Living with Michael Jackson

Living with Michael Jackson is a television documentary in which the British journalist Martin Bashir interviewed the American singer Michael Jackson from May 2002 to January 2003. It was broadcast in the United Kingdom on ITV (as a Tonight with Trevor McDonald special) on 3 February 2003, and in the United States three days later on ABC, introduced by Barbara Walters. Jackson took Bashir on a tour of his home, Neverland Ranch, and discussed his family, unhappy childhood, plastic surgery and relationships with children.

In November 2003, the BBC aired Louis, Martin & Michael, a documentary by the British filmmaker Louis Theroux, who had lost out to Bashir to make the documentary. In December 2003, following controversy raised from Bashir's documentary, Jackson was charged with seven counts of child molestation and two counts of intoxicating a minor with alcohol, all of which he was acquitted of in a court of law in June 2005.

Summary
Living with Michael Jackson begins at Neverland Ranch, where Michael Jackson and Martin Bashir tour the estate's grounds and face off in a racecar match. Jackson explains he writes the songs by composing lyrics and not the music, because the music "will write itself." While watching footage of the Jackson 5, he recalls painful memories of harsh treatment at the hands of his father and explains that this is why he never laid a hand on his children.

At the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas, Jackson speaks about his love life, his changing appearance, and his children. Bashir meets the Jackson children Prince and Paris, who wear masks to conceal their appearance. Jackson then goes to Berlin, where the "baby dangling" incident occurred. Jackson visits Berlin Zoo and a charity auction and receives a humanitarian award at the Bambi Awards.

Back in Neverland, Gavin Arvizo is interviewed and states that it was Jackson's support that helped him beat his bout with cancer. Jackson admits that sometimes when Gavin stayed with him, Jackson let him sleep in his bed while he slept on the floor. When asked what he gets out of his involvement with children, the singer replies that he gains joy, because "my greatest inspiration comes from kids".

During January 2003, Bashir meets with Jackson in Miami for the final interview and brings up the subject of his face. A visibly upset Jackson says that he has only had two operations on his nose in order to facilitate his singing. Bashir concludes that Jackson wanted to change his appearance as a result of his troubled youth and father's insults. Bashir repeatedly questions Jackson about why he invites children into his room. Jackson defends himself stating that such activity is natural when the children are of close friends or family, and that "many children," including the Culkin family children (Macaulay and Kieran) have slept in the same bed as him. Jackson strongly denies any sexual motivation for this.

Criticism
Michael Jackson felt betrayed by Martin Bashir and complained that the film gives a distorted picture of his behaviour and conduct as a father. He said that in the final version of his interview, Bashir used only material that supported the negative view Bashir was portrayed as holding towards Jackson. In response, Jackson and his personal cameraman released a rebuttal interview, which showed Bashir complimenting Jackson on his abilities as a father and his grace under pressure.

"I haven't seen that documentary," remarked Madonna, "but it sounds disgusting, like Bashir exploited a friendship. Publicly humiliating someone for your own gain will only come back to haunt you. I can assure you, all these people will be sorry. God's going to have his revenge."

Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher slammed the documentary as "typical British journalism". In an interview with Ian Dempsey on Today FM, Gallagher said: "I was quite annoyed at the fact that one of the biggest stars that ever was or ever will be they managed to get access to him for how many months and there was an hour and half programme on him and they mentioned his music and his art for maybe two or three minutes. Did you learn anything new about Michael Jackson that you didn't already know? He's off his nut, he's got a huge house, he's got a lot of money, we all knew that anyway. I would rather have had an hour and a half programme telling me how he wrote the album Off the Wall and the one after that". Stating in Jackson's defence, Gallagher said: "I mean so what if he climbs trees. Any man that has got a fairground in his backgarden and can say to a child, 'I'm going to build a water park behind that mountain', give him a round of applause. He seems like a very passionate and caring father so let's not tear him up".

Bashir stated: "I don't believe that I've betrayed Michael Jackson at all. I agreed that we would make an honest film about his life. The film was fair to his musical achievement and gave him every opportunity to explain himself. I'm not accusing anybody of being a child molester or a paedophile." Bashir was the first witness for the prosecution in Jackson's child molestation trial. He refused to answer questions from defense attorneys. Following Jackson's death in 2009, Bashir said Jackson "was never convicted of any crime, and I never saw any wrongdoing myself, and while his lifestyle may have been a bit unorthodox, I don't believe he was a criminal".

In 2021, Michael Jackson's UK publicist Mark Borkowski stated that he had discouraged him from doing the documentary with Bashir. In the same year, many fans demanded an investigation to examine the circumstances surrounding the documentary after it was revealed that Bashir had used fake documents to secure an interview with Diana, Princess of Wales in 1995. Jackson's family also reacted by criticizing Bashir for hoodwinking him and manipulating the footage, and stated that they were considering legal action.

Rebuttal video
In an attempt to repair his image, Michael Jackson released a second interview, The Michael Jackson Interview: The Footage You Were Never Meant To See, broadcast on Fox in the United States even though NBC reportedly bid $5 million for the footage, Jackson sold the footage to Fox Network for £1.6 million. It was aired on Sky One in the U.K. This was presented by Maury Povich and contains material which Bashir omitted. It also features new interviews with people close to Jackson, such as his former wife Debbie Rowe, parents Joseph and Katherine, brother Jermaine and close friend Elizabeth Taylor. In this interview, Rowe claimed it was at her request that the children wore masks in public. She also pointed out that the concept of "sharing a bed" can be misunderstood: for example, she herself likes watching television in bed; when she has a visitor, they both watch television together in bed. It also contains interviews with Bashir giving very different opinions to those he had given in interviews as well as in the voice-overs. He is shown praising Jackson as a father as well as saying that he thinks it is wonderful that he allows children to come to Neverland, though he had made previous statements that Neverland Ranch was a "dangerous place" for children (a direct contradiction of his later statement that he did not believe Michael Jackson was a criminal).

The footage that they show in this documentary was filmed by Hamid Moslehi privately. He states that he was not "secretly" videotaping the interviews, as was popularly believed. He said Bashir knew they were also filming, but that Bashir probably did not know that when he told his camera crew to cut, that he was still filming.

Part of the footage was not aired because videographer Hamid Moslehi refused to hand it over, owing to a financial dispute with Jackson. It was found by police in a search of Moslehi's home in November 2003, and showed the accuser's family praising Jackson.

Bashir said a 16-second clip was being used to portray him as being unfair when he had interviewed Jackson for more than 10 hours.

In the US 14 million watched Jackson rebut Bashir's piece on the Fox channel. The program's UK debut on Sky One drew more than two million viewers, making it the third-biggest show in the channel's history.

Ratings
The UK airing had 15 million viewers while 38 million watched the 2-hour special on ABC.

In popular culture
On 14 March 2003, the BBC produced a special spoof parody of the documentary, entitled "Lying to Michael Jackson". The sketch showed Michael Jackson, played by comedian Lenny Henry, being interviewed and followed around for the documentary by Martin Bashir, played by Rowan Atkinson.

The miniseries was also parodied in the British sketch comedy series Bo Selecta.