An 11-year-old Culkin had starred in Jackson’s music video for “Black and White,” and the pair became close friends. Culkin now 39, told Esquire magazine he never saw Jackson abuse anyone and denied the singer behaved inappropriately with him.
“I never saw him do anything. And especially at this flashpoint in time, I’d have no reason to hold anything back. The guy has passed on. If anything–I’m not gonna say it would be stylish or anything like that–but right now is a good time to speak up. And if I had something to speak up about, I would totally do it. But no, I never saw anything; he never did anything.”
In the interview with Esquire, when asked if it bothers him that people assume he was also abused by Jackson, Culkin said: “I’m gonna begin with the line – it’s not a line, it’s the truth: He never did anything to me. I never saw him do anything.”
Culkin first met Jackson when he was performing in The Nutcracker in New York City as a child, but it was after the actor starred in that the then-10-year-old received a random call from him. The pop star told Culkin he understood the pressures of a child was named the godfather to Jackson’s daughter in 1998.
“When Macaulay Culkin was little, [his brother] Kieran Culkin would sleep on this side, Macaulay Culkin was on this side, his sisters in there,” Jackson told Martin Bashir in his 2003 documentary Living With Michael Jackson. “We all would just jam in the bed, you know, we would wake up at dawn and go in the hot-air balloon.”
Culkin took the witness stand in Jackson’s 2005 child molestation trial to defend the King of Pop. He said at the time that Jackson never molested him.
HBO’s 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland continued to spark conversation surrounding Jackson’s legacy. The doc detailed the story of Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who alleged that Jackson sexually abused them as children for years.
