How to suppress class initializers

I need to call a bunch of Class.forName() s on third-party classes but this causes the static initializers to run of all the affected classes. This running of the static initializers is a undesired side effect that I want to avoid because the logic pulls in all sorts of other dependencies and other garbage.

Is there a way to prevent these from running? I need the class object, not just info I can get by hacking the class binaries.