Leaving Neverland: James Safechuck and Wade Robson's most shocking revelations

Wednesday night saw the first part of Leaving Neverland, the controversial HBO/Channel 4 documentary about Michael Jackson. The second part aired on Thursday night.

In the film, Wade Robson and James Safechuck describe in graphic detail how they were sexually abused by Jackson as young boys at his “Neverland” ranch.

Here are eight of the darkest revelations from what Jane Mulkerrins’s Telegraph review called a “decisive and damning” documentary.

1. Jackson introduced the boys to masturbation

Safechuck recalls his first trip to Paris with Jackson, when he was ten years old. “He set it up like, ‘I’m going to show you something everybody does, and you’ll really enjoy it.’ It was like he was teaching me something new.

“I remember my penis swelling up because I did it so much that first time. I remember dipping my penis in warm water. Michael filled the cup up.”

2. Jackson would masturbate while staring at the boys from behind

Both Robson and Safechuck remember this predilection. “Michael would like it,” Safechuck says, “if you would bend over and spread open your cheeks. Then he would masturbate.”

Robson concurs. “He would have me go to the far corner of the bed and be on all fours, and have me just bend over, so he could look at my anus, while he was masturbating. And I was just… on display.”

3. Sometimes he would anally penetrate the boys too

“Periodically,” Robson continues, “through [the act above] he would come and stick his tongue in my anus.”

Safechuck remembers Jackson doing the same, against his will, when he was a teenager. “He wanted to do some anal [sex]. He put his finger inside me and I didn’t like it at all, so he kind of backed off on that. I think I was just wincing, and I was asking him not to do it, but he did it, and said ‘You’ll like it’.”

4. Jackson made both boys fondle his nipples while he masturbated

Both Robson and Safechuck recall Jackson masturbating while they squeezed his nipples. “He would moan and react to that,” Robson adds, "like it felt good.”

5. Jackson forced the boys both to receive and give him oral sex

“One time I was sleeping,“ Safechuck remembers, “and I woke up and Michael said that he had performed oral sex on me while I was sleeping.” At the time, he was unsure how to react. The act, he says, became frequent from then on.

Robson has a longer, more graphic remembrance. He remembers “Michael pulling my underwear down, pulling it off, and going down and starting to perform oral sex on me. And I remember him putting my hands on his head when he was down there. I’ll never forget the feeling of his hair – that was rough, almost like a Brillo pad.

“Quickly it turned into having me perform oral sex on him too.” He recalls the discomfort of “having a full-size adult’s penis in my little seven-year-old mouth”.

6. Jackson introduced the boys to pornography

Jackson began to show Robson, at the age of nine or 10, “pretty graphic, heterosexual porn: oral sex, full penetration, anal stuff. Michael liked it, so I wanted to like it. He showed me some video porn, and this was full oral sex, ejaculation in the mouth, on the face.”

“I remember that affecting me more than the photographic porn. I remember the feeling in my stomach being really heavy, like a nervousness. I didn’t really know how to deal with it.”

When he was a teenager, Safechuck had the same experience. He remembers that Jackson would “buy a big jug of wine. I remember getting really drunk, falling over. And he’d put porn on, in the bathtub, he had these little TVs, and you could watch porn wherever you wanted.

“Porn and candy, that was what he had.”

7. Toys and children’s entertainment were central to Jackson’s acts

When Robson was being forced to let Jackson masturbate behind his anus, he would have, in front of him, “this big elaborate Peter Pan cardboard cut out. So either I was looking back at him masturbating, or looking forward at Peter Pan.”

Safechuck describes having sex with Jackson in several locations on the Neverland Ranch; these included the games room and arcade. “There was toys everywhere, things to do, so they kind of mixed together.”

8. Jackson designed “drills” to avoid being caught

Jackson repeatedly told both of the boys that they couldn’t tell anyone what they did when they were alone. “It was very much a secret,” Safechuck recalls, “and he would tell me that if anybody found out, his life would be over – and my life would be over.”

Safechuck also remembers Jackson making emergency plans. “He would run drills with me, where we’d be in the hotel room and he’d pretend someone was coming in, and you’d have to get dressed as fast as possible without making any noise.”