Why I know Michael Jackson is innocent

He told me the whole truth under hypnosis

Uri Geller, Sunday Telegraph, January 2004

As Michael Jackson’s lawyers fight to prove his innocence of sickening child abuse allegations, I am asked constantly by reporters and by friends why I continue to defend this man. How can you be so certain he is not guilty,they urge. How can you be so sure of your own intuition? What will you do if you are proved wrong?.

They called me foolhardy when I dismissed the rumours out of hand and proclaimed my confidence in Michael by inviting him to act as best man at my wedding.

The reason is simple: I know the full truth about Michael Jackson and the claims that he sexually abused a teenage boy. He told me the whole story, himself, holding back nothing, under deep hypnosis.

Until now I have discussed this evidence with no one apart from my family. The fact is that there are elements here which do not reflect well on either Michael or me. For this reason, I have held back from revealing all that I know, in the hope that it would never be necessary for me to speak.

My friendship with Michael began in the home of Mohamed al Fayed,about two years after the death of his son Dodi with Princess Diana in the Paris car crash. Mo and I were deep in conversation when a call was brought to him. It was one which couldnt be postponed if you don’t take Michael Jackson’s call, he might ring back in ten minutes… or he might never.

“Michael, guess who I’ve got sitting here!” Mo chuckled. I was flattered to hear a gasp and a tinkling giggle down the line from New York. I was more flattered still to receive a pair of first-class air tickets to New York, with a message from Michael that he needed me urgently to boost his latest album, a $30 million project called Invincible which was then in the final stages of recording.

I checked in to the hotel where Michael was staying that week. His bodyguard phoned ahead to let him know I was on my way up, but when I knocked on his door nobody stirred. It was ajar. I entered nervously,calling out his name. Thousands of photographs, toys and little treasures, all of them gifts from fans, were scattered around a vast suite. Lifesize Star Wars cutouts stood guard. There was a longish delay before he greeted me, and at the time I thought nothing of it. Later, I began to see the significance.

We liked each other immediately, and quickly found we could each of us talk and listen at the same time. I felt at ease with this gentle man,whose big frame belies his physical frailty. Michael told me he wanted my powers to flow through his album. Would I place my hands on the tapes and energise them?

We didn’t go straight to the studio. Instead, Michael hired a movie theatre and stunned me by dancing to the soundtrack of The Matrix,grooving out in his own world at the back of the auditorium. But the next day at The Hit Factory, where Invincible was being prepared, I saw a different side to this legendary pop artist: controlled, focused, streetwise and simply a league ahead of everyone else in the room with his intense musical imagination and vision.

At the sessions end, he let everyone drift away while he urged me to lay my hands on every reel. And when we were alone, he said, Uri, there’s something else I want you to help me with. Please say you can.

Michael confessed, without any drama, that he had a problem with what was effectively a craving. I won’t say what it was,as it is incidental to what I am about to tell you. But it was something on the lines of chocolate or peanut butter – therefore something of the sort that many people are susceptible to.

Michael looked into my face and said: I want your help, because nothing else helps me. Please help me to stop. I immediately told him that I could put him under hypnosis and instruct his sub-conscious mind, at the deepest level, to reject the craving.

At first he was both hopeful and a little sceptical but, when I told him how I had worked as a stage hypnotist in Israel before my ability to bend metal made me famous worldwide, Michael agreed to give it a try.

He was a remarkably suggestive subject for hypnosis. Within a few seconds he had surrendered his will and was allowing me to lead him into a relaxed state of trance. I have hypnotised many people, and it’s easy to tell if they are faking. A good subject can eat a whole onion in the belief that it’s a sweet apple. Michael was an excellent subject I could have told him to write me a cheque for $1m and he would have done it on the spot.

Of course I did not intend to take advantage of him that way. But what I did was, it must be said, equally unethical. I gave him an affirmation, a positive statement used by hypnotists to change a patients behaviour,so that he would no longer have the craving. At that point I should have brought him gently out of his trance. Instead, I asked him: Michael Jackson, tell me with total honesty what was the real story behind the allegations of sexual abuse made against you by the boy Jordy Chandler? He did not hesitate. It was all made up. His family just wanted my money. Why did you pay the family? It was the easiest thing to do. He said it flatly, without stopping to think. I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d had enough.

I started to ask him: Have you ever touched a child…I know that at this point I was way over the line. I had not asked Michael’s permission to probe his unconscious. We were doing this, he thought, to help him with a health problem, not to lay bare the corners of his mind and his past. I acted without respect for his privacy, and I violated my own ethical code. But I had to know the answers. A friendship was growing between us,and I had to be able to trust Michael utterly, because I am a dogged kind of friend  I don’t back away when bad stuff starts to fly.

Bad stuff would come Michael’s way, I was sure of that. He had been in the thick of it for five years, and intuition told me there was worse to come. I did not suspect then that, by introducing Michael to Martin Bashir, I could be the instigator of a new catalogue of problems for him.

I have defended him staunchly. I knew from that day in the studio that this would be my role, as a protector as well as a friend. But that could only be if I heard the right answer to my final question.

Have you ever touched a child or a young person in a way that you shouldn’t, I asked. And he replied: Never. I would never do that. My friendships with children are all very beautiful. He was still under deep hypnosis and quite literally incapable of lying. The session had gone on for too long. I was becoming concerned that someone would enter the studio and demand to know what was going on which would be a difficult situation for both of us.

I brought him out of the trance quite quickly and too swiftly, I now suspect – counting him up from ten to one, and telling him forcefully that, though he would remember nothing of the session, he would never again have the craving. Sadly, my personal belief is that the therapy did not work or, if it did,I could see that it had worn off by the next time Michael came to London.

I am not proud of any of this. It gives me no pleasure to say I betrayed a friends trust by probing his psyche. But I am glad I did it, and I would do it again. Because I know i do not merely hope and trust in Michael Jackson’s innocence, but I know. Because I have looked into his mind.