Elton John Sympathizes With Michael Jackson, Calls Him Mentally Ill

[RAMROD 105,086]

Elton John‘s memoir Me is on its way, and in a new excerpt published by The Independent, the legend remembers some tragic moments in the later years of Michael Jackson.

“I’d known Michael since he was 13 or 14,” he wrote. “Elizabeth Taylor had turned up on the Starship with him in tow. He was just the most adorable kid you could imagine. But at some point in the intervening years, he started sequestering himself away from the world, and away from reality the way Elvis Presley did.”

In particular, John recalled Jackson attending one of his dinner parties, at which Jackson didn’t eat anything a disappeared for a few hours before being found hours later “in a cottage in the grounds of Woodside where my housekeeper lived: she was sitting there, watching Michael Jackson quietly playing video games with her 11-year-old son. For whatever reason, he couldn’t seem to cope with adult company at all.”

“God knows what was going on in his head, and God knows what prescription drugs he was being pumped full of, but every time I saw him in his later years I came away thinking the poor guy had totally lost his marbles,” John added. “I don’t mean that in the light-hearted way. He was genuinely mentally ill, a disturbing person to be around. It was incredibly sad, but he was someone you couldn’t help: he was just gone, off in a world of his own, surrounded by people who only told him what he wanted to hear.”

 

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/elton-john-michael-jackson-mentally-ill-8532989/

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/music/news/elton-john-michael-jackson-child-sex-abuse-allegations-david-furnish-book-a9153326.html

[Neroneau 934]

“in a cottage in the grounds of Woodside where my housekeeper lived: she was sitting there, watching Michael Jackson quietly playing video games with her 11-year-old son. For whatever reason, he couldn’tseem to cope with adult company at all.”
 

well … duh . 

[Illuminati 15,825]

Never beating the allegations

[Celloo Deng 53,760]

the article is from 2019, I thought I'd heard him say this before..

[Teletubby 137,875]

5 minutes ago, Celloo Deng said:

the article is from 2019, I thought I'd heard him say this before..

@RAMRODis in 2019. after TikTok was banned, Ramrod decided to travel back in time.

[bionic 44,068]

None of this really feels sympathetic

[MadArchitect 609]

all im gonna say those who deny and dismiss even the possibility of the stuff he could've been doing behind closed doors with children are just blinded and deluded

[PartySick 146,833]

41 minutes ago, RAMROD said:

For whatever reason, he couldn’t seem to cope with adult company at all.”

This is completely bogus lol

He enjoyed the company of children and their parents, sure, but he had a ton of adult friends he'd spend time with. Other celebrities, people he met through his work, things of that nature.

Dude practically spent the last half decade of his life being roomies with a handful of them after ditching Neverland permanently.

Something I wish people would understand is that he didn't seek the company of children, he sought surrogate families. People who could provide even temporary moments of normalcy.

Phillip Cohen is a great example. He and Michael became friends at a gaming resort and he eventually became close with Phillip's wife and kids. He attended a bar mitzvah, spent a lot of time at their house, and they spent a ton of time at Neverland (as a family) and MJ's other homes. They remained close with him throughout the 90s and 2000s and are still some of his staunchest defenders.

The Cascio family is another great example. Michael worked with Dominic Cascio in the early 80s (think Thriller days) and became close to his wife and kids as well. Those boys grew up around Michael, knowing him more from family dinners and outings than anything else. In the mid-2000s he even helped the boys, now grown men, to make music. Hence the infamous "Cascio tracks" that found their way onto the first posthumous album and about a dozen more floating around online. They remain strong defenders.

The Culkins are a rare example of what happens when he befriended the kid first. Mike reached out to Macaulay Culkin (via his parents, obviously) after Home Alone and they became great friends, bonding over the shared experience of childhood stardom and family pressure. He also became friends with his parents, brother, and sisters. His dad wrote a whole book about Michael and how he felt he was a "lost child" looking for a home. As Mac got older, they only grew closer as friends. Mike named him his daughter's godfather and you can see him as a grown man sitting next to Michael at the 30th anniversary show in 2001. They all remain strong defenders.

What people mistakenly believe is that Mike would ditch kids when they got older. At least, that's an allegation Wade Robson has made. But what Wade won't tell you is that his mother was directly toxic towards Michael, pressuring him to do things such as include Wade in the video for Jam when Mike only wanted black children from the inner city involved or, infamously, pressuring him to have Wade play his younger self in that one Pepsi commercial (which he didn't end up doing, thank god). That's what started the rumor of Michael wanting a white child to play him. Michael eventually "ghosted" Wade 'cause his family was taking advantage of him. And Wade turned out to be cut from the same cloth, dancing next to Janet in 2009 at the VMAs only to launch his own set of false allegations four years later after being denied a position as choreographer for an MJ tribute show.

I did not mean to rant that long but most of y'all know how I feel about this man  I will defend him until my death.

44 minutes ago, RAMROD said:

I came away thinking the poor guy had totally lost his marbles

 

It's sad that he chooses this way to speak about this tbh. In my psych class in college I dedicated a major project to MJ's mental well being. He's obviously one of my favorite subjects so I already knew a lot about him but doing that deep dive in that context really gave me a different appreciation for him as a human.

MJ was a deeply traumatized person, not "disturbed", with a warped sense of normalcy from growing up and living in abnormal circumstances. Dude was raised in strip clubs before he was raised on the stage. Abused by his father and then by the world. On the back of his childhood trauma was an adulthood filled with deep loneliness and depression, isolation, addiction, chronic illness (lupus, several other autoimmune diseases, inflammation, pain), and justified paranoia. He never had a chance to be anything but abnormal.

His mental health (loneliness, stress, and depression) got so bad that he once went 60 hours straight with no sleep and ate very little. He had to rely on surgical strength drugs just to sleep at night and, as we all know, that's what ended his life.

None of this makes him any more "disturbed" or "crazy" than any other victim of abuse coping and trying to heal.

It's telling that people who spent years with Michael as good friends, coworkers, or aquatintences have nothing but good things to say about him.

Elton clearly only knew him through passing interactions and shallow, uninformed judgemental assumptions and he has zero clue how to speak about mental illness or trauma without sounding like a complete ass so maybe he should shut up

[onionring 148]

1 hour ago, bionic said:

None of this really feels sympathetic

Well in a way it is. Empathetic it definitely is not