Just as Michael is opening in theaters nationwide, a family that was very close to the late Michael Jackson now accuses him of sexual abuse in a new lawsuit.

Dominic and Connie Cascio, and their five children, say Jackson abused four of the kids at Neverland Ranch, on trips, and at tour stops.

The family had previously defended the singer against abuse allegations on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in 2010 and in other outlets. They had long described themselves as the pop idol’s “second family.”

But as reported by The New York Times, the Cascios previously approached the Jackson estate with the allegations years ago. The family and the estate struck a secret agreement whereby the family would be paid around $16 million over the course of five years. When the payments halted in 2025, another round of negotiations fell apart, and now a lawsuit has been filed. Jackson first met Dominic when he was a manager at a posh Manhattan hotel where Jackson frequently stayed.

A lawyer for the estate, Marty Singer, released a statement calling the family’s efforts a “desperate money grab,” and added, “The family staunchly defended Michael Jackson for more than 25 years, attesting to his innocence of inappropriate conduct. This new court filing is a transparent forum-shopping tactic in their scheme to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars from Michael’s estate and companies.”

The family said they were partly motivated by watching HBO’s now-shelved 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, where Jackson was accused of sexual abuse, noting it helped “deprogram” them and helped them process what happened.

The complaint accuses Jackson of being a “serial child predator who, over the course of more than a decade, drugged, raped and sexually assaulted each of the Plaintiffs, beginning when some of them were as young as seven or eight,” and “groomed and brainwashed” them, giving the family “obsessive attention, lavish gifts, access to his celebrity lifestyle, and declarations that he loved and needed each of them.”

The suit further claims Jackson was “constantly under the influence of drugs and frequently intoxicated,” while also giving the young Plaintiffs “alcohol, marijuana, illegal hard drugs, and prescription drugs, including Xanax, Vicodin and Viagra.” Also, he called wine “Jesus Juice” and hard liquor “Disney Juice.” They claim Jackson had code phrases for abuse sessions that included “Can I have a meeting” and “Go to Disneyland.”

Jackson, the family says, “repeatedly stressed that all of their lives, and Plaintiffs’ family members’ lives, would be destroyed if his sexual activity with them were discovered” and “drilled them on what to say if a police officer or other adult asked whether he was molesting them.” The suit adds that Jackson’s employees, advisors, lawyers, and doctors were “aware of Jackson’s abuse and aided and abetted it, both by facilitating it and concealing it.”

Michael opens this weekend and is projected to set a box office record for a music biopic.

The allegations come on the heels of Leaving Neverland director Dan Reid telling The Hollywood Reporter that the popularity of Michael means “people don’t care that he was a child molester. Literally, people just don’t care … So a lot of people, I think, will kind of swallow any misgivings they may have and just sort of say, ‘Oh well, it’s a great jukebox movie’ and just completely ignore the fact that this guy was worse than Jeffrey Epstein.”