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Michael Jackson’s Family Forcing HBO to Arbitration Over ‘Michael Was a Pedo’ Doc

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Michael Jackson loved to rape little boys. He also ate unicorn flesh and bathed in the blood of lost puppies.

I don’t actually believe that, but I can say it because he’s dead. See, you can’t defame the dead, once someone dies you can say whatever you want about them and it’s legal because in the eyes of the law the dead don’t have reputations to defend.

But if you’re, say, the estate of Michael Jackson, you might not like people saying that he was a little boy rapist or that he was a galactic warlord who enslaved the Saiyan people as his personal army and destroyed the planet Vegeta because the amount of money you can make off of his IP depends a lot on people’s willingness to buy his records and various merchandise and they’re a lot less likely to if there a bunch of documentaries on TV about him gangbanging all the boys on the Magic School Bus while Miss Frizzel’s head was turned.

But what is Jackson’s estate going to do as, since I said, it’s entirely legal to defame and lie about dead people, so even if every detail in HBO’s doc about Jackson is fabricated there’s no recourse.

Well, unless HBO just happened to have signed a contract with an anti-disparagement clause almost 30 years ago when they produced a concert video featuring the singer. Then Jackson’s estate can, apparently, enforce the arbitration clause in an entirely unrelated contract and try to stifle HBO’s free speech through arcane legal maneuvers.

“The contract contained a broad arbitration clause that covers claims that HBO disparaged Jackson in violation of ongoing confidentiality obligations,” the panel ruled. “We may only identify whether the parties agreed to arbitrate such claims; it is for the arbitrator to decide whether those claims are meritorious.”

Basically, Jackson’s estate is just pulling a more successful version of Donald Trump’s plan to stay president after his landslide election defeat. HBO can say whatever they want about Michael Jackson because he’s dead, but since it may hurt their ability to make money off of his music library, the estate is just throwing any legal argument they can make at the courts and hoping one sticks. Because they were smart enough not to employ Rudy Giuliani, they found something that kind of did.

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