Guns N’ Roses’ legendary former manager Doug Goldstein told Appetite For Distortion in a new interview that ‘everyone’ knew Michael Jackson was a pedophile, based on a source he had at Neverland Ranch. Goldstein told GN’R Central about Slash appearing on Jackson’s “Give in to Me” in 1991, and how he felt it hurt his relationship with Axl Rose. Slash revealed a heartbreaking Michael Jackson photo last year.
“So he [Axl] does that huge interview, he bears his deepest, darkest secret, and Slash comes to my room two months later and says, ‘Hey, I’m going to play with Michael Jackson.’ What?! No!
“So everybody in the industry knows that Eddie Van Halen got $1 million for ‘Beat It.’ I said, ‘At least let me negotiate the deal.’ ‘No, it’s already negotiated.’ ‘What do you mean? You’re not going to let me do my job?’ I said, ‘Look, I need to go to Axl with some ammunition to explain why you’re going and hanging out with a pedophile.’
“Slash said, ‘It’s already negotiated.’ So I said, ‘At least give me some ammunition to go to Axl and tell him, ‘But yeah, he’s getting X amount of dollars.” He said, ‘He’s giving me a big-screen TV.’ ‘Hang on, what?!’ ‘Yeah, he’s going to give me one of those big 72-inch screen TVs.’
“‘So that’s what I get to go with Axl with? You’re going to go play with a pedophile after he just bore his soul, for a big-screen TV?!’ ‘Yeah…’
“That was the beginning of the end right there, that sealed the fate of the band. Axl never again thought Slash was his brother. Like I said earlier, the greatest thing I ever did was let Axl know what they thought of him – because he loved those guys. He thought they understood how damaged his own life was.”
Goldstein said in the new interview, “I’ll be honest with you what it is. I’ve had this discussion privately, I call it ‘cowards behind keyboards’. If you google ‘Doug Goldstein Guns N’ Roses,’ the very first thing is – well, the second thing that comes up is, ‘Why Doug Goldstein is full of shit.’ And it’s an article that you cannot comment on, by the way, he edited it so that you can’t put a comment.
“But it was related to my comments about – I saw the end of the line coming [for Guns N’ Roses] when Axl did his piece about being abused as a child, and then Slash decides to go do a pay-per-view with Michael Jackson…
“‘But those [pedophilia] accusations didn’t come out for a couple of years!’ Well, that’s all well and good, but those of us that were in the industry – we all knew. I have a friend that I will leave nameless that I’ve known since I was 18 years old, who was literally the house manager at Neverland, and we all knew what was transpiring out there.
“So I don’t really give a shit about some coward behind a keyboard saying that I was full of shit, other than when somebody’s interested in possibly working with me. And that’s the second thing that comes up. I don’t know how to get rid of it, I’m not savvy enough to call Google and say, ‘This guy’s full of shit.'” Ultimate-Guitar transcribed Goldstein’s comments.
