By his account, a dozen good years before any of this. ▤

Mottola says he and Jackson “worked together probably 12 years or more” with “nothing but an incredible working relationship” across Bad, Dangerous, and HIStory. The financial chess board this sits on is laid out in Phase I's file.

His counter-narrative: a “perfect storm,” not a sabotage. ⚠︎

Mottola frames the break as a “perfect storm” — the molestation allegations plus sales that underwhelmed by Jackson's own standard — leading Jackson to “lash out” at the label as “the voice of authority.” This directly contradicts Jackson's public framing of deliberate Sony sabotage. Both sides stand; the site adjudicates neither. The campaign itself is Phase III's whole file.

THE GAP BETWEEN THE PUBLIC LINE AND THE PRIVATE ONE. ▤

Publicly, Mottola called Invincible some of Jackson's best work. Privately, now on record: “Everyone in the company thought that it was good… but by no means Michael's best work. After years of recording, we were not about to ask him to go back… and cut some new tracks. For all we knew, that might take another two or three years.” The daylight between the two lines is itself part of the record.

Branca's 2003 firing — corrected, full story elsewhere. ▤

Corrected 2026-07-10: Jackson's own attorney, ⌜John Branca, was fired in 2003 — not over an undisclosed Sony conflict (the site's old framing), but on the strength of an unsubstantiated private-investigation report, contradicted under oath by Jackson's own lawyer. The full account and sourcing live on Branca's own file; noted here as the structural fault line under Mottola's era.

HIS FACE IN THE PAPER, WITH DEVIL HORNS. ▤

When Jackson's July 2002 campaign named Mottola — a “racist” and “devilish” — Mottola recalls seeing his own picture “in the paper with devil horns,” calling Al Sharpton immediately, and Sharpton later publicly calling the racism allegations, in his opinion, “untrue” — a distancing Mottola says was delivered “in a very, very big way” on his behalf. Sharpton's rally appearance is documented separately; the phone call itself is Mottola's account alone.

And then, he says, they made it up. ▤

Mottola says he and Jackson “got friendly again — very friendly” afterward, and kept doing business together on shared catalog interests, without holding a grudge. His characterization; no independent account of the reconciliation is offered alongside it.

On Jackson's death: “a money machine.” ▤

“Michael had really not taken care of himself in my opinion… everybody around him never really watched him the way they should have… this was a money machine.” A pointed, somewhat harsh characterization — presented as Mottola's own framing, not the site's assessment.

How it ended, for the record: Sony got the catalog. ■

Jackson held his 50% Sony/ATV stake — the thing the whole fight was about — until his death in 2009. In 2016, Sony bought that stake from the Jackson Estate for $750M (announced March 14, 2016; deal closed September 30, 2016). Corrected 2026-07-11: this page previously gave a “$750M–$1.2B” range, which conflated the real 2016 deal with a separate, much larger February 2024 Sony catalog transaction ($600M for a different 50% stake, against a $1.2B–$1.5B total valuation) — a distinct, later deal, not this one. The chess game that opened in Phase I closed here.