Just before dawn, a couple hundred Michael Jackson fans from 27 nations held a candlelight vigil outside the Santa Maria courthouse. They sang "We Are the World." They basked in the collective bliss of the brightly-colored bubble that is the Jackson Fan Phenomenon. It's real, it's tangible. It's an infectious love high that pervades gatherings of Jackson fans — a heady mix of innocence and unquestioning devotion to their pop-star idol.
The Miller Street courthouse entrance looked like a mini-United Nations as fans waved their countries' flags in the still of first light. The day that unfolded before them would take all the bliss they could muster.
On March 28th, Judge Henry Melville ruled that witnesses to five of Jackson’s previous incidents could be heard at this trial — and we now see just how devastating that call is ultimately going to be to Michael Jackson’s defense.
The tactic has been used successfully to convict sex offenders when the current accusations were not strong enough to convict on their own. It's a prosecution option unique to California, passed by the state legislature in 1995 and upheld in 1993 by the California Supreme Court.
The first witness who took the stand under these new rules was a 24-year-old who now sells auto parts. His testimony devastated the courtroom. If you were casting an episode of Law and Order’s Special Victims Unit, you’d be hard pressed to find a more credible-appearing witness.
His mom was Michael Jackson’s personal maid, a woman who cleaned Jackson’s Hollywood hideaway and MJ's betroom suite at Neverland Ranch, a single mom who sometimes brought her young son along when she cleaned up after the King of Pop.
According to this young man, Jackson's advances took place twice in Hollywood, once sitting on Jackson’s lap some 17 years ago.
As he told it, Jackson began tickling the then-7-year-old,fondling the boy outside his clothes. It happened again a year later — this time on top of a sleeping bag in Jackson’s Hollywood crib. As before, they watched TV as the fondling continued for “two cartoons’ worth.” And each time, this young man said, Jackson shoved a hundred dollar bill inside his pants. The boy saying “it was a 'don’t tell your mom' thing.”
That’s when the young man’s voice began to crack. He cried. The courtroom recoiled in his pain, falling stone silent.
Far more powerful in testimony and far more credible in presence than Jackson’s current accuser, he went on to describe a third incident at Neverland when Jackson’s hand allegedly slipped up inside his shorts — "touching my balls" — keeping it there for two to three minutes. He was 10 years old then. “That time, I didn’t get any money.”
The first person he told? “Probably God,” he said. He became a youth pastor and now mentors kids in trouble with the law. Here’s a young man who underwent counseling for 5 years, four of it after receiving his payoff. If he is a fake, would he have continued with therapy? Clearly, he’s still not over it. Former prosecutor Jim Hammer called his testimony “radioactive.”
Tom Mesereau tried dogging the boy’s credibility, not being able to remember exactly what he told two Santa Barbara sheriff's deputies when he was 13. They were the first people he told of the molestation, but his testimony about fighting the revelation despite the deputies' prodding appeared to fit the behavioral patterns of child molestation victims who resist telling, or downplay a story of abuse.
He'd been razzed at school and his church group about his friendship with Jackson, called "a faggot." The last thing he wanted, he said, was more humiliation. "It was embarrassing then, and it's embarrassing now."
Mesereau chased the money trail: a two million dollar settlement for the mom and her son and a 20-thousand dollar payment his mother received for appearing on "Hard Copy."
Cross-examination continued Tuesday morning, but Mesereau only succeeded in underscoring the boy's minor memory faults and suggesting the possibility that "improper tickling" contests may have been misinterpreted as molestation.
This was a very sympathetic witness. If the jury buys his testimony, claims by Jackson’s current accuser take on infinitely more weight.
So why’s a 24-year-old who won a six-figure settlement from Michael Jackson working in an auto parts shop? Former Sheriff Jim Thomas told me the young man gets an annual payment until he’s 40, so winning a Jackson payoff isn’t like winning SuperLotto. And a Pick-6 winner isn't burdened with sexual guilt for life.
He'd never told his wife about the molestation. She learned of it in court, hearing her husband tell his story to the world.
His mom took the stand Tuesday afternoon and wasn't nearly as convincing. She's a Salvadoran émigré who claimed she unlocked Jackson’s master bedroom door, heard laughter, and walked into the bathroom to see underwear on the floor — Jackson’s white briefs, and the neon green Spiderman underwear worn by Jackson’s 8-year-old boy-guest Wade Robeson.
Their bodies were clearly visible behind the steamed up glass door. That was the bombshell of the day, the rest was mostly benign — telling her son to get off Michael Jackson’s lap while they were reading a book together, for instance.
But in maid-English she also admitted taking things from Jackson’s room — a watch, jackets — she made it sound innocent and said Jackson good-naturedly told her to keep the loot — but she was clearly helping herself to Jackson’s stuff.
And she complained that footage from the "Hard Copy" interview — a segment which the show called The Bedroom Maid’s Painful Secret — was used by other outlets and she wasn’t paid for it. Diane Dimond, who’s up here covering the Jackson trial, conducted that interview, but she wasn’t talking.
Under cross-examination the maid backed off an allegation she made that Robeson slept with Jackson for weeks at a time. She admitted later that she only saw it twice. Many other inconsistencies, too. She couldn’t remember Jackson giving her pocket money over the years — some $5-thousand as Mesereau told it — 2, 3 and 5-hundred dollars at a time that this woman, earning less than $20-thousand a year, couldn’t recall.
Though the Jackson family got her a legit Social Security number and sqared her immigration status with the government, the maid ultimately quit Neverland without giving notice. Just can't get the help these days.
Perhaps it was all about Bubbles the Chimp who bit the maid, twice. And though is didn’t come up, it seems clear from the description of her duties — that she was probably the one who had to launder Bubbles’ diapers. We may have just met the first maid who doesn't like Scrubbing Bubbles.
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