The Tabloid The Mirtor!  That  Fasley Acused and Called Michael Jackson a Pedo Were Run by a Family of Actual Criminals 

The British tabloid press has a long, proud history of destroying people for profit. In the 1990s, no one knew this better than Michael Jackson. The *Daily Mirror*—then owned by the Maxwell family—relentlessly branded him “Wacko Jacko,” ran sensationalized stories about his personal life, and helped cement a public narrative that he was a dangerous predator. The coverage was vicious, often baseless, and designed to sell papers.

Meanwhile, the family that owned the paper was swimming in far darker waters than any tabloid headline ever suggested.

Robert Maxwell, the media mogul who controlled the *Mirror* until his mysterious death in 1991, was not a crusading journalist. He was a fraudster who looted his own company’s pension fund of hundreds of millions of pounds, leaving thousands of employees destitute. And his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell—the one he famously named his yacht after—would later be convicted of recruiting and grooming underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein’s international sex trafficking network.

The irony is almost too grotesque to stomach. The same press empire that spent years painting Michael Jackson as a “wacko” and a child abuser was run by a man who stole from the elderly and his own workers, and whose daughter would become one of the most infamous enablers of child sexual abuse in modern history.

Let’s be honest about what was happening here. Jackson was eccentric, reclusive, and an easy target. He was a Black man who had achieved astronomical success and dared to be different. The tabloids didn’t need proof to run stories about him—they needed headlines. They needed to sell papers. And so they manufactured a monster, feeding a public appetite for scandal while ignoring the actual crimes unfolding under their own roof.

Robert Maxwell’s own financial crimes were barely investigated by the very newspapers he owned. His death in 1991 conveniently left more questions than answers, and his empire collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. But instead of turning that investigative energy on the Maxwells themselves, the tabloids kept their sights on Jackson, milking every rumor, every unsubstantiated allegation, and every leaked police report for all it was worth.

By the time the 2005 trial came around—where Jackson was acquitted on all 14 counts—the damage was already done. The media had tried, convicted, and executed him in the court of public opinion years earlier. And when he died in 2009, the same papers that had hounded him for decades suddenly published weepy tributes to a “misunderstood genius.” It was a fitting final act of hypocrisy from an industry that has never truly apologized for the lives it has ruined.

The Maxwell family’s story, by contrast, took decades to fully unravel. Ghislaine Maxwell was finally convicted in 2021—long after the *Mirror* had been sold off, restructured, and rebranded. But the question remains: Where was the same ferocious tabloid energy when the crimes were closer to home? Where were the “Wacko Ghislaine” headlines? Where were the daily front pages demanding answers from the Maxwells?

The answer is simple. The tabloid press is not in the business of justice. It is in the business of profit. And Michael Jackson, a global icon with no real power over the media machine, was the perfect target—a cash cow of controversy. The Maxwells, on the other hand, were the machine itself. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and you certainly don’t expose the criminality of your own owner.

We owe it to history to remember this: the same people who called Michael Jackson a monster were, in their own way, far worse. They were enablers. They were fraudsters. And they used the power of the press to project their own sins onto a man who, for all his flaws, was never convicted of a crime.

Jackson’s legacy is still debated today, often unfairly. But the tabloids that destroyed him are a footnote—a cautionary tale about media power, racial bias, and the danger of a press that refuses to look in the mirror.

Maybe that’s the real crime.