Corey Feldman: "Being with Michael Jackson Brought Me Back to My Innocence"
- MJStory
- 30 באוק׳
- זמן קריאה 6 דקות
עודכן: 1 בנוב׳
Michael Jackson and Corey Feldman were two stars who had grown up in the spotlight from an early age – their friendship often met with curiosity or mockery. When Jackson faced allegations in 1993, Feldman defended his friend and denied any wrongdoing during the police investigation. Years later, Feldman’s leaked police interview would expose what the investigation into Michael Jackson had really been about – and it wasn’t justice.
Corey Feldman was one of Hollywood’s most famous child actors of the 1980s, known for his roles in The Goonies, Stand By Me, and The Lost Boys. In 1984, when Feldman was thirteen, he met twenty-five-year-old Michael Jackson on the set of The Goonies, after Steven Spielberg invited Jackson to visit.
The two bonded over their shared experience of growing up in the spotlight – both having spent their childhoods working in an industry that left little room for a normal life. Their friendship developed naturally, built on mutual understanding of what fame could take away from a person at a young age.
Feldman said Jackson’s world was unlike anything else in Hollywood. There were no drugs, no alcohol, no profanity – a stark contrast to the chaos that often surrounded young actors. For Feldman, it offered a sense of calm and safety he rarely found elsewhere.
In his memoir, Feldman recalls having witnessed disturbing and abusive behavior within Hollywood that left him devastated, and how, during that time, he turned to Jackson for normalcy and stability.
“Michael Jackson’s world, crazy as it sounds, had become my happy place,” Feldman later wrote. “He was adamantly against drugs and alcohol; I couldn’t even swear around him. Being with Michael brought me back to my innocence. When I was with him, it was like being ten years old again.”
Then, in 1993, came the Chandler allegations.
When accusations against Michael Jackson surfaced, police launched an extensive investigation. Detectives reached out to nearly every child who had ever spent time with Jackson, including Corey Feldman, then 22. Once the questioning began, it became clear that their interest wasn’t in understanding the truth – it was in finding something against Michael Jackson, no matter what.
Years later, the leaked audio tapes of Feldman’s interview would expose the nature of the interrogation. Detectives pressed him repeatedly, searching for any detail that could be twisted into wrongdoing, suggesting that perhaps he was hiding something.
Feldman responded calmly and consistently. Yes, he had occasionally slept in Jackson’s room, but Jackson had never touched him or behaved inappropriately. On the contrary, he described him as kind, innocent, and protective.
“We stayed up talking until we got tired, and he insisted that I slept on the bed and he took the cot because he didn’t feel it was polite for him to take the bed,” Feldman explained.
On the tape, Sgt. Deborah Linden of the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department can be heard saying, “The concern is that if something did happen that you’re not telling us, it’s because of that.” She then presses further, remarking that Feldman “looked funny” when he answered certain questions.
In another peculiar moment, Sgt. Linden stated that they “hadn’t yet found anything that would clear Jackson” – a remark that defies the logic of a fair investigation, since the role of the police is to gather evidence of guilt. Her statement amounts to a perverse inversion of reasoning – as if the evidence itself had to prove someone's innocence before guilt had even been established. After all, how can one prove that something didn’t happen, especially when there’s no evidence that it did? It was an attempt to manipulate Feldman – not only was the phrasing spurious, but it was crafted to make him believe that other interviewees had contradicted his account – something we now know was entirely false.
But Feldman pushes back gently but firmly: “If there was something that I’d been hiding for all these years, then I would want nothing more than to bring it out right now – to make sure that Michael got the help that he needed."
At some point, Feldman said something that should have stopped the interview cold. In trying to explain how he would have recognized inappropriate behavior if it had occurred, he revealed that he had been molested as a child – but not by Michael Jackson.
The detectives didn’t react. They didn’t ask a single follow-up question, and never told him to file a complaint. They simply went back to asking about Jackson.
“All they cared about was trying to find something on Michael Jackson – who was innocent,” Feldman later said in an interview.
Corey Feldman later described that experience in his 2013 memoir Coreyography. The passage is brief but revealing – a firsthand account of how the police handled his interview and where their priorities truly lay.
“When I first heard that Michael Jackson had been accused of child molestation, I almost laughed – it seemed so ridiculous. Then I got a call from the LAPD; a sergeant and a detective wanted to talk to me about my friendship with him [...] The audiotapes have long since been leaked to the press – I clearly stated that Michael never touched me, never acted in any way inappropriate. What’s incredible about them, however, is that I admitted that I had been molested; I even named my abuser. The sergeant peppering me with questions, Deborah Linden, breezed right past that. She didn’t seem the least bit interested.”
Feldman’s words revealed something no official police report or media coverage ever did. The investigators weren’t out to catch abusers – they were hunting for one specific name. Their focus wasn’t on protecting children; it wasn’t on finding out the truth; it was on incriminating Michael Jackson.
What’s even more striking is that Feldman’s account also challenges one of the most persistent misconceptions about the Michael Jackson investigations – that the authorities went easy on him, or that his young friends were never given the chance to speak or disclose abuse. The record shows the opposite. The 1993 investigation was relentless.
It wasn’t that the children would have met disbelief if they had claimed Jackson abused them. It was the opposite: whenever they said nothing had happened, they met disbelief – and persistent pressure to change their answer. The atmosphere wasn’t one of protection or restraint; it was one of determination to find something, whether or not it was there.
In the years that followed, as new accusers – Wade Robson and James Safechuck – would claim they were “too afraid to come forward,” Feldman's tapes stand as a contradiction.
(Both Robson and Safechuck had in fact been interviewed by police back in 1993 – and, like Feldman, consistently denied any wrongdoing by Jackson.)
Feldman’s taped interrogation captures that attitude in real time, but his experience wasn’t unique. Others who were questioned during the same investigation later described similar encounters. The system wasn’t silencing accusations; it was eagerly waiting for them. It was ready to amplify anyone willing to say the words it wanted to hear.
When Leaving Neverland reignited the allegations in 2019, Feldman again defended his friend in a series of tweets. He said that while he couldn’t speak for others, every experience he’d had with Jackson was innocent. “[Michael Jackson] never touched me inappropriately, never swore in my presence, and never suggested anything sexual,” he wrote, adding that he even had tapes of their conversations to show their innocence.
Feldman stressed that Jackson had many chances to cross boundaries and never once did. “Most pedos are serial offenders,” he pointed out. “He certainly had the opportunity with me and others — so how did he control those urges so well, while so blatantly sexual with those two boys?” And as he concluded, “as much as those two men deserve to have their voices heard, so do the thousands of kids who hung around him that don’t agree.”
Feldman’s memories bring the story back to where it began – a friendship that, for him, offered a moment of calm inside a business that rarely gave one. Jackson’s house, their fun experiences and their conversations about music or their childhood – that was what he remembered.
The contrast could not be sharper: the only adult who created that safe space and made him feel protected became the one investigators most wanted to take down.