The sister of the boy accusing Michael Jackson of child molestation told the court on Thursday that on one of the first times the family visited Neverland ranch, the boy asked if he could sleep in the singer’s bedroom. The family agreed.
She also revealed that two years later, at the time of the alleged abuse, during a trip to Miami, Jackson repeatedly took the boy into a private room. Her brother, she said, would ”act jumpy” afterwards.
Her evidence came on the fourth day of the 46-year-old singer’s trial on charges of child molestation, of giving alcohol to a boy, and of conspiracy involving kidnapping, false imprisonment, and extortion.
Under cross-examination by the district attorney, Tom Sneddon, leading the prosecution case, the now 18-year-old woman explained her family’s relationship with Jackson. He came into contact with the boy when the child had cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy from which he subsequently recovered.
She told the court that the singer would phone her brother, and invited the entire family to Neverland. Once there, she said, relations within the family suffered.
Her parents, she revealed, had a fierce argument on the first visit. Her father threw a soft drink can at her mother and stormed out, she said. Asked by Sneddon if he had struck her mother on previous occasions, the woman replied: ”Too many to count.”
Did he strike you and your brothers, he asked. ”Yes,” she replied, ”lots of times.”
It is thought the prosecution wants to show the mother’s behaviour as attributable to beatings by her then husband, since the defence hopes to portray her as a wildly inconsistent money-grabber who was prepared to manipulate her children for financial gain.
Although the prosecution is presenting its case first, the defence has had the better of the opening skirmishes.
The defence attorney, Thomas Mesereau, has turned the testimony of the first two prosecution witnesses to his advantage. He intimidated Martin Bashir, the British journalist who made a documentary about Jackson, by repeatedly asking him if he had discussed his testimony with journalists and by pressing him on his contacts with the prosecution.
”Were you taken into a private room when you arrived to meet with any of the prosecution team?” Bashir’s answer to this and similar questions was a slightly hesitant ”no”, as if he were unsure what Mesereau was getting at. As swiftly as he took up these lines of questioning, Mesereau dropped them, but their effect was destabilising.
With the second witness, Ann Gabriel, a PR executive employed by the Jackson camp for a crisis-management team in the days after the broadcast of the Bashir documentary, Mesereau was even more successful.
He manoeuvred Ms Gabriel to corroborate the Jackson side’s defence, that Jackson is a naive, trusting, isolated figure, and a victim of a conspiracy by the family that has brought the child molestation allegations, and of a conspiracy by those around him.
But Mesereau’s painstaking approach tested the patience of not only the media and the public, but also the judge. In cross-examination of Gabriel, Judge Rodney Melville cut short Mesereau to say: ”Counsel, you asked that 10 times today. You need to grasp the evidence and not keep repeating it. You only have to look at the jury and realise that they are tired of this.”
It was a rare moment of ill-temper from Judge Melville, who is emerging as the one element of humour in the case. After it emerged that Mesereau’s microphone had not been switched on for half an hour and he was inaudible in the gallery, Judge Melville said: ”Oh, has he been talking?” On Thursday, when the judge’s microphone refused to work and he moved to another desk, he said: ”Can you hear me now? I sound like one of those cell phone adverts.”
Jurors see inside bedroom
Footage of Michael Jackson’s master bedroom at the Neverland ranch, complete with a Marilyn Monroe picture, figurines, dolls and several televisions, was shown in court on Thursday, giving jurors a peek inside the private life of the 46-year-old singer.
The video depicted shots of a cluttered bedroom and bathroom in which Jackson is alleged to have abused the 13-year-old boy at the centre of the case, but none of the adult magazines that the prosecution alleges were found in the suite.
Prominent in the footage were a sparkling bedspread, pictures of Monroe and Shirley Temple and stacks of videos.
Two rooms that investigators called the ”doll room” and the ”toy room” were filled with dolls of every size and a dollhouse, as well as mannequins and figurines of such characters as Batman and Superman, and C-3PO, Boba Fett and R2-D2 from Star Wars.
The video was shot by Santa Barbara sheriffs when they searched the ranch in November 2003 after the allegations were made against the singer. – Guardian Unlimited Â