WHERE’S MICHAEL? GQ wants to know!

WHERE’S MICHAEL?
Shortly after his acquittal, Michael Jackson left Neverland and headed to Bahrain. Devin Friedman went in search of the deposed King of Pop

The obsessed know that Michael Jackson has been living in the tiny nation of Bahrain for almost a year. Possibly as a cross-dresser, a drug addict, a Muslim, or at least a still weird human being. After his acquittal last June, he vacated Neverland, flew east, and disappeared into the desert, presumably to escape an entire nation that no longer loved him.

In the intervening year, those who had been searching for it will have found some coverage of Michael Jackson’s life in the Middle East. Sunday Mirror, September 18, 2005: Seen cruising Bahrain in a red Ferrari he had shipped from America. New York Post, November 14, 2005: Went shopping for toys. Daily News, November 15, 2005: Spotted in the women’s bathroom at a mall while visiting Dubai, wearing women’s clothing and applying makeup. (After which Michael Jackson’s spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., issued a statement in response, which was picked up by the Associated Press: It was all a mistake! Wrong door!)

Some of the news coverage has been sensationalistic: One plotline has it that Michael Jackson is taking forty Xanaxes a day, delivered via secret flights from California. Which is somehow tied to some underpants that investigators had found at Neverland that tested positive for trace amounts of cocaine but were never introduced at the trial because, you know, anyone could have been handling those underpants (unclear how it all links up, but underpants and cocaine: a bad combination for Mr. Sleepover). And the Jackson family, having caught wind of this addiction, was supposedly set to stage an intervention in which they’d fly to Bahrain and get him the help he needs, thereby preserving the life to which he is now hanging on to by a thread.
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