Naming Neverland: Michael Jackson, Peter Pan and the Lawsuit That Never Was

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

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We have been trying to figure out the best way to tell this particular story, Yorgo.

Yes, quite challenging for sure.

I think it has to start with one of my favorite things, which is a video I had previously never seen before.

Well, you have to go through a significant rabbit hole to find it.

And yeah, it has two of the biggest icons of

the 20th century.

If the sales pitch on this episode is briefly, do you want to see a video of the biggest celebrity in the world in a way you've never seen him before?

I'm like, okay.

So let's hit play.

So explain what we're seeing here.

We are seeing Michael Jackson dressed in his most Michael Jackson-esque leather everywhere.

Military style regalia.

A Jerry Curl.

Michael Jackson, making his way down this hallway, past this receiving line of greeters.

Yes.

You think when you watch this video that, oh,

they're here to see Michael.

Yes.

You would assume so because he's the most famous person on planet Earth at this time.

This is 1988?

1988, yes.

He has had already the number one album of all time, thriller.

Followed it up with Bad, and he is currently touring Bad around the world.

And so everybody's like teetering on edge.

Just standing in line, like it's like the high school lunch.

Michael Jackson is fidgeting.

Happy to be here.

How does it feel to be meeting the royalty tonight?

Very exciting.

His feet look like they are nervously tapping on the the brown wood floor of this long hallway in England.

Because who is now arriving?

Boom!

We got Prince Charles, then now King Charles

just arriving and glad-handing.

You know, great, great double-breasted suit, purple tie.

And behind him, by the way, an even bigger star than a literal king who is now dwarfing, by the way, the king of pop.

Yes, the iconic Princess Diana.

Just looking like the epitome of grace.

Michael Jackson almost seems to be auditioning

for a role of some sort.

He's so sheepish.

It all raises the question of like, what are they here to do?

Yes.

In this hallway in England.

And there is Yogo, a true

childhood memory giant check.

The Happy Gilmore big checks, as it were.

He had just a big one with the bad logo from his album and a Pepsi logo.

And

it is worth $450,000.

Yes.

And there's Michael Jackson's autograph, bottom right corner in blue, cursive.

Yeah.

But the most curious detail that we are pausing this video to zoom in on is the recipient of this giant $450,000 check,

which would be the Prince's Trust, which supports a building that houses and controls Michael Jackson's favorite thing in the entire world,

which is

Peter Pan.

Because Peter Pan to me

represents something that's very special in my heart.

You know, he represents youth, childhood, never growing up, magic, flying,

everything I think that children and wonderment and magic, what it's all about.

And to me, I just have never ever grown out of loving that or thinking that it's very special.

Do you identify with him?

Totally.

You don't want to grow up?

No, I am Peter Pan.

Are you not your Michael Jenks?

I'm Peter Pan, my heart.

Yeah, the reason you reached out to me is because you have a theory that you're positing that this video that nobody else has noticed in this way happens to be the scene of a quid pro quo that enabled the most infamous celebrity home in America to be named Neverland Ranch, allegedly.

Yeah.

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All right, so before we dive into this Michael Jackson theory, I need you to understand the roots of the fascination on the part of our correspondent today, Yurgo Archidas, who last appeared on our program to expose the fake democracy that was MTV's Total Request lot.

And more recently, asked me a pretty weird question.

Have you heard the story of the tombstone that had a Spider-Man on it?

And I

had not.

So in this case, there was a boy who died who was four years old from a rare genetic condition.

And this boy, it turned out, named Ollie Jones, loved Spider-Man more than anything else in the world.

And so after Ollie died in 2018, just a couple days before Christmas, actually,

Ollie's father attempted to honor him with a special gravestone etched with the image of Ollie's all-time favorite Marvel superhero.

At which point, Ollie's father learned that his family needed permission.

permission from the company that owns Marvel to do this.

Disney, despite them writing for requests to use it, denied them to preserve the innocence and magic of its characters.

And that quote about innocence and magic comes from the letter that Disney's permissions department had sent Ollie's family, according to a viral article from the BBC, which also noted that this was simply policy.

Disney extended their sincere condolences to Ollie's family.

But what this letter explained is that Walt Disney himself had once ruled that Disney characters could never be featured on headstones or memorial markers or funeral urns.

And this got Yorgo thinking for years now about the use of litigation on the part of these brands to protect the purity of their characters, of their intellectual property.

And how, in at least one extremely conspicuous case,

this somehow

did not happen

yes and you were like i wonder what the most obvious example of this of this would be and it 100 would be neverland ranch yes and why did they never pursue it Which struck me as a really good question to find out about.

Because why did the entity tasked with defending Peter Pan not do the thing, the Spider-Man logic thing?

Why wouldn't they demand that this radioactive global superstar with a traumatic childhood stop honoring and arguably corrupting this character that he loved to the point where he embodied it across the world?

It was one of the most publicized celebrity pet hobbies, interests, slash obsessions that was out there.

And this was pre-Neverland.

He's doing interviews and starts singing songs from Peter Pan halfway through.

And I like creating magic.

Sun is so high.

Watch me now.

Watch me now.

He was very, very obsessed with it to the point that it was

so well known that South Park made an entire episode based on it.

Hey, Stan, what you doing?

Mr.

Jefferson, all.

It's 1.30 in the morning.

Look at me.

I'm Peter Pan.

Shamon.

I'm a little boy forever.

Hey!

I mean, we should point out psychologically speaking, like the diagnosis here is pretty on the nose.

Yeah.

Michael Jackson didn't want to grow up, and here in Peter Pan is the embodiment, the literary embodiment of a guy, a man man who never had to.

That's the promise and the potential of Michael Jackson's love affair with this character.

And on top of that, where do you go to become Peter Pan?

Michael, according to the LA Times, in March 1988, paid $28 million for a 2,700-acre ranch in the St.

Inez Valley.

Yes.

It used to be called Sycamore Valley Ranch.

And he recorded the music video for Say, Say, Say with Paul McCartney there earlier in the decade.

And he just fell in love with it and he wanted to purchase it and create his own little theme park.

Right.

Named after the place in Peter Pan that is known as the haven where the lost boys live and are free from the meddling and the impurity of us adults.

Yes, and Captain Hook, aka Joe Jackson.

I like the first wheel.

It's a traditional,

very old, you know, amusement exhibit.

And it's soothing.

It's not, you know, anything that's dangerous or anything.

It's just comfortable, mixed to wish and dream.

Can we go on it?

So we should establish here that, per your theory, nobody knows how Michael Jackson got the legal rights to call it Neverland.

Yes, and it feels like one of those things that would obviously need to be a deal or some kind of contract.

Well, Michael Jackson's estate, let's just also catch people up on this.

Famously litigious.

In a myriad of different ways.

Right.

Michael Jackson's estate sued his own mom at one point.

It's just the culture that we live in.

You have to keep it close to the vest and not allow anybody to use your intellectual property in any way.

So Neverland and Peter Pan, which, again, is the work of art that Neverland is inside of.

Who owns the rights to that?

The Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, England.

Children's Hospital.

Very famous over in England.

Super, one of the most famous in the world.

It's been around for like ever, basically.

Charles Dickens was a big fundraiser for it, which just kind of puts it in perspective.

You want to know how old this shit is?

Charles Dickens was doing it.

Yeah, the ink on the Magna Carta hadn't dried yet.

But in this story, it turns out that Charles Dickens is not.

the writer that we are most interested in.

No, not at all.

Another very, very famous British author named J.M.

Berry, who was the author of the play peter pan which was peter pan or the boy who would not grow up and i thought this was a disney movie the entire time i think most people do i did certainly

my father actually did know i spoke to david berry the great great nephew of j.mberry jmb as as we call him he had this amazing flat overlooking the river thames

so the play premieres in december 1904, and it truly is like nothing anybody's ever seen before.

There's a moment in the play where Tinker Bell, you know, has taken the poison and is dying and her little light is fading.

And Peter Pan turns to the audience and says, if you believe in fairies, you know, clap your hands because that will save her life.

If you believe,

wherever you are, clap your hands and she'll hear you.

Clap!

Clap!

Doma Tinkai!

Clap!

And they didn't know whether the audience would respond to that.

The audience instantly burst into a terrific round of clapping.

It was obvious from the first performance that, oh, this is going to be a thing.

Everybody got the idea of it.

From there, it just went all around the world.

So is all of this business is mushrooming?

The money, right?

So like J.M.

Berry is rolling in it, I presume, at this point.

Oh, yeah, it just kept ascending.

Like he met with Charlie Chaplin to potentially have him play Peter Pan.

The snowball really started snowballing.

I spoke to Andrew Birkin, who is the foremost expert on Peter Pan and J.M.

Berry.

He wrote a book called J.M.

Berry and the Lost Boys.

I'd spent probably about four months going through all Barry's notebooks.

It's like, you know, 50,000 notes and his handwriting is almost impossible to read, but you gradually get used to it.

And he also wrote a docudrama in the 1970s called The Lost Boys, and that was all about J.M.

Barry.

Birkin kind of explained very plainly how much he could give a shit about the finances.

They found all these uncashed checks in his drawers after he died.

He'd been sent, you know, tens of thousands of pounds.

He'd never even bothered to put them in the bank.

He'd forgotten about them.

so he was certainly not um

you know uh uh

adept at um licensing and the financial side of it so jm berry is the ricky henderson of playwrights in like the 19th century yeah he's a nightmare for payroll accountants and he's framing his check

But this is where I should jump in to mention that the real-life inspiration for Peter Pan, for Neverland, for Wendy and Tinkerbell and the Lost Boys

was JMB

himself.

JM Barry, it turns out, had lost his own brother in a tragic ice skating accident when they were young.

And their mother was the one who said, quote, now he won't have to grow up to be an old man, end quote.

And the Lost Boys, for instance, the kids who live in Neverland and never had to grow up, they were inspired by by a family of orphans in Barry's neighborhood that JM Barry had taken in when he himself had grown up and become an adult.

And that, in a nutshell, is why JM Barry was not obsessed with the prophets of Peter Pan.

This

was real to him.

And this whole story had dark undertones that he had inserted for a very personal reason.

And so what he cared about more than anything else was protecting the spirit of his actual play.

But as it went around, it went international, played everywhere, and then they eventually made a silent movie in 1924 of it.

And after that, it seemed like he really gave up on all of the ownership of it because there became alterations to his actual play.

And he's like, it's not my thing anymore.

And according to Birkin, the JMB biographer, and Birkin's own life story, by the way, we'll figure into our story here a bit later, J.M.

Berry starts workshopping an idea.

I've had this idea.

What do you think

about me giving the rights of Peter Pan to the Great Almond Street Hospital?

And the great-great-nephew, David Berry, actually confirmed that as well.

The idea of giving the copyright to Great Ormond Street.

Then one night he's at a banquet with the Prince of Wales.

He has a couple too many glasses of port, as one does, and he kind of gets the nudge that he needs.

So he was sitting next to the Prince of Wales.

He said,

you know what, I'd like to give Peter Pan's Great Ormond Street Hospital.

And the Prince of Wales was the chairman or the president of the hospital at that point.

Which explains why the Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana, in 1988, were in that video we started this episode with, receiving the giant $450,000 check from a nervous Michael Jackson.

It had been a royal arrangement, famously, this donation thing, that everybody knew to abide.

Yes, except for there was one notable example that was kind of a nightmare looking back.

Because it was for the hospital, It was respected by everyone except Walt Disney.

I mean, the Disney company, who always gave them tuppence and really ripped them off quite badly in the early 50s with the cartoon.

So I found out.

I found out that tuppence is a thing that I can say in everyday life.

Oh, yeah.

What was that rooted in, that frustration with Disney?

Walt Disney, you know, Birkin's best friend, went to go see the 1924 silent film that we've been talking about.

And then later, when he was trying to make a movie, he approached the hospital and paid £5,000 for the rights.

If you look at how much money Peter Pan has made, it's made $87 million at the box office.

And then you think about the merchandising action

and how many different iterations it is.

So many green hats, you know, just Captain Hook swords, Tinkerbell, the fairy wings.

And so, like, the value of Peter Pan to just make it for $5,000

is just unbelievable.

It's a hell of a deal for Old Walt.

Not only do they they make just money hand over fist and continue to make money from it, but they Disney-ified it.

You know, the Disney thing

is a bit of a travesty, really.

I mean, it just makes Peter Pan into this cute little cheerful chappie, and all the dark undertones are eliminated.

It's a very, very misleading version.

I'm not saying it's a bad piece of animation, far from it.

It's just that

it is not true to the real spirit of Peter Pan.

It is familiar, this dynamic, insofar as a work of art has become, you know, commodified and become, for popular consumption, this thing that now we forget the origins of.

Like it's just now everywhere and we don't know why.

Honestly, something that shocked me was that he popularized the name Wendy.

So the name Wendy in the play originally, that was not a popular name.

David Berry actually corrected me when I said that he popularized it.

That's where the name comes from.

Yeah, what I have found out already is that I can never eat a bacon double stack without thinking about JM Berry.

If Peter Pan was not created, nobody would be able to have a baconator.

Thank you, Berry family.

The thing is about all this is that, like, while those things did seep into culture and a lot of this stuff is just kind of omnipresent now, the hospital itself really was way more focused on the play productions.

It was revived every Christmas, except I think 1942 during the war, right up until the 1980s.

So in the 1980s, a movie adaptation of Peter Pan, another one, started going around Hollywood.

And you will never believe the celebrity that was rumored to play old Peter Pan.

Yeah, I'm going to guess that his name may rhyme with

Jaichael Maxson.

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So, this movie that you've been alluding to,

I should disclose that this is my favorite rendition of all of the many, many, many, many renditions of Peter Pan that have seeped into culture.

Hook.

Let's fly!

Oh my god, where are we going?

To never, never learn.

This movie is my favorite.

Rufio.

Rufio.

Rufio.

Rufio.

I mean, Dante Bosco, Filipino brother.

I mean, this is my guy.

Him being the leader of the Lost Boys, like, what was the development of this film like?

Okay, so the development of this movie, which was essentially coming from Birkin himself, started in the early 80s when he found out that Francis Ford Coppola, while he was editing Apocalypse Now, he's in the jungle, he's watching Marlon Brando, and he's like, you know what, let me escape through a JM Berry.

Yeah, let me tune out these exploding helicopters for a second.

Yeah.

And let me crack open this biography of the guy who wrote Peter Pan.

Yeah, let's go to Kensington Gardens.

Who cares?

And so he ends up reading it and contacts Birkin.

They start like talking about developing it into a movie.

And Coppola at that point is just hot shit.

Coppola, after Apocalypse Now, obviously he had done the Godfather movies, one Oscars, the conversation, Patton, all of this shit.

He's coming in and he's like, okay, my production company, American Zootrope, let's potentially do this.

And so Birkin goes down to Hollywood and meets up with old Francis.

And this is where Andrew Birkin's life story becomes quite relevant.

And I alluded to this a bit earlier, but the guy isn't just some Peter Pan obsessive who wrote a book.

Andrew Birkin was mentored by Stanley Kubrick and had worked on 2001 A Space Odyssey.

And he then became the first assistant director to the Beatles on their magical mystery tour.

And is also, by the way, the brother of the lady behind the Birken bag.

That's also true.

And on and on and on.

But in Hollywood, Francis Four Coppola had invited Birkin to visit the enormous and fake Las Vegas that he had built for another film he was making called One from the Heart.

And this Vegas set

didn't seem like like a super logical business decision.

And so Coppola asked Birkin, who again had these real Hollywood credits, what he thought.

What do you think?

What do you think?

And I'm thinking, well, yeah, it's okay, but why didn't you just go to Las Vegas and she's on location?

Anyway, the film went barely out.

Which meant that Francis Vercoppola and his production company were no longer in the running, business-wise, to adapt the book, which became

Hook.

At which point, another director who just happened to direct a production of Peter Pan at his own school when he was 11 years old, and also happened to be at this point a known friend of Michael Jackson as an adult now in the mid-80s,

emerged.

Inter Steven Spielberg.

At the time, he was a good friend of Michael Jackson.

And then rumors started flying around, no pun intended, that Michael would make a good Peter.

Right.

So So there's a 1988 news report that we found.

And the quote that I'll just read here is that Michael Jackson has visited the Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Yes.

The Peter Pan ward.

And the article says, He toured the rest of the ward, tenderly kissing deformed babies on their feet.

Michael, ringed by five burly minders, next went to the hospital's Peter Pan ward, named after the character he hopes to play in a film.

We just all to say that it sounds like the favorite to get this role of his lifetime is Michael Jackson.

To put Stevens Pielberg and Michael Jackson together would have made a huge amount of box office sense.

And I like creating magic.

If the algorithm was casting back in the 80s, this would definitely be the movie that we would have seen.

Yes, and Birkin kind of dispelled any kind of notion that he might have actually been truly the favorite.

I think Michael thought that if he told enough people publicly that he was going to be Peter Pan, that somehow Spielberg would say, yeah, great, why not?

So there's this article, this Entertainment Weekly article, 2011, in which Spielberg says to the magazine, quote, Michael had always wanted to play Peter Pan, but I called Michael and I said, quote, this is about a lawyer that is brought back to save his kids and discovers that he was once, when he was younger, Peter Pan.

Which is to say that Michael Jackson didn't get the job.

That enough!

Okay, Mr.

All right.

The show's over.

Now you put that thing away.

Now put it down before you poke somebody's eye out.

You're not old enough to shave.

What are you doing with the firm?

Been flying around.

This is an insurance nightmare.

What is this?

Some sort of Lord of the Fly preschool?

Where are your parents?

Who's in charge here?

Robin Williams plays adult Peter Pan.

And he's like a yuppie, workaholic dad who needs to go to Neverland to figure out what's important in life.

So how did Michael react to the news that he was not getting this role?

If we smash cut to the early odds, there's a Vanity Fair article that

sets a scene that's quite wild.

Michael wired $150,000 to a bank in Mali, to a witch doctor named Baba,

who would sacrifice 42 cows in a ceremony to curse Michael Jackson's enemies.

The article, it quotes the witch doctor, the voodoo chief, Baba, saying, Steven Spielberg, be gone.

So if you can't be Peter Pan, what do you do?

You live like Peter Pan.

Oh, man.

And so this ranch that he, again, bought for almost $30 million that he named Neverland, the status of the naming rights such that he can legally have the clearance

to rebrand himself and his home in the image that he wants to be, is what?

Where are we at with the status of the rights?

So Jim Callahan, the former prime minister of England, has a wife, Audrey Callahan, who works on the board of Gosh.

And she proposes a new bill that will make it so the Peter Pan royalties remain with Gosh in perpetuity.

Whoa.

Which I found out there are only two works that have that distinction from David Berry.

So Peter Pan became one of only two works that own permanent copyright in this country and the other one is

the Bible.

So I know this episode is pretty bizarre at this point on account of all the witch doctors and Spider-Man tombstones and princesses of Wales and now the Bible, but this fact does need to be reiterated here, I think, because what the great-great-nephew of J.M.

Berry says is actually

true.

In 1988, that historic bill was passed by English Parliament, and it granted the perpetual right to royalties for Peter Pan to gosh, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

Which is just a remarkable testament to a remarkable play and a remarkable hospital.

Because while copyright protection normally expires in Britain after 50 years,

only the King James Bible and yes, Peter Pan enjoy such protections forever.

And so speaking of timeline questions here, we should now recall what we have established already about the year that bill was passed, which was, again, 1988.

Because 1988 was also the year that Michael Jackson bought the ranch that became Neverland,

and 1988 was also the year that he nervously presented that giant check for $450,000 to said hospital via the Prince and Princess of Wales.

In that video, Yorgo wanted to start this whole show with.

Which is why Yorgo's theory about what Michael Jackson was trying to do there in that video, his whole theory about the quid pro quo that we're finally trying to fact-check here

feels

pretty linear.

He's like, hey, let me hand this money out.

Let me just kind of do this as a wink, wink, nod, nod.

So when this does pass, you're not going to bother me if I decide to wear a whole like Peter Pan costume all the time, or if I want to name my ranch Neverland.

Right.

He is theoretically buying the protection.

He's buying the role that Hollywood had denied him in perpetuity himself.

Yeah, it's what corporations do or really rich people do when they donate to presidential campaigns.

I'm going to give you this money now,

but we kind of understand you're not going to get this money ever again if you don't help me out in the future.

Right.

The theory you have is that this is political favor trading

in broad daylight.

And so this is a big allegation.

Huge.

Were you able to prove that your theory is true?

It's complicated.

So, Yurgo, this is the part where we have to show people what's in the box.

Yes, certainly.

So, your theory again is that this is a quid pro quo.

Michael Jackson is so deeply invested in being this version of Peter Pan that he is put towards this mission, $450,000 in this giant check, almost $30 million for the ranch.

And in exchange, you theorize he gets the rights, the legal rights in perpetuity.

So the hospital, the children's hospital, what did they tell you when you confronted them with this massive theory?

Well, I spoke to the appeal coordinator at that time in the late 80s.

How are you doing, Robert?

How's it going?

Yeah, I'm pretty good, Yogo.

Except it's a Monday and it's quite late for me.

And it's early for you.

So I'm at the end of my day.

His name was Robert Pike.

And just to make it clear, the appeal coordinator, appeal, means basically charity fundraising.

I was in right at the beginning of there being a concept of a Peter Pan office at Great Almond Street Hospital.

He told me the words I did not want to hear.

No, not as far as I'm aware.

I can't swear to that, but I'm pretty sure I would know if that had been the case.

So if the top authority at the the hospital is telling you, is telling us, yeah,

I didn't see anything like that.

What was this check for?

Well, there are two options that I've come up with.

One, that he was just being magnanimous.

He's a very philanthropic person that checks out.

Right.

And he'd visited the hospital before.

So this is just like the general, like, I want to support a good cause neutrally without any sort of strings, even vaguely attached.

That's the one theory.

But if you remember Michael Jackson as the the guy who paid a f ⁇ ing witch doctor to curse Steven Spielberg, it sounds like

theory number two, we can't rule out entirely.

Yeah, I mean, there's just a chance that he was being proactive by donating this money just in case litigation would eventually come up.

Right.

The through line through this entire episode has been litigation.

It's been people suing each other.

And so the next question is.

A couple years later, what's it like when the great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, these good people you've been talking to, are watching from afar Michael Jackson become now the world's most famous alleged child molester?

It was the sheriff's deputies who executed the search warrant of the Neverland Ranch.

On the 18th of November, 2003, Neverland was raided by the police.

Since Michael Jackson was accused of sexually molesting children, his dangerous tour has been plagued by controversy.

In a four-minute statement, Jackson said allegations that he molested a boy are untrue.

Michael Jackson says his accuser is among thousands of children.

He's invited to his 2,600-acre Neverland Ranch in California to play in his amusement park, visit his zoo, watch movies, play video games, and feast on their favorite foods.

What legal recourse do these people have?

What do they consider given that Michael Jackson was living at Neverland Ranch, the most famous manifestation of their whole trademark?

I mean, this was by far the most interesting thing I got throughout all of my reporting.

And that is that the hospital did not even consider it.

And Robert Pike was nice enough to explain why.

You'd rather be getting press coverage for

groundbreaking treatments and this sort of thing rather than the fact that you're chasing some

music star

because he's given his house the wrong name.

If you're going to chase somebody for calling their house Neverland, where would you end?

You might have to go around the world and see who else had got a house called Neverland.

There might be thousands of them, you know.

I think in terms of litigiousness,

we were far, probably still are far more relaxed than you are in the States.

This is mind-blowing to me because this is the exact opposite of the Spider-Man graveyard logic.

It's

that we talked about before.

It's such a cultural blind spot that Americans are suey McSusersons and that we will just sue anybody.

Suey generous.

Yes.

When it comes to suing.

We are super into suing.

Robert Pike said, what are we going to do?

Sue all these people whose houses may be, it's like, that is exactly what we're doing.

That's what we will do.

It's just what happens.

It's remarkable that I did not consider it until this point in the investigation.

Yeah.

It's like, hey, our intellectual property.

We're going to make them stop or they're going to have to pay for it.

Because in America, we see these things like they're haunted houses.

Like bad things happen at a place that's bearing a certain name.

We need to protect that place from being forever associated with Michael Jackson.

Yes, I would say that in America, at the very least, there is an understanding that Neverland has negative connotations.

Yes.

But what I found out is that it might not be the case across the pond.

You know, I think the fact that he named his branch Neverland will probably quite quickly be forgotten.

You don't think so?

No.

See, this is what I'm talking about.

No great-great-nephew of J.M.

Berry.

I do not think so.

This is why we had to fight for our revolution because we just don't see the same way.

No.

Ever since we threw that tea into the ocean, it's very clear.

We love representation.

Yes.

And we can quantify that love, it turns out, because a 2005 analysis that I found of legal fees by the esteemed Royal Economic Society in the UK found that the United States files roughly three times as many civil lawsuits as England does.

And also, we spend roughly three times as much money on litigation overall.

In fact,

nobody on the planet spends more on lawsuits than, you guessed it, America.

Which I think says less about Michael Jackson and Neverland and Peter Pan and probably a bit more about

Yorgo and his extremely incorrect theory and the rest of us.

Because

we

love

lawsuits.

We love torts.

We love suing our fellow American for all sorts of things.

Straight on till morning.

But it does remind me, though, like in a perfect sort of poetic way, like the full circle.

nature of the story, which is that Neverland, this concept that represented a place where you are free from the concerns of adults,

that then got co-opted by Michael Jackson to do allegedly terrible things, as we all know, such that it contaminated the concept of Neverland in America, at least.

Yes.

In London, in England, in Britain, the place where this originated,

they are basically the Neverland of Neverland.

A place where this never really mattered as much as it did out in the world of American adulthood.

Peter Pan and Neverland are just still innocent and just living a terrific life.

And everybody thinks of J.M.

Berry when they hear Neverland, as opposed to here when we think of some of the grossest allegations of all time.

Yeah.

Yorgo Architas, thank you for reminding all of us where all of this, both Peter Pan and this country

actually came from.

Torts, baby, torts.

That's where we're at.

That's where the money's at.

Please don't sue us.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.