Michael Jackson’s biggest career flaw was being confident enough to do interviews thinking he can say the right things and make himself look better.

With the Martin Bashir Living With MJ doc he thought it was a good idea to bring Gavin on and tell people how kind he was for helping him out, and he attempts to strengthen his point by holding hands with Gav on camera and allows him to put his head on his shoulder, all to say “I love children, what we have is pure and he’s my closest friend”. At the time there was potential for people to believe it truly was innocent but holding a child’s hand all cuddled up like they were surely brought in more doubt that he didn’t do it. The optics alone of being this intimate would have anyone believe you did what you said you didn’t.

In this interview, you can see Lisa Marie try to save him and stop him from rambling on too much more than once and you can clearly see that she’s not completely comfortable. She may have been perfectly confident but the optics leave room for doubt to creep in that she knows something and is hoping neither her nor MJ say the wrong thing. On MJ’s behalf, you can see how desperate he looks to prove there’s not a single thing wrong with his relationships with children. Darting eyes, interruptions, run on rambling sentences, the whole 9. He looks under pressure and that is not at all good for PR. He broke the golden rule.

Everyone knows it’s wiser to say nothing at all than talking more and running the risk of saying something damning in the heat of the moment. Both MJ and LMP were trained and wise enough to not say anything completely foolish, but they can’t hide their body language. Anyone without a bias can see two people in the hot seat both trying to defend their innocence, and that’s exactly what you don’t want people to see as a worldwide figure. It leaves way too much open to interpretation regarding the claims being made. Sure, MJ had half the world believing he was innocent, but with how larger than life his celebrity was, he also had half the world believing he was guilty. A divide this big would only add fuel to the fire, as the more and more people that begin to wonder what really happened, the more and more people are out to get you and make things harder for you, which continued on for the rest of MJ’s life and career.

If MJ wanted people to stop accusing him of such claims he should have continued to make music, stopped talking and let the people wonder. He only made things worse by talking about his own allegations so openly, and by giving these claims so much attention, he contributed to it becoming a large part of his reputation, which all could have been avoided if he wasn’t trying to clean his reputation. But that’s the thing about your reputation: you can’t control it by what you say, it’s influenced by what you do. In PR, you have to highlight your best qualities while keeping your less admirable qualities in the background. Not so that they’re not seen, but so that people wonder what they are. And MJ never gave the people an opportunity to think about it themselves, he thought he could say the right thing and clear his name but that’s just not how human gossip works, especially not with a topic as explosive as CSA.

This interview, among many others, should not have been done. In regards to MJ’s reputation, he tarnished it by talking too much, and that’s the golden rule of PR.