Nineteen ninety-three was the year the accusations hit. A 13-year-old boy’s family accused him, the tabloids went feral, and for a lot of people the words “Michael Jackson” and “monster” got stapled together more or less overnight.
Keep the facts of the case straight, because they matter. No criminal charges were ever filed over the 1993 allegations. The matter was settled in a civil suit in 1994. And when a separate case did go to trial years later, in 2005, he was acquitted on every single count.
Now set the courtroom stuff aside for a minute and look at what the man was actually doing with his time and his money that same year.
The documented stuff is remarkable on its own. In June he announced a donation of $1.25 million for children hurt by the previous year’s Los Angeles riots. In October he made it possible for 5,000 underprivileged kids to go see Keiko, the whale from Free Willy, at a park in Mexico City. In December his foundation airlifted 60,000 doses of children’s vaccines to Tbilisi, in the Republic of Georgia, working through Mikhail Gorbachev’s foundation.
He opened that same year at the Super Bowl, turning the halftime show into a Heal the World moment, and he talked about the foundation’s mission in his own words more than once.
Michael Jackson Speaks On Helping The Children At His “Heal The World” Foundation Launch In London
There’s plenty more on the record, too. He performed at Bill Clinton’s inaugural gala, and his Heal the World Foundation later airlifted 46 tons of relief supplies into war-torn Sarajevo.
Fans have put together much longer lists of his 1993 good deeds, hospital visits and ambulances and gifts in a dozen countries, and honestly some of those are harder to tie back to a solid source, so take the giant versions with a little caution. But even just the parts you can actually document add up to a staggering year for one person.
That’s the thing worth sitting with. While a big chunk of the planet had made up its mind that he was a villain, he was quietly moving vaccines into a war zone and sending thousands of poor kids to see a whale. You can make of the man whatever you want. “Monster” just isn’t a word that fits the year he was actually having.