According to an article in January’s Reader’s Digest, Will Wright, a contestant in “Wheel of Fortune”, had host Pat Sajak jump into his arms and hug him tightly after he won $48,400 on the show. Now he’s suing the show for two million dollars, claiming that Pat Sajak’s actions have caused a painful back injury, mental anguish and family disruption.
A man in Cincinnati is suing a bar for over a million dollars because he got so drunk that he fell off the stool and hit his head. He claims that it was the barkeeper’s fault for not cutting him off. A woman in Atlanta was awarded $220,000 after her dance partner “tried a shag style spin move” and broke her finger. Hazel Norton of Mississippi sued her doctor for giving her a medication to treat heartburn that may cause heart damage in some patients. She even admitted to have never been hurt in any way by the medication. A North Carolina man shot and killed two people and won half a million from his psychiatrist for not insisting that he continue his treatment several months before the murders. At least that was overturned in an appeals court.
To top that all off, now there’s some little boy charging pop star Michael Jackson with child molestation. About a decade ago, Jackson was charged with a similar crime. To have the case dropped, he paid tens of millions of dollars to the accuser. That’s quite a hefty sum, enough to pay off a mortgage and even maybe buy a small country or two. Jackson claimed he paid the money to end the case, which he found a humiliating lie. No evidence supporting either side was ever found.
According to CNN, last February, Los Angeles County child welfare officials found there was no evidence Jackson had had “inappropriate contact with the boy.” In addition, BBC reports that the boy told social workers that he had not been molested, and there is an audiotape in which the boy and his mother said there had been no inappropriate contact.
I don’t care much for Michael Jackson, but it’s all too easy to try to accuse someone like him of being a pedophile. He’s kind of strange and does some weird things, from the countless nose jobs to his “Nevereverland” amusement park, to dangling his baby over a four-story-high balcony. I must admit that even I have been unable to resist making an occasional joke about him, but this looks like this is just another situation in which someone wants a piece of his wealth and he’s an easy target.
Even if some evidence does surface that he is guilty of “performing lewd or lascivious acts” on the child, the mental state of the parents of this child comes into question. What kinds of parents send their child to sleep alone in a bed with a sketchy adult male? If Jackson is found guilty of anything, the parents should be charged as well. Not only did they let their child sleep with an adult male, but also they knew that he had been accused of child molestation in the past. This is like if the parents were to drop their child in a lion’s cage in a zoo and then press charges on the zoo because their child was mauled, perhaps even demanding that the lion get put to sleep.
It’s completely unnatural for unrelated adults to want to sleep alone in the same bed with small children. As much as Michael Jackson should understand that, the parents of the “molested” child should know that even more so. Are they fit to be parents if they’re going around letting men who’ve been accused of pedophilia sleep with their kids?
If Jackson were indeed guilty of the crime, then I wouldn’t be opposed to his parents being charged with being an accessory to the crime and neglect. I don’t have much respect for Jackson, but it appears that this is just another example of extortion, of someone trying to unjustly take someone else’s money. I’m sick of people abusing our judicial system and ruining the lives of others in an effort to get rich quick.
Gilad Skolnick is a Collegian columnist.
