TEN YEARS AGO Michael Jackson managed to make some rather serious child-abuse allegations go away. After he paid a dentist’s son, Jordan Chandler, then 13, about £8 million, Jordan suddenly fell silent. He and his family moved away from Los Angeles and have moved from one gated estate to the next, keeping quiet, ever since.

But the investigation never did quite stop — it, too, just went quiet. “I’ve told everybody that when I finish I’ll make a statement,” Santa Barbara’s District Attorney, Tom Sneddon, told The Washington Post. Some people took that to mean that nothing more would happen. Johnnie Cochran, Jackson’s lawyer at the time, thought differently: “Sneddon’s kind of the wild card in this,” he said, meaning that while others might just give up, Sneddon probably would not.

Cochran was right. This week the Santa Barbara authorities finally closed in around Jackson. On Tuesday 60 police officers and forensics experts crawled over the 2,700-acre Neverland ranch, purpose-built — wth its Ferris wheel and bumper cars — to appeal to children.

They spent the best part of two days there, apparently hunting for videos and photographic evidence. On Wednesday an arrest warrant was issued alleging child molestation.

Jackson, who was in Las Vegas shooting a music video at the time, was urged to turn himself in. “Get over here and get checked in,” Sneddon pleaded with him, adding: “We have a co-operative victim in this proceeding.” Although nothing has been said officially about the victim, American TV is awash with reports that the boy in question is a 12 or 13-year-old cancer patient whose “last wish” was to meet the singer.

Sneddon is adamant that the 45-year-old singer will now be charged, and it has got to the point where it would be a national scandal if he were not. Last February some 27 million Americans watched Jackson freely admit to inviting young boys to sleep in his bed. “It’s not sexual, we’re going to sleep. I tuck them in,” Jackson told Martin Bashir. “It’s very charming. It’s very sweet.”

After the broadcast, the feminist lawyer Gloria Allred wrote to authorities in Santa Barbara County calling for a child-welfare investigation. Sneddon’s office felt pushed to issue a statement saying that it had no grounds to proceed, based on “the act of an adult sleeping with a child without touching”.

But it was clear that something had to be done, particularly after Jordan Chandler’s deposition was leaked to the public. The document is not a pleasant read. The boy alleges acts of mutual masturbation, oral-genital contact and shared baths. “Michael Jackson told me that I should not tell anyone what had happened. He said this was a secret,” said Jordan.

A couple of months later Vanity Fair magazine trawled through the records of the Santa Maria courthouse and dug out an affidavit given by Sergeant Deborah Linden, then a deputy sheriff for Santa Barbara County (she is now the police chief of San Luis Obispo). Linden specialised in sex crimes and cited interviews with Jordan and his father. “Jordan stated that Jackson told him that if Jordan ever told anyone about the molests, Jordan would be placed in Juvenile Hall and both Jordan and Jackson would be in trouble. Jordan said that Jackson told him he did this with other boys; however, Jackson said that ‘he didn’t go as far with them’.” But without Jordan’s willing testimony, Jackson could not be charged and the accusations disappeared.

From that point, however, Jackson’s life has been unravelling. His popularity never recovered and his music career has been in decline . Determined to put the child-abuse allegations behind him, he had a stab at normality, with marriage to Lisa-Marie Presley. After the inevitable divorce, he enlisted his plastic surgeon’s nurse, Debbie Rose, to bear him two children, Prince Michael and Paris. Now he also has a third child, Prince Michael II, whom he calls Blanket and whom he dangled from a hotel balcony earlier this year.

Extensive damage was done to the star’s reputation by the Bashir documentary. The writer Jonathan Margolis met Jackson through a mutual friend, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and began working with the singer on a book about childhood. “I think I once said I’d have him as a babysitter any time,” says Margolis. “Possibly not now — that was pre-Bashir.”

Still, Margolis can’t bring himself to believe that Jackson is guilty of anything serious. “From what one knows, paedophilia is a serial offence. What’s mysterious about Michael is the scarcity of allegations. And where is the furtiveness that we associate with paedophilia? Bashir says ‘Do you sleep with little boys?’ He says ‘Sure I do, everybody does’.” But Jackson is not normal, concedes Margolis.

“Some of his stories about what he regarded as fun I didn’t find amusing. He told us in hysterics about how he’d stayed in a hotel in Cannes with a posh terrace underneath his room. He was water-bombing people. Amazingly, he just tells the story as a kind of ‘Wasn’t that fun?’, with no possible conception that the people below might have been wearing nice evening clothes. He’s stuck at about 13 — a not very mature 13-year-old.”

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette