ABSTRACT
On 13 June 2005, after deliberating more than 30 hours, a Santa Barbara County, California, jury found singer Michael Jackson not guilty on ten charges related to child sexual abuse, for which he could have been sentenced to a total of almost twenty years in prison. For more than two years, elite shapers of opinion and policymakers had continuously denounced and derided Jackson and his alleged sexual behaviors. Once the dust settled, however, it became clear that the joining of forces between the media and law enforcement that led to and accompanied Jackson’s trial had failed to spark an extensive or lasting moral panic over adult males’ sexual abuse of minor boys. Because Americans already associated him with sometimes provocative but mostly harmless subversion of expectations concerning race and gender (as well as other aspects of social identity), Michael Jackson never sufficed as the sort of personification of social menace that helps turn public anxieties into full-blown panics.
