President of fan club delighted with verdict, admires pop star for 'heart'By RICHARD LAKE
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Copyright ? Las Vegas Review-Journal
Want to peek inside the mind of a Michael Jackson fanatic? Sit down with Farah Pajuheshfar for 15 or 20 minutes.
"Thirty-six years ago, it was his music and his dance. Later on it was his heart," Pajuheshfar said Monday, surrounded by memorabilia featuring the pop star. "He's a humanitarian. The way he cares about the world."To Pajuheshfar, a 47-year-old immigrant from Iran and the president of a local Michael Jackson fan club, there was simply no way a jury could find Jackson guilty of hurting anybody, let alone of molesting a little boy.
"They found him not guilty of all these charges," Pajuheshfar said, sitting at the dining room table of her Henderson home a couple of hours after the jury's announcement. "I'm so glad. We've been waiting for this for 12 or 13 years."
Pajuheshfar fell for Jackson as a child growing up in Iran back when it was a democratic country. As a young woman, she fled to France after the Islamic revolution of 1979.
Her devotion to Jackson grew as his efforts to help children and the poor expanded, she said. A man like that, she said, wouldn't hurt a fly.
"I taught my kids to never ever judge someone without knowing them," she said.The family moved to Las Vegas 13 years ago. Once, she and her now 13-year-old daughter even met Michael Jackson at an event on the Strip.
And though she is not a friend of Jackson's or anything, she said she feels close to him."Michael Jackson is not just a singer to us," she said. "Michael became part of my family. ... He helped us through difficult times in our lives. I don't have any brothers, but he is like my brother. He's a part of my heart." As far as the trial goes, all any skeptic would have to do is simply look at the evidence, she said. This clearly was nothing but an attempt to extort Jackson for money, she said.
"We read every transcript," said Pajuheshfar, a local hairdresser
But isn't Jackson just a little too weird for such adoration? Didn't he go off the deep end a long, long time ago?
"Not to us," Pajuheshfar said of the pop star's adoring fans. "He's not weird." Pajuheshfar said she would have been at Jackson's Neverland Ranch already if not for her son's graduation from Green Valley High School today. Because of that event, she said she'll have to wait until Wednesday to travel there.
In the end, she said, she believes most people will come to accept the verdict as truth, once they examine the evidence.
Everybody else, she said, can wallow in their ignorance.
"Some people, they really don't want to learn the truth," she said. "These people, you cannot change their minds."
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