In July 2002, Michael Jackson showed up in Harlem, at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, in the middle of an ugly public fight. He was at war with his own record label. He accused Sony and its chairman, Tommy Mottola, of failing to promote his album Invincible, and the whole thing had turned personal and bitter.
Standing there, he laid out how the attacks on him had started. “The minute I started breaking the all-time record in record sales,” he said, “overnight they called me a freak, they called me a homosexual, a child molester, they said I bleached my skin.” In his telling it was all a deliberate campaign, and he put it bluntly another time, saying the record companies “really, really do conspire against the artists.”
Michael Jackson speech about Sony and Tommy Mottola, July 2002, New York
It’s worth being straight about the facts underneath the noise. Sony called his accusations against Mottola “ludicrous,” and even Sharpton, who stood with him, publicly stepped back from the racism charge. On the molestation line specifically, the 1993 allegations against Michael never led to criminal charges and were settled in a civil suit, and when he was later put on trial, in 2005, he was acquitted on every count.
So you can read the Sony feud however you want, and plenty of people at the time wrote him off as paranoid. But it’s a striking thing to watch, him standing in Harlem and naming, one by one, every label that had been pinned on him, and arguing that none of it was an accident.
This clip digs into that whole Sony fight if you want the backstory on why he was so angry.