Prosecutors in the Michael Jackson trial on Tuesday inflicted new setbacks on a defence team already reeling from a decision to allow testimony about the star’s alleged history of child abuse.
”It was a great day for the prosecution,” said legal analyst Andrew Cohen, adding however that Jackson’s lawyers did manage to score some points when a flight attendant denied seeing Jackson serve alcohol to his young accuser.
The prosecution boost came a day after Judge Rodney Melville ruled that jurors at the child sex trial could hear testimony about five more boys the embattled ”King of Pop” is alleged to have molested in the past.
The man who introduced Jackson to his future accuser, comedy club owner Jamie Masada, delivered a fresh blow to the defence during feisty and laughter-laced testimony at the trial in Santa Maria, California.
Masada also told jurors of his frequent visits to the young cancer patient in a hospital where the boy, who appeared to be on death’s door, told him how he dreamed of meeting the pop superstar.
”The kid was dying. The doctor told me he had two to three weeks to live,” Masada recounted.
He said he had suggested Jackson contact the boy. The boy ”was very happy, he was very excited” when the superstar phoned him at the hospital, Masada said.
He undermined the defence argument that the accuser’s mother coached her children to make up claims against Jackson in a bid to win a financial settlement, suggesting the now estranged father was the grifter.
Masada testified that the woman refused an offer of unlimited cash. He did not identify the benefactor, but referred to statements by defence layer Thomas Mesereau who said last month that Jackson had offered to buy a house for the boy’s family.
”She said, ‘Tell him we need a friend, we don’t need money, we need prayers’,” Masada quoted the boy’s mother as saying.
Legal analysts saw Masada’s description of the mother as a strong boost to the prosecution.
”Testimony that (the mother) rejected the money is pretty powerful stuff,” said former prosecutor Ann Bremner, who is following the case.
Masada also recalled the mother of the then 13-year-old accuser tearfully telling him during a February 2003 telephone call that she and her children were being held prisoner at Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.
”She was upset, she was crying…she said ‘they hold me here with my kids against my will’,” Masada told the jurors.
Prosecutors claim Jackson molested the boy and then plotted with aides to kidnap him and his family and detain them until they made a video exonerating the star of any suspicion of child abuse.
On several occasions, Masada had the court in stitches of laughter. Even the embattled Jackson admitted he was amused. ”You need a little comic relief sometimes,” he told journalists as he left the courtroom
But Masada was also combative with Mesereau, telling him not to put words in his mouth and saying an earlier witness told him the defence lawyer ”lied and took stuff out of context”.
Mesereau did appear to regain some ground during cross-examination of a flight attendant who was on a chartered flight from Florida to California with Jackson, his accuser, the boy’s family and others two years ago.
Cynthia Ann Bell said she had served wine to Jackson out of a Diet Coke can, but insisted she never saw the star give alcohol to the boy, or any other children, as the prosecution claims he did.
She said the boy was ”unusually rude” and ”obnoxious” on the flight, complaining his food was not warm enough and showing off a watch Jackson had given him, saying ”it’s really expensive”.
Jackson, who could face up to 20 years if convicted, has denied all 10 charges of fondling the boy, plying him with alcohol and conspiring to kidnap him and his family two years ago. — AFP
