A California appeals court on Friday revived lawsuits from two men who allege Michael Jackson sexually abused them for years when they were boys.
A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal found that the lawsuits of Wade Robson and James Safechuck should not have been dismissed by a lower court, and that the men can validly claim that the two Jackson-owned corporations that were named as defendants in the cases had a responsibility to protect them.
The ruling marks the second time the suits, filed in 2013, were restored after being dismissed. In 2020, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark Young found that Robson and Safechuck can’t sue the Jackson-controlled corporations for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty because they didn’t have the ability to stop his alleged sexual abuse of the children.
Their suits were initially dismissed in 2017 because the statute of limitations had expired, but were brought back under legislation that gave a three-year window of victims of sexual abuse to sue.
The court rejected the corporations’ arguments that they didn’t have a duty to protect the men because “they had no ability to control Jackson—their sole owner—or his interactions” with children. “To treat Jackson’s wholly-owned instruments as different from Jackson himself is to be mesmerized by abstractions,” wrote Associate Justice John Shepard Wiley Jr. in a concurring opinion.