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Michael Jackson’s nephews, TJ, Taj, and Taryll Jackson, filed a $100 million libel suit against RadarOnline on Wednesday for alleging the late singer “sexually abused” the three boys who are Tito Jackson’s sons and were in the group 3T. The case was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.
According to the lawsuit, RadarOnline wrongfully alleged Jackson “sexually abused young boys [and] implied that this included his ‘nephews,’ but added that his ‘family’ (which, of course, includes plaintiffs) resisted any inquiry into that criminal conduct.” Gossip Cop has reached out for a comment from an attorney for RadarOnline, who tells us, “We haven’t seen [the lawsuit] yet.”
In June, RadarOnline published a series of articles about Jackson and his alleged molestation of children. And in a June 24 story that still sits on the website, the outlet claimed, “Michael Jackson‘s sordid secret life of creepy porn and perverted art was no secret to his family…his own relatives were grilled during the past investigation into child molestation claims against him — and there were even claims he had exposed some of them to his sick fetishes!”
The site reported that after Santa Barbara Police Detectives interviewed Jackson family members during a 2003 raid on the singer’s Neverland Ranch, “Authorities even worried that he may have victimized his own relatives!” “The detectives’ report cites Michael even used sexy photos of his own nephews … in their underwear to excite young boys,” alleged a RadarOnline source.
The lawsuit contends, “Radar’s statements were entirely false and defamatory,” and that none of the singer’s nephews “was ever sexually abused by Michael Jackson or ever had any sort of sexual contact with him.” And while Jackson’s family asked for a retraction, the suit states, RadarOnline “refused to correct any of its libelous assertions about plaintiffs, thereby aggravating its wrongful conduct.” The court filing calls the RadarOnline reporting “fraudulent, oppressive and malicious,” and asks for damages of $100 million “to deter them from publishing such vicious, false and defamatory ‘reports.’”
As Gossip Cop reported in June, while Jackson was hit with several counts of sexual abuse and molestation, he was acquitted of all charges in 2005. Also at that time, the Jackson family said in a statement, “Everything in these reports… is false… Those who continue to shamelessly exploit Michael via sleazy internet ‘click bait’ ignore that he was acquitted by a jury in 2005 on every one of the 14 salacious charges brought against him in a failed witch hunt.” “Michael remains just as innocent of these smears in death as he was in life even though he isn’t here to defend himself,” added the family’s statement.
