Four siblings who sued the Michael Jackson estate for sexual assault are facing a setback after a Los Angeles federal judge ruled that their dispute must be resolved in private arbitration. Judge Hernán D. Vera found that a 2019 settlement agreement signed by Edward, Dominic, Marie-Nicole, and Aldo Cascio will prevent them from litigating their claims in a public court of law. “Although the allegations are horrific,” Judge Vera wrote in his decision, viewed by Pitchfork, “the court is without discretion to do aught but enforce the language of the arbitration clause.”
In a statement to Pitchfork, the Cascio’s lawyer, Howard King, wrote: “It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that the decision on whether the Cascios were duped into signing an unconscionable agreement with an arbitration clause will be made by an arbitrator rather than a jury of peers. The family had hoped the Court would allow for a public trial over the decades-long molestations of the Cascio siblings by Michael Jackson and the ensuing cover-up by his advisors. Instead, the family will seek justice from the dark confines of a private conference room.” Pitchfork has also reached out to the Jackson estate’s legal representation for comment.
The eldest Cascio sibling, Frank, did not join his siblings’ complaint but did file his own independently. In March, his suit was sent to arbitration by a different California state judge, citing the same clause in the settlement agreement.
The Cascio siblings allege that they were each abused and sexually trafficked as children by Michael Jackson over a period beginning in the late 1980s until days before his death in 2009. Their father met Jackson while working as the general manager of a luxury hotel where the pop star often stayed. In their suit, the plaintiffs claimed that Jackson gave them alcohol and hard drugs—often procured by his employees—isolated them from one another, and threatened that their family would be “ruined” if they told anyone about the sexual acts they engaged in with him.
All five Cascio siblings and their parents supported Jackson during the 2003 trial in which he was charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy, Gavin Arvizo. (He was later acquitted.) Frank Cascio published the memoir My Friend Michael in 2011, and the siblings often described themselves as Jackson’s “second family.” It was the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, they recently told The New York Times, that allegedly “deprogrammed” the siblings, leading them to confront the Jackson estate over the alleged abuse.
In 2020, the Cascios reached a settlement with Jackson’s estate that would pay out roughly $16 million over the span of five years. One term of the deal was that the siblings sign a Confidential Acquisition and Consulting Agreement, which included non-disparagement and binding arbitration clauses that prevented them from going to the police with their allegations or suing the Jackson estate in open court. Their new lawsuit claimed that the non-disclosure clause had been explained to them as a “life rights” agreement, and was “designed to silence victims of childhood sexual abuse.”
A separate lawsuit against the Jackson estate—this one filed by James Safechuck and Wade Robson, the subjects of Leaving Neverland—is set to go to trial in November after being revived in 2023.