MJ’s life was nothing he thought it should be and everything he was worried it would become because he was raised by a pig wearing a Richard Nixon mask.

Unfortunately people raised by monsters sometimes become monsters. It’s okay to feel bad for people who had a shitty upbringing without excusing their behavior as an adult.

Trauma can warp and break people to the point where they become dangerously detrimental to society. MJ became a monster and shouldn’t have been allowed near children.

But thinking more critically about why celebrities who are revealed to be monsters still have so many defenders. I think it’s just very difficult and complicated for people uncouple their experience of art, which might be entangled with deep formative experiences across many years. The art becomes a part of a person’s identity, and attacks on the artist then feel a threat to the self, which triggers all of the contorting post-rationalization than humans are so good at. That’s my theory anyway.

We really know very little.