In the new Michael Jackson biopic Michael, one complicated chapter of the King of Pop’s life is notably absent: the accusations of child molestation that followed him for years, but for which he was never convicted or held legally liable.
In a recent interview with Today, however, Colman Domingo — who plays Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, in the film — explained why he thinks the controversy ultimately didn’t belong in the script. “The film takes place from the ’60s to 1988,” he said on Thursday (April 23) when asked whether he felt Michael had “whitewashed” that part of MJ’s legacy.
“So it does not go into the first allegations in, like, 2005?” he continued, agreeing with co-star Nia Long’s assessment that Michael was deliberately written “through [Michael’s] eyes.” “We centered on the makings of Michael, so it’s an intimate portrait of who Michael is.”
Though Michael’s criminal trial for charges related to child molestation took place in 2005, the allegations date back to the early 1990s. The Los Angeles Police Department first began investigating him in 1993 after Jordan Chandler, who was 13 at the time, accused the musician of inappropriate sexual conduct. The child’s family settled with Michael for $22 million the following year, but the investigation was reopened in 2003. Two years later, a jury found Michael not guilty on all charges. Jackson and his legal team steadfastly denied the allegations.
“There’s a possibility of there being a part two that may deal with other things that happened afterwards,” Domingo continued on Today. But Michael, he asserted, “is about the making of Michael, how he was raised and then how he was trying to find his voice as an artist.”
Michael arrives this week after numerous production setbacks, with early projections estimating it could open with $150 million at the global box office. Originally scheduled to premiere a year ago, the film underwent heavy reshoots.
And while the film in its final form may not have gone into the years where Michael was under investigation, it’s been widely reported that the reshoots were necessitated by the discovery of a decades-old agreement between the Jackson estate and Chandler’s family, which promised that the former would never dramatize the latter in any capacity. The original script allegedly featured depictions of their accusations against the late icon, who died in 2009.
Chandler is not the only person who has accused Michael of molesting him as a child. Wade Robson and James Safechuck also claimed that the Grammy winner sexually abused them when they were kids — which the Jackson estate has vehemently denied — outlining their allegations in the 2019 docuseries Leaving Neverland while spending the last decade pursuing legal action. In court filings from 2025, the Jackson estate claimed that Robson and Safechuck were seeking $400 million in their lawsuit, which Jackson’s lawyers claimed had “no merit,” adding that “Michael is innocent.”
Watch Domingo address the absence of the child molestation allegations from Michael on Today below.
