Newsday (New York)
June 5, 2005 Sunday
Courting stars is trial and error
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
SANTA MARIA, Calif. - The man with the oversized chin walked confidently to the witness stand, turned to the court clerk and held up his right hand. "My name is Jay Leno. L-E-N-O," he said loudly, as if anybody didn't know.
With that, the biggest name in the big-name trial of Michael Jackson took his turn before jurors, following actor Macaulay Culkin, preceding comedian Chris Tucker, and highlighting the celebrity current that has rippled through this case.
Even celebrities who didn't testify found their way into Jackson's trial on child molestation and conspiracy charges. Larry King was called by the defense, though the judge ended up disallowing his testimony. Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross and Kobe Bryant appeared on the defense team's initial witness list, and Taylor and Bryant were mentioned in testimony, though none was called to testify. Brooke Shields and Liza Minnelli were cited by witnesses talking about Jackson's female friendships. Marlon Brando's daughter-in-law and granddaughter related to jurors their memories of the accusers' behavior at Jackson's Neverland Valley Ranch.
Somewhere along the way, Mike Tyson, Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey were mentioned as celebrities allegedly eyed by the accusers as potential shakedown targets.
Even celebrity animals figured in the case as Jackson, in a video shown to jurors, spoke in all seriousness of his desire to throw a bash for Benji, Lassie and other famous fur-balls.
But will the star power fly with a jury from Santa Maria, whose most famous resident may be Jane Russell of '50s films and Playtex bra fame? That was one of the intriguing calculations of this trial as jurors began deliberating Friday following closing arguments. Calling stars to testify carries with it added risks because of the expectations that accompany their star power, say legal experts. Hence, when they don't deliver as promised, the consequences can be greater - and the performances of the stars in this case got mixed reviews.
"It was kind of over-promised and under-sold," Seattle attorney Anne Bremner said of the defense's final week, in which Leno, Tucker and the Brando relatives took the stand for what was expected to be a litany of devastating testimony that would portray Jackson's accusers as grifters who glommed onto the rich and famous to better their own lives.
Celebrity testimony
Leno acknowledged the family was a bit pesky, but he said they never asked him for a thing. Tucker said he didn't trust the family, but he appeared so evasive under cross-examination that some analysts said he may have tainted his own testimony. The Brandos offered virtually nothing to the defense other than to tell jurors what they already knew: That the mother of the alleged victim acted oddly, and that the alleged victim tended toward rambunctious behavior.
"At this stage in the defense, if you're not helping them, you're hurting them," Los Angeles attorney Trent Copeland, who has represented several celebrities, said of the defense team's final, famous-name witnesses. "Jay Leno was supposed to be one of these final, knock-your-socks off kind of witnesses, and it clearly didn't pan out."
Like many regular court observers, Bremner said that up until that final defense week, she had viewed the case as Jackson's to win. "They started so strong ... and then it sort of falls apart," she said, explaining the possible impact of bad celebrity appearances. "There's so much anticipation anyway because of who they are, and then when they come in and just fall flat, in some ways the jurors are left saying, 'Is that all there is?' "
Culkin's vivid account
One star did shine on the stand: Macaulay Culkin, who defended Jackson and denied prosecution claims he had been groped by Jackson as a child. Culkin, now 24, presented a sympathetic and vivid account of being catapulted to fame by "Home Alone" in 1990 and of being helped through the chaos by Jackson.
"One day I was a normal kid ... the next thing I knew I'm this thing, and people are hiding in the bushes and trying to take my picture," he said.
"We have a unique understanding," Culkin said of the seemingly odd friendship that he, as a little boy, developed with Jackson, who was in his 30s at the time. "He understood what it was like to be put in that position."
Skeptics, though, pointed out that Culkin is a star for a reason. "He's an actor - he's a trained actor," said former Connecticut prosecutor Susan Filan. Not only did Culkin's description of his friendship with Jackson match the "same pattern of grooming" he is accused of using on other alleged molestation victims, Filan said, but Culkin had good reason to lie. "It's not good for his career" to admit he was molested, she said.
Jackson himself is proof that celebrities are risky witnesses. He testified during a 2002 civil trial over concerts he failed to put on and behaved oddly on the stand, including giggling and mugging for cameras. Jackson lost the case.
But stars can bring special clout to a case, particularly a case like Jackson's in which so many non-celebrity witnesses seemed to be swayed by things that would not affect wealthy entertainers: a desire to get close to Jackson, a pending lawsuit against the singer, anger at having been fired from Neverland or simply shut out of Jackson's life. "You have an advantage when you're a celebrity. People know you, they like you, they trust you. You have no ax to grind," said legal analyst Jim Moret.
In addition, even if jurors can't relate to such witnesses' wealth and Rolex-studded lifestyles, they should be able to relate to the fear of being wrongly accused of wrongdoing or targeted in a fraudulent suit, said Jackson family attorney Debra Opri, citing Santa Maria's small-town folksiness.
"No one wants to be a target," said Opri, comparing Jackson's plight to that of a small-business owner being driven out of business by a dishonest competitor. "In the end, the jury will consider Michael's celebrity in terms of the way he is treated."
May 30, 2005 Monday
The accuser has the last word
Jackson jury left with boy's video interview - unchallenged by defense - as it readies to deliberate the case
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
SANTA MARIA, Calif. - The dark-haired boy slouched in an overstuffed chair, mumbling so badly that the police officer coaxing information from him strained to hear the words.
In a darkened courtroom, Michael Jackson sat poker-faced as always, staring at the scene on the large screen. If the star was curious about jurors' reactions as the boy talked of being forcibly masturbated by him, of pulling his hand away when it was placed on the musician's crotch, of fending off a passionate kiss and of being pressed to guzzle vodka, rum, and wine, Jackson didn't let on.
Like everyone in the courtroom, he seemed transfixed by the awkward kid, whose 64-minute videotaped interview brought testimony in Jackson's child molestation trial to a quietly dramatic end Friday.
With that, a case that had seemed in many observers' eyes to be firmly in Jackson's hands suddenly was up for grabs as jurors prepared for deliberations later this week, with the last testimony before them the words of the alleged victim.
Unexpected turns
In many ways, it was a fitting closeout in a trial where little has gone as expected. The ex-wife called to skewer Jackson grew weepy and praised him. The stars called to skewer the accusers were less damning than anticipated. The defense rebuttal to the video, expected to feature fierce grilling of the accuser, didn't materialize when Jackson's team chose to simply rest its case.
"It was absolutely brilliant, absolutely the right way to end this case for the prosecution," said former Connecticut prosecutor Susan Filan.
The surprise defense move elicited rare unanimity among lawyers from around the country who have been watching the trial since testimony began Feb. 28.
Several speculated that the holiday would help prosecutors by giving jurors time to ponder what they had viewed before hearing jury instructions and closing arguments, expected to begin Wednesday.
Just three weeks ago, as the defense was presenting its case, a newcomer to the courtroom might have thought the accusers, not Jackson, were on trial. Defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. focused his case firmly on portraying the alleged molestation victim, now 15, and his mother as con artists after Jackson's money.
It wasn't difficult. Reams of documents showed that at the same time the mother claimed her family was held captive at Neverland in February and March 2003, she was enjoying body waxes, shopping trips, and meals on Jackson's dime.
Welfare officials indicated she had committed fraud by hiding bank accounts and tens of thousands of dollars won in a lawsuit against J.C. Penney. A secretary to the lawyer who had handled the J.C. Penney case testified that the lawsuit itself was fraudulent but that the mother had threatened to have her murdered by the Mexican Mafia if she told her boss.
Video's revelations
The boy was described by various witnesses as disruptive, rude, even cunning, and far more savvy about sex and alcohol than he claims to have been before meeting Jackson.
It's no wonder the defense fought to exclude the video, which prosecutors hoped would redirect the case back to Jackson and his alleged crime.
"The jury is going to sit here and listen to [the accuser's] words at the end of the case," argued Robert Sanger, part of Jackson's team, in an attempt to exclude the video on grounds it overstepped the limits of proper rebuttal evidence.
Judge Rodney S. Melville disagreed.
In many ways, the video reveals the boy, then 13, as an average adolescent. Clad in baggy denim shorts, a short-sleeved blue shirt, and sneakers, he plops himself into the chair and asks a police officer: "How long is this gonna take?"
Asked how his school grades are, he replies, "I guess average." "Bs and Cs?" the officer asks. "Cs and Ds," he replies. There is small-talk as the officer strains to pull conversation from the boy.
Then the subject turns to his bout with a cancerous tumor that began in 2000, and that put him in touch with Jackson.
Prosecutors say it was his feeble condition, combined with his poor and dysfunctional family, that made this boy ideal fodder for a pedophile looking for a pliable, needy victim.
If the boy is believed, Jackson worked gradually toward the molestation, starting with a friendly phone call to the boy's hospital room.
Prelude to alleged abuse
By 2001, he was a regular visitor to Neverland. It was during a Florida trip in 2003, after the boy had beaten his cancer, that things allegedly changed.
He tells police Jackson began serving him alcohol to "relax" him as the star and the family dealt with the fallout from a TV documentary that showed the singer and the boy together, and that included Jackson's comments that he shared his bed with children.
One night after they had returned to Neverland, he says Jackson "was really drunk." As they lay on his bed, Jackson began telling him that if boys did not masturbate, "we could go crazy," the boy says.
"What happened next?" the investigator asks.
The boy sighs and says nothing.
"You're safe here. Trust me, you are," the officer says.
After a long pause, the boy says Jackson insisted on fondling him, something repeated at least four times over a period of weeks.
Mesereau had been expected to call the boy to the witness stand if the video aired, but no defense lawyer wants the jurors' last witness to be the alleged victim. "It's possible Thomas Mesereau weighed all his options and thought the least risky was to control what he can control, and that's the final argument," said legal analyst Jim Moret. "Now we can see more than ever how important those arguments will be."
May 23, 2005 Monday
Simmering race issue;
Question is public concern for Jacksons, but muted in court
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
SANTA MARIA, Calif. - On a chilly morning outside the Michael Jackson child molestation trial, one voice stood out from the usual chants of "Innocent!" being shouted by fans. "This case is about racism!" the voice screeched as the star alighted from his sport utility vehicle, waved at the crowd, and headed into court.
Had the shouting man spent any time inside the courtroom, he would have realized how far removed his proclamation is from the case being presented to jurors. In a trial that has featured a host of ugly accusations, from secret drinking to pedophilia to hints of animal abuse - one witness was asked if he had seen Jackson throwing rocks at his pet lion - racism is about the only social ill that hasn't come up, a surprise perhaps given memories of the O.J. Simpson, Kobe Bryant, and Mike Tyson cases. Like Jackson, all three were extraordinarily high-profile black men accused of felonies. Unlike Jackson, all three were held up by many social commentators, and by their attorneys, as victims of a system that judges blacks more harshly than others.
In this case, the only people screaming racism other than the occasional fan are the Jacksons themselves, underscoring the oddities of the defendant and of the circumstances in which he finds himself: on trial before an overwhelmingly white jury from a quiet, conservative town whose claim to fame - until now - was its annual strawberry festival.
At one point in jury selection, it appeared race could become an issue when one potential juror, a black woman, challenged the panel's racial makeup. "How diverse is this jury looking to you right now?" she said to prosecutors, who dismissed her. The final jury comprises eight whites, three Hispanics, and one Asian. One of the alternates is black. That is a reflection of the jury pool in Santa Barbara County, where blacks comprise just 2 percent of the population compared with whites at more than 70 percent.
"The race card is only effective if there is an audience that will be receptive to it, and a Santa Maria jury is not going to be receptive to it," said law professor and former Santa Barbara County prosecutor Craig Smith, comparing the situation to that of the Simpson trial. There, the east Los Angeles demographics ensured an overwhelmingly black jury, in an area where blacks had a powerful distrust of law enforcement. "The LAPD and Mark Fuhrman were the villains in the O.J. case," he said, referring to the police officer whose racist utterances figured prominently in Simpson's defense. "Compare that to Santa Maria, where you don't have a hatred for law enforcement. You have the very opposite."
There also is the issue of Jackson's physical appearance. So pale is his skin that when trial proceedings are watched on a TV monitor set up for observers not inside the courtroom, Jackson appears like the grim reaper.
Jackson says his chalky complexion is because of a skin condition, and he denies having plastic surgery to eliminate his once-wide nose and full lips. Whatever you believe, his appearance makes it impossible to lump him into any racial category, said Seth Clark Silberman, a humanities professor at Yale. So thorough has been Jackson's transformation from his days as the 9-year-old front man for The Jackson Five that he has become an entity unto his own, said Silberman, who teaches courses on race and gender.
"I think part of what sells Michael through this trial is his singularity. Yes, he's black, but he's more Michael than he's black, and he's more Michael than he's white," Silberman said.
Those who know Jackson say it is unfair to accuse him of maligning his blackness. From the early 1970s, when The Jackson Five performed for Operation Push, Michael Jackson has been aware of racial inequities and devoted to closing them, said J. Randy Taraborrelli, who has known the Jackson family since the 1970s and who wrote the 1991 biography of Michael Jackson, "The Magic and the Madness." Taraborrelli, who is providing analysis of the trial for CBS News, said the problem faced by the Jacksons in their early years at Motown was that faced by many black artists: the knowledge that coming across as black activists could cost them white fans.
"That didn't mean they didn't have strong feelings about political causes," he said. "Race has always been an issue for the Jacksons privately, but they don't necessarily trumpet that for the world."
That seemed like it might be changing at the start of this case, when Nation of Islam bodyguards began providing security for Jackson. Taraborrelli said family members felt it could accomplish two things: send the message that Jackson had a strong black presence on his team, and provide airtight security. The Nation of Islam plan backfired, generating such negative publicity that the group was dropped. That hasn't stopped family members and Jackson from expressing their belief that race is at the root of the prosecution.
"It is racism," Jackson's father, Joe, said in a January 2005 television interview. Jackson's brother Jermaine called Michael Jackson's arrest in 2003 a "modern-day lynching." Jackson portrayed himself as a victim of racism in a March radio interview with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, comparing himself to Nelson Mandela and other "black luminaries" he said had been unjustly prosecuted.
Even if such sentiments aren't aired in the courtroom, they serve an important purpose. "Michael clearly has two jobs," said Silberman. "The first is to win the case legally. But he's also figuring out how to present this case publicly, and he feels like presenting it through the lens of race is going to inspire sympathy, if not empathy."
Some legal experts suggest the Jackson defense may be keeping race in mind for an appeal or retrial. That, however, would only happen if the jury convicts or is unable to reach a verdict, something observers say is unlikely given the strong defense witnesses and the shaky prosecution ones. Whereas race was crucial in the Simpson case, Jackson's defense has planted reasonable doubt without it, said Loyola University law professor Laurie Levenson.
"Ultimately, race is not the big issue here," she said. "He's a black man, but he's not O.J."
May 16, 2005 Monday
Jackson video takes the stand;
Documentary outtakes aired in court give pop star chance to defend himself without testifying
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF CORRESPONDENT
SANTA MARIA, Calif. - A constant question in the Michael Jackson trial has been whether the beleaguered star will take the stand to defend himself against child molestation charges. With one deft defense maneuver, the question has turned to whether Jackson needs to take the stand.
Jurors last week saw nearly three hours of Jackson, unplugged and unedited, as his lawyers showed outtakes from a videotaped interview, footage that never aired on TV and that amounted to Jackson addressing the courtroom himself, with one important twist: His celluloid self couldn't be cross-examined.
Not only was it a smart tactical move, but even if Jackson testifies after all, he will be under far less pressure to explain himself than had the video not been shown, said lawyers watching the trial. "He has already educated the jury to who he is," said former Connecticut prosecutor Susan Filan. "They'll [the jury] be listening to him not to see if he's weird - they know he's weird - but to see if they believe him."
Most legal experts say it would be folly for Jackson to take the stand, for several reasons. One is his unpredictable behavior in court in the past. When Jackson testified in a 2002 civil trial unrelated to the current case, for example, he goofed off famously and at one point wiggled his fingers in the air behind his head as if to don devil horns. Jackson lost the suit, which alleged he had failed to put on two promised concerts, and was ordered to pay the concert promoter more than $5 million.
Another reason not to have Jackson testify is the belief that it's best to keep the accused off the stand whenever possible, said Santa Barbara County prosecutor Craig Smith. "There's a name for defendants who testify. They're called convicts," Smith said, citing a long-standing and oft-quoted legal maxim. In this case, it would be particularly foolish, even "greedy," for the defense to call Jackson given the prosecution's shaky situation, he said.
"It's still early in the defense, but at this point I think to put Michael Jackson on the witness stand, you're snatching defeat from the jaws of victory," Smith said.
To explain how defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. was able to offer video that cannot be cross-examined, one must recall the first day of testimony, Feb. 28, when prosecutors showed the televised 2003 documentary, "Living With Michael Jackson," by journalist Martin Bashir. The documentary, which showed Jackson holding hands with his eventual accuser and stating that he had shared his bed with children, led to the criminal case now under way. Legal rules required that the defense be allowed to counter the edited version by presenting the outtakes, to put Jackson's comments into context and to bolster Mesereau's contention that Bashir set up Jackson for a hatchet job.
The video presented to jurors, who watched it on a huge screen on the courtroom's front wall, does an efficient job of that. Bashir comes off as nauseatingly obsequious as he gushes to Jackson and laughs uproariously at the pop star's lame jokes. "You've got a wicked sense of humor!" Bashir exclaims when Jackson cracks during pre-interview banter that he can't tell one pope from another. "Why do they all look alike?" Jackson muses during the rambling chitchat. "It confuses the heck out of me."
Jackson appears hazily indifferent to Bashir's pandering and more interested in checking his hair and makeup, discussing art, animals and children, and lamenting the childhood he never had.
"I was raised in a world with adults ... I'm compensating," Jackson says as he explains his obsession with Peter Pan and all things kid-like. As he speaks, the whistle of the choo-choo train that Jackson installed at his Neverland Valley Ranch is heard in the background, a reminder of the lengths Jackson has gone to cloister himself in his fantasy world.
In some of the most effective parts of the video, Jackson speaks convincingly of how fame has controlled his life. He reveals that he can't sleep without bright lights on, so accustomed is he to the glare of the stage, and he talks of his wish to see a movie, take a walk or go grocery shopping without attracting curious mobs. "They lock you in the aisles, staring," Jackson says in his feathery whisper of a voice.
"They're so quick to call you strange or weird, but you're forced to be," he says of his critics. "You're almost forced to be a hermit."
To be sure, there are times when he seems delusional, as when he compares his child-advocacy efforts to those of Mother Teresa, or when he speaks in all seriousness of wanting to throw a party for animal stars such as Benji, Lassie, Cheetah of Tarzan fame, and his pet chimp, Bubbles.
Jackson also comes across as clearly obsessive about children, even picking up a magazine during one break and tearing out a page that features a large photograph of children standing together. Yet he also seems utterly non-sexual and is clearly embarrassed when he says his two children with ex-wife Deborah Rowe were conceived naturally.
A couple of times, Jackson displays clear signs of irritation, as when the interviewer pushes him on sensitive subjects such as plastic surgery. Jackson's posture becomes rigid, and his right hand begins loudly slapping - almost pounding - a table beside him.
"Can we get on with this ... this is tabloid garbage," he says sharply, after repeatedly insisting he has only had two nose operations.
Even taking into account such apparent lies, the overall impression of Jackson was as an innocent oddball - just what his lawyers needed, said Anne Bremner, a Seattle defense attorney following the trial. "It was a very good tactical move."
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