Except two juries have said he never did.
Sure he was screwed up in the head and was little more than a big kid most of his adult life, but considering both his trials were pushed forward by the parents of the children in question, neither of which were all that well off and against a (at one time) billionaire, it's really not hard to see where the real motivation lay.
I'd feel it's fairly safe to say he was never guilty of anything more than being a loon.
The fact the families were happy to settle for financial compensation says a lot, too. If someone abused my kids, I'd want to see them in prison. Forever.
I did initially think (hope?) that Michael Jackson had faked his own death - on the basis that the only way he'd ever be left alone would be if he was dead. He had so much plastic surgery that he looked like a freak, which would make it
easier for someone else to die in his place - it's much easier to make someone look just like a freak than to make them identical to a normal person. Find someone who is dying, pay them or their family a lot of money, give them enough plastic surgery to make them look like Michael Jackson. Then that person dies in Michael Jackson's home, is anyone going to question whether it was the real Michael Jackson?
But as more information has come out over the past week or so, I'm increasingly convinced that it was either a tragic accident or a suicide attempt. The kind of drugs he was using (anaesthetics, etc) were not the sort of things that anyone
should be using at home, even with the assistance of a doctor. You need a full resuscitation team on standby before it's safe to use things like that, which is why operations take place in hospitals.
I don't think he was a drug addict, by the normal definition, either. I think he was someone in a huge amount of physical and mental pain who was abused by his doctors and handlers in the same way that he was abused by his father as a child. Poor guy.