Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite ends with a letter. Ki-woo, the surviving son, reads his father’s words from the bunker beneath the house — the man who killed someone and went underground rather than face the world above. Ki-woo writes back. He has a plan. He will make enough money to buy the house one day, and when he does, his father can walk up the stairs and out into the light. The dream, even after everything, is still about getting back inside. The scheme collapsed. People died. And the response is to start planning the next approach.

That’s the film’s great and merciless insight — it was never really about class, or greed, or even violence. It was about proximity. About what people are willing to construct — the lies they’ll build, brick by careful brick — to stay close to something they believe will save them. And about how that construction always collapses. When, never if.

The lap of luxury has a gravity. And some people, when they feel it slipping away, will do things that are very difficult to explain any other way.

On April 24, 2026, the Michael Jackson biopic lands in cinemas worldwide. The trailer clocked 116 million views in its first 24 hours. The Jackson name is about to be the biggest conversation on the planet again. The estate is worth $2 billion. And right on cue, the parasites have appeared at the gate.

RELATED: Hell Freezing Over: How the Epstein Case Shifted the Conversation on Michael Jackson

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Grace Rwaramba spent seventeen years inside Michael Jackson’s world. She started as his personal secretary, became his children’s nanny, travelled with him across continents, and was described by those close to the family as the most maternal presence the kids ever knew. She wasn’t a peripheral figure, either. She was in the house. She was in the room. She knew the Cascio family not from the outside looking in, but from having stayed with Michael and the children in their New Jersey home over many years.

In the immediate wake of a judge ordering the Cascio federal lawsuit into private arbitration — the moment their very public legal strategy visibly collapsed — Grace posted on Facebook. The Cascios, she wrote, were among the first Michael turned to when over seventy sheriffs raided Neverland and his life was torn apart. She had witnessed their bond firsthand. She called what was now happening “a profound betrayal.”

In response to her, Ron Naldi, Connie Cascio’s brother-in-law, made a lengthy Facebook statement defending his family’s honour and noting the damage inflicted upon them.

He also posted that his in-laws “are not in this for the money” and want to ensure “NO CHILD ever has to be subjected to a predator as evil as Michael Jackson.”

What’s interesting and baffling is that back in February of 2025, months after the Cascios were identified as those lobbing accusations at the Michael Jackson estate, the same man, the uncle of the accusers, shared a video on his Facebook page celebrating Jackson’s 1993 Super Bowl halftime show.

His caption: Awesome.

Ron isn’t alone in this particularly bizarre art form. Joy Robson — the mother of Wade Robson — appears in Leaving Neverland as a woman shattered. Someone who completely trusted Michael Jackson; she genuinely didn’t know what was happening. The documentary asks you to feel for her.

Then you find out that after Wade came forward with his allegations in May 2013, Joy was still liking pro-Michael Jackson tribute posts on Facebook. As late as 2015. Two years after her son publicly declared this man had systematically abused him for years.

Ask yourself honestly. If your child told you that, would you be hitting the thumbs up on photographs of him? Would the word ‘like’ even be in your vocabulary in relation to this person?

Small details. But small details are where the truth lives, while the big statements are still getting the spotlight.

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Before the abuse allegations. Before the demands. Before the swimwear negotiations. There were the tracks.

In 2010, Eddie Cascio and his songwriting partner and brother-in-law, James Porte, sold a collection of recordings to the Jackson estate, claiming that Jackson had recorded them in the Cascio family basement in 2007. Three tracks — Breaking News, Monster, and Keep Your Head Up — landed on the posthumous album Michael.

Two independent forensic experts subsequently confirmed that samples of Jackson’s real voice had been lifted from previously released songs and spliced into an impersonator’s vocals. The tracks were pulled from streaming in 2022 after a decade of litigation, the estate and Sony settling rather than face a full trial. The vocalist many believe was on those tracks, Jason Malachi, hired a lawyer in 2018 and offered to confess — before being quietly encouraged by attorneys for the estate and Sony to stay silent.

The Cascio family sat on Oprah’s sofa that same year and defended the tracks as authentic. Eddie declared, “I can tell you that it is Michael’s voice. He recorded right there in my basement.”

This is the family now asking a federal court to believe them.

And this is worth dwelling on, because it creates a dilemma the Cascios have never addressed and cannot resolve.

If they admit the recordings were fraudulent, they are admitting a conspiracy to deceive the Jackson estate, Sony, and the global public for financial gain. It also establishes, beyond any reasonable argument, that they are willing to lie comprehensively and for money about their relationship with Michael Jackson.

If they insist the recordings were genuine, a different question presents itself immediately. Why would a family being systematically trafficked and abused across decades care so deeply about perpetuating that man’s musical legacy that they would go to the trouble of producing and selling posthumous material in his name? Why would Eddie sit on Oprah’s sofa and defend those recordings with evident pride? Why would the intimacy of the basement sessions be offered as proof of the bond’s authenticity, when the bond itself is now characterised as the mechanism of their exploitation?

There is no version of the Cascio story in which both things are true. A family that understood itself to be the victims of a monstrous predator does not subsequently team up with an impersonator to extend that predator’s commercial legacy and publicly celebrate the collaboration as proof of how close they all were.

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Frank Cascio wrote a 300-page book defending Jackson. He gave a CourtTV interview during the 2005 trial and said: “I wouldn’t be here if I thought that man was a paedophile.” The family sat on Oprah’s sofa in 2010 and answered in unison when asked about impropriety: Never.

After Leaving Neverland aired in 2019, Frank threatened to go public with sexual abuse accusations unless the estate paid him. They paid him $3.3 million in 2020 to stay quiet. He came back for $213 million. When that didn’t land, the demand dropped to $44 million through Mark Geragos — the same Mark Geragos who once declared on Good Morning America that Jackson was “absolutely 100 per cent innocent.” When that didn’t land either, Howard King filed the federal lawsuit. The estate filed for civil extortion. Geragos, the man who once called the original accusations a shakedown, tried to run the shakedown himself, then handed it back to King.

Frank’s defence for why he didn’t understand the 2020 settlement he signed and accepted millions under? Dyslexia. The same dyslexia that apparently didn’t affect his ability to write a 300-page book, negotiate a publishing deal, or sign multiple commercial contracts in the years since Jackson’s death.

One other problem: Frank didn’t sign alone. All five Cascio siblings signed the 2020 agreement. Are all of them dyslexic?

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The lawsuit rests on a claim the Cascios have never adequately explained: that five adults, across decades, failed to understand that what was happening to them was abuse.

This is the 2019 framing — that Leaving Neverland was the revelation that finally made sense of their experience. Until then, they thought what Jackson did was love.

Frank was present throughout the 2005 criminal trial — giving CourtTV interviews while the most forensically detailed child abuse prosecution in California history was being assembled around the man he called a father and a brother. Expert witnesses explaining in precise clinical terms exactly what a predator does to a child and how they do it. Frank sat through all of that and still typed his 300-page defence. We are asked to believe the penny didn’t drop until a Channel 4 documentary a decade later.

Extend that across five people. Five adults, all simultaneously failing to connect what happened to them with internationally reported abuse allegations against the same man. There is no precedent for this. Nor is there precedent for five siblings from the same close-knit family being abused across the same period without a single one suspecting the others were also at risk. If Frank and Eddie had been abused and understood Jackson as a predator, the idea that they never once considered whether their younger siblings were in danger strains credibility past the point of snapping.

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For thirty years, Jackson’s detractors built a consistent psychological profile of his alleged victims’ families. Broken homes. Absent fathers. Financial vulnerability. Children with emotional voids that a wealthy and attentive benefactor could fill. The pattern, endlessly repeated, was one of structural fracture.

The Cascios are a tight-knit nuclear family with a present, engaged father. Frank Junior described his father as a man who believed paedophiles should be thrown to the wolves. There was no void to fill, no fractured dynamic to exploit. And yet the lawsuit asks us to accept that Jackson specifically targeted this family — with its strong paternal figure and its intact structure — and abused all five children across decades without the father noticing, suspecting, or being told by a single one of his children. A man who wanted paedophiles thrown to the wolves, sharing his home with one, and detecting nothing.

The established grooming narrative doesn’t accommodate this. Either Jackson’s alleged methodology was entirely different from everything his accusers spent three decades describing, or the Cascio account wasn’t constructed with much attention to whether it fits the template it’s supposed to support.

Marie Nicole Cascio’s inclusion compounds the problem further. The accusation ecosystem surrounding Jackson has maintained one remarkably consistent psychological claim across three decades: that Jackson was exclusively attracted to boys. Girls were present but peripheral. When a female accuser appeared in the Jane Doe case, she was carefully framed as tomboyish — her inclusion requiring special contextualisation within the established male-victim template.

Marie Nicole requires no such contextualisation, because none is offered. By all accounts, she was a typical girl. Her inclusion in the lawsuit sits alongside her brothers’ without explanation, without amendment, and without any acknowledgement that her presence fundamentally contradicts thirty years of psychological profiling that the accusation community itself constructed and defended.

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Then there is Aldo. The Cascios claim the abuse continued until 2009. All five of them were adults by then. Aldo specifically alleges that shortly before Jackson’s death, Jackson sought sexual contact with him. Aldo was nineteen years old.

If the Cascio accounts are to be believed, Jackson was simultaneously sexually interested in adult men, a typical girl, and multiple boys across multiple decades. A psychological profile so broad it contradicts not just the established narrative but the specific clinical framework his accusers spent decades constructing.

The media has not appeared to notice this. Or if they have, they don’t want you to strain your minds thinking about it. Having invested thirty years in a specific psychological portrait, the arrival of allegations that comprehensively contradict it has been reported without comment, as though the contradiction doesn’t exist. Either the portrait was wrong, or the new allegations don’t hold up. The press has thus far declined to choose. The reason for it isn’t difficult to deduce.

The complaint also places Edward Cascio at Elton John’s UK home, where abuse is alleged to have occurred. Frank’s own book tells a different story. In My Friend Michael, he describes Elton John arranging for Jackson to transfer to a private rehab estate outside London — a facility, not Elton John’s home — and recounts travelling there with Eddie to visit. The two accounts describe fundamentally different locations. Elton John’s name in a sex trafficking complaint guarantees international headlines. Frank’s book, published in 2011, was not written with that in mind.

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The Cascios’ complaint references unnamed members of what they call the Jackson organisation — people who allegedly facilitated the trafficking. Many of those individuals are still alive. Not one has been reported to law enforcement. Not one is being sued. If the purpose of this action is genuinely to ensure no child ever suffers at the hands of a predator, the identifiable living enablers are an obvious starting point. The Cascios have not started there.

The parents are equally absent. The lawsuit’s own logic — that Jackson systematically trafficked their children across multiple countries and decades — makes Frank Senior and his wife Connie either catastrophically negligent or complicit. They hosted Jackson. They allowed their children to travel with him. They are the most proximate enablers in the entire story. They do not appear in the complaint. Wade Robson and James Safechuck did the same thing — redirected accountability toward maids and security guards who had no authority over whether the Cascios could spend time with Jackson, and away from the parents who did.

The Daily Mail interview, published February 28, 2026, adds a different problem. Aldo Cascio told journalist Daphne Barak he hated Jackson, that he would scream into his pillow cursing his name, and that he felt relief when Jackson died.

The lawsuit’s entire timeline defence is that the Cascios didn’t understand what Jackson did was wrong until Leaving Neverland reframed their experience in 2019. Until then, they thought it was love.

Aldo hated him and was cursing his name before he died in 2009. In the same interview, he describes their final phone call — three days before Jackson died — in which Jackson brought up sex, and Aldo told him no. He’d already decided he was done. Jackson went silent and hung up. That determination was made years before any documentary, years before the catalogue hit two billion dollars. So what exactly did Leaving Neverland do? Deprogram the already deprogrammed? Create an epiphany that was already present within Aldo? That Jackson was a bad man, and what he did was wrong? But he knew that well enough before 2019 to scream and curse into his pillow. It just seems that “documentary” opened the door to millions of dollars for whoever uses the right buzzwords.

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There is a detail that cuts through everything else, because it isn’t contested.

Before any lawsuit. Before any demand figure. Before moral declarations about protecting children. The Cascios’ first move after changing their story was to approach the Jackson estate privately and insist that negotiations take place at the swimming pool of the Sunset Marquis Hotel. In bathing suits. So nobody could wear a wire.

The estate raised this in their petition. The Cascios did not dispute it. Aldo and Marie Nicole did not dispute it in their sworn declarations. It happened.

A person making a legitimate claim of abuse does not engineer an unrecordable meeting. They want to be recorded. They want witnesses. They want a paper trail. Someone with a genuine grievance runs to document it. The Cascios went to the estate — the commercial entity managing a two-billion-dollar catalogue — not the police, not the FBI, not a prosecutor. The implicit message delivered at that poolside meeting was unambiguous: pay us, or all five of us will go public. For a business dependent on the Jackson name, five accusers speaking in unison is an existential threat regardless of the underlying truth.

Frank, the man now positioning himself as a survivor seeking justice, went on national television during the 2005 criminal trial and said he wouldn’t be there if he thought Jackson was a paedophile. He said this more than once. His defence was not reluctant, not hedged, not carefully worded. It was categorical. The Cascios did not help Gavin Arvizo put Jackson behind bars when they had the chance. Frank stood before the cameras and made sure everyone knew exactly where he stood. Are we supposed to believe he didn’t understand what the word paedophile meant during a criminal trial in which that very question was being argued in court every single day?

And now — in the same federal complaint that announces their commitment to child protection — the Cascios benchmark their damages against Jordan Chandler’s 1994 settlement, arguing the scale and duration of their alleged abuse warrants a larger figure.

Chandler received his settlement in 1994. The Cascios know exactly what he got. They filed a document arguing they should get more.

The poolside meeting in swimwear. The $213 million opening demand. The silence that ended precisely when the catalogue hit two billion dollars. A compensation comparison filed in a court of law by people who want you to know they’re not doing this for the money. Frank, who at one point had hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid gambling debt, would probably want you to know the same thing.

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James Porte — Marie Nicole’s husband — has suggested on social media that video, photographic, and audio evidence exists that will prove Jackson abused the Cascios.

If such evidence exists and has existed for years, James Porte sat on documented proof of child abuse for more than fifteen years without reporting it to a single law enforcement agency. The same man who wants you to believe this lawsuit is driven by moral imperative possessed, by his own account, material evidence of serious crimes against children and did nothing with it except wait.

The credibility problem compounds when you consider who James Porte is. This is the man who co-wrote and co-produced alongside his brother-in-law Eddie the tracks that two independent forensic experts confirmed were fake — fabricated audio presented as genuine Michael Jackson recordings and sold to his estate. His professional legacy, in the context of Michael Jackson, is the production of fraudulent audio sold as authentic.

He is now threatening to release audio, video, and photographic evidence in support of a lawsuit brought by his wife and her family. Any such material would require the most rigorous independent forensic scrutiny — not because scrutiny is inherently hostile to accusers, but because the one person vouching for its existence has already demonstrated, in this same context, with this same family, a willingness to fabricate and sell audio as something it was not.

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The Cascios’ lawsuit asks us to believe that Michael Jackson was a human parasite. That he was the one who infiltrated their home, fed off their warmth and normalcy, and used their family as cover. The family that spent thirty years defending him.

They sold fraudulent recordings to his estate and defended them under oath on national television. Pocketed millions to stay quiet, then came back for hundreds of millions more. Their moral urgency only arrived at the precise moment the catalogue valuation made the silence worth breaking.

They want the “truth” out there. They just needed the truth to be worth two billion dollars first.

And Jackson was the parasite?

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None of this proves Michael Jackson was innocent. None of it proves he was guilty. That’s not the point of this piece.

The point is the behaviour. Just the behaviour, observed plainly.

A mother likes tribute posts about the man her son says destroyed him. A man typing Awesome under footage of someone his family is now suing for child sex trafficking. A family selling fraudulent recordings to an estate and defending them under oath on national television. A $213 million demand dressed up as a moral obligation. A poolside meeting in bathing suits — a lawyer who once called it a shakedown, back again for a second serving. The damages figure they filed in court. Modelled on Jordan Chandler’s 1994 settlement. The people who weren’t doing this for the money knew exactly what Jordan Chandler got — and wanted more. Evidence held for fifteen years without a single call to law enforcement.

And all of it — every single piece of it — arriving in the weeks before the biggest Michael Jackson cultural moment in a generation.

Bong Joon-ho’s great insight was that the dream survives the disaster. The scheme fails, the bodies drop, the house burns — and the surviving character’s response is to start planning how to get back in. The Cascio family have a game plan of their own.

On March 9th, an interview aired on GBNews. Marie Nicole cried. Her mother, Connie, cried. Dominic Sr sat beside her, looking like he wanted to be somewhere else. Daphne Barak, the journalist who has been central to the Cascio media campaign, told host Ben Leo that this isn’t about the money. That there was no $200 million figure. The $213 million demand is in the court filing. It is public record. Anyone with a phone could have looked it up before the cameras rolled.

But rest assured, from Uncle Ron to Daphne Barak, it has absolutely nothing to do with money.

Photo Credit: Sam Emerson

Author Bio

As a freelance journalist, Ryan Smith’s work is driven by a commitment to restoring what has long been absent from institutions meant to uphold truth and accountability: honesty and transparency. Alongside his analysis works on the life, career, trials and tribulations of Michael Jackson, whose unfair treatment over the years paved the way for the path he is on, Smith also dissects and examines popular culture, such as books, movies and video games, always aiming to shed light on what’s beneath the surface.