Faking Michael

In 2010, Damien Shields, then 22, was reloading the official Michael Jackson website repeatedly from his home in Australia, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the heavily hyped unreleased track “Breaking News.” When it arrived, he was disappointed — then angry. He believed that the King of Pop, who died June 25, 2009, wasn’t singing on the song. It was an imposter. “I was outraged, the same as thousands of other fans,” Shields says. “But unlike those other fans, I wanted to do something about it.”
That moment led to a 14-year, DIY investigative journalism project, involving expensive trips to interview Jackson’s nephew Taryll Jackson in Los Angeles and scour the archives of the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. Originally intended to be a book, Shields’ new, 12-part podcast, Faking Michael, which is available on major podcast platforms, is the “untold story of the biggest fraud in music,” he says.

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The “true-crime podcast,” as Shields calls it, was inspired by NPR’s Serial and makes a methodical case that two producers and Jackson friends, Eddie Cascio and James Porte, faked the vocals on “Breaking News,” “Monster” and “Keep Your Head Up” and hoodwinked Jackson’s estate and longtime label Sony Music. In 2010, the estate made a deal potentially worth $250 million with Sony for 10 albums, including deluxe reissues of previous Jackson albums and new and unreleased material. Shields argues, however, that the estate was under pressure to provide new tracks and made a deal with Cascio and Porte, whom Shields accuses of employing an imposter singer named Jason Malachi.

According to Faking Michael, when superproducer Teddy Riley and Taryll began postproduction on the tracks in August 2010, Taryll concluded his late uncle’s vocals weren’t on the songs and complained on social media. The podcast also reports that the estate asked producers for their expert opinions but ignored their feedback and released the tracks anyway in December 2010.

Damien Shields

Calika

After fans filed a class-action suit against the estate and Sony, the parties settled in an undisclosed agreement in 2022. Earlier, the label had pulled the three disputed tracks from the 2010 album Michael. A Sony representative declined to comment, and a rep for Jackson’s estate did not respond to requests for comment; an attorney who represented Cascio and Porte in the suit did not respond to requests for comment. But Shields, now 36, discussed Faking Michael by Zoom from Australia.

What should listeners take away from your podcast?

This is art forgery.

How did you fund all this research?

It’s self-funded. When I started taking this seriously and traveling overseas, it was very difficult. I was working a minimum wage-type job at a marketing firm and didn’t have any money. I would save up, then go on a trip, do my research and come back totally broke, then save up and do it all again. In 2017, I left my job to work on this full time. To fund that, I started driving ride-share. One of the interviews I did was with Teddy Riley’s manager, Lawanda [Lane]. [According to the podcast, Riley, who had worked with Jackson, received $50,000 per track for Michael, including the Cascio-Porte material.] I’d been trying to get Lawanda for 11 years. She texted me at two in the morning Australian time: “Hey, Damien, I’m ready to talk.” I said, “Now?” She said, “I can be ready in 10 minutes.” So I switched off my ride-share app, drove home and interviewed her for four-and-a-half hours. That’s one of the cornerstone interviews.

The podcast suggests Sony and the estate made the deal with Cascio and Porte because they were desperate to release unheard Jackson music immediately after his death. How did they fall for this?

There were stipulations in the deal that you will release X amount of songs on Y amount of projects over Z amount of years. When the estate was coming into the problem with the vocals and people were telling them, “Well, this is not Michael,” they had to weigh that with “What implication would there be of releasing it anyway?” compared to the implication of breaking the contract.

Why do you think the estate was so desperate for unreleased Jackson material during this period?

The material Michael worked on in the final years of his life — he didn’t really do anything [with it]. He worked with [singer] Akon for two or three years, and he did a verse and some ad-libs on a duet. He worked with [producer] RedOne for two years. RedOne thinks he had one song that could possibly be released, but it would have to be “We Are the World” style, with multiple artists, because he didn’t have enough with Michael. [The estate] wanted final-year songs [from 2009]. They couldn’t do it, because there weren’t final-year songs. And the Cascio tracks were [allegedly] final-year songs.

You air snippets of recorded music, including songs that appeared on Michael and unreleased studio recordings. Did you have to clear them with the estate and Sony?

A lot of the material Cascio and Porte turned over to Sony leaked online in the spring of 2015. [It’s unclear who was responsible for the leak.] The source materials were out there on the internet. You’ve got to let listeners hear it, but you’ve got to respect fair-use copyright guidelines. [The recordings are] only used when I’m talking about something to prove my case. Ethics are at the top of my list.

And you don’t want Jackson estate co-executor John Branca coming after you.

I hope that John Branca will appreciate this. As much as it makes the estate look foolish, it does demonstrate that they were the victim of fraud. The estate should be listening to this and going, “We have to contact the authorities.”

Have you heard from Cascio or Porte or anyone from the estate or Sony?

No. We haven’t had any blowback or pushback from people who are depicted in it. Even though we are talking about something that I consider to be the greatest fraud in music history, I made a very conscious effort to not attack anyone’s character. The actions speak for themselves.

What’s next?

I want to get a good night’s sleep!