Jacko’s Bad Day In Court

Maybe it really was a lightning attack of back spasms that kept Michael Jackson out of court last week. (It’s plausible.) Or maybe he just thought the event thus far had been short on melodrama. (It hadn’t.) But on Thursday, when he finally appeared in Santa Barbara County Superior Court after the judge in his child-molestation case threatened to revoke his $3 million bail, the deposed King of Pop displayed his usual showmanship, even if not his usual sartorial flair.

Wearing a dark jacket over blue pajama bottoms, and supported by bodyguards, the 46-year-old moonwalker did a slow, frail moon swoon past the gaggle of reporters. The moment had echoes of the famous James Brown routine, in which the soul man, feigning exhaustion, would be shepherded toward the wings by bandmates, only to break free and sing one more chorus of Please, Please, Please. Jackson’s version was pretty persuasive … until he heard the encouraging cries of his admirers. Instantly he executed a neck swivel in their direction. His body might have been in agony, but his fan radar was as limber as ever.

Jackson has treated the trial as an occasion for performance art–arriving fashionably late, as if to his own concert, doling out gallery seats to his family and the lingering faithful, some of whom are sleeping over at the Gloved One’s Neverland estate, where the crimes are alleged to have occurred. But he should have been jolted into reality when he listened to last week’s sobering, detailed testimony by the star witness: a boy, 15, who related a catalog of sexual abuse at the hands of the man he had thought of as “my best friend.”

On the witness stand, guided by district attorney Thomas Sneddon, the boy, who is not being named to protect his identity, declared that two years ago, in Jackson’s bedroom, the singer twice molested him. “I was under the covers, and that is when he put his hand down my pants and started masturbating me,” the boy said. A day or two later, “he did it one more time.” He said that Jackson showed him and his younger brother pornography in magazines and on the Internet, and plied them with wine–“Jesus juice”–in Diet Coke cans. Under stern cross-examination by Jackson lawyer Thomas Mesereau Jr., who argues that the family’s charges are a scam to elicit money from Jackson, the boy wavered in some particulars but did not break.

The accuser and the accused make a poignant pair. Both have attested to physical abuse by their fathers. And both cried out for a gentle touch. Jurors will decide which of the two is to be believed: the one who is a child or the one who thinks he still is.

The boy met Jackson in 2000, when the accuser was 10 and suffering from what was diagnosed as incurable leukemia. Surgeons removed his left kidney and spleen and a 16-lb. tumor. He was given large doses of chemotherapy, which doctors said would either save his life or kill him. The kid deserved a break. When he asked to meet his hero, Michael Jackson, it was arranged.

During one of the first visits to Neverland, Jackson invited the boy and his brother to stay in his room but insisted they first get permission from their parents. The boy says his parents agreed. Did they believe that Jackson was the sinless benefactor he has always proclaimed himself to be, or were other forces–ignorance, celebrity fever, avarice–at play? Over the next two years, the boy, his mother and his younger brother and older sister were stay-over guests at Neverland. Jackson lavished gifts and attention on them and provided them an SUV and rides in limousines. Gradually, the accuser said, Jackson’s fascination waned, even as the boy’s condition worsened. He testified that the singer hid when the boy visited the ranch. A year later, in a near miracle, the cancer was declared to be in remission. No evidence of it has returned.

The family didn’t hear from Jackson again until the fall of 2002, when British documentarian Martin Bashir was shooting a feature on the star. Jackson invited the boy to take part and supposedly told him that if he did a “good job acting” in this “audition,” he might get acting jobs in film. Again the boy saw Jackson as “the coolest guy in the world, like my best friend ever.” He and his family say they didn’t know the film was for public, worldwide consumption.

When Living with Michael Jackson aired in the U.S. in February 2003, with the boy prominently on view, the Jackson camp, apparently worried that it showed the singer as child-obsessed, if not a child molester, quickly planned a rebuttal video. That brought the boy and his family back to Neverland, where again the boy and his brother slept in Jackson’s bedroom.

The litany of alleged misbehavior–making prank phone calls, sneaking drinks, scanning porn sites, even a lesson in masturbation–is not unfamiliar for preteens. But such doings usually occur among peers. According to the boy, Jackson saw himself as the wise teacher. “If men don’t masturbate,” the boy recalled him saying, “they can get to a level where they might rape a girl or they can be kind of unstable.”

The outcome of the trial will turn largely on the skill of the two law teams. Mesereau has paraded his courtroom savvy in cross-examining the accuser’s brother and sister, who were forced into contradictions. Sneddon took heat from observers for unloading his heavy artillery in the second week of what is expected to be a four-month siege, with hundreds of witnesses. The suspicion is that the D.A., who has been itching to nail Jackson since an aborted 1993 molestation trial, just couldn’t wait to see the star squirm.

But what kind of star is Jackson? He has not had a No. 1 hit since You Are Not Alone, in 1995. He has allowed surgeons to ravage his face until he resembles Peter Pan less than the Phantom of the Opera. He is now famous primarily for being notorious. Jackson is not the only celebrity who has been hypnotized by the limelight, who pampered his quirks instead of developing his work, who remained addicted to the high life long after the big money ebbed. (Prosecutors, angling for access to his financial statements, assert that he is near bankruptcy.) But it can be said that Jackson has pursued his dreams–like creating his own theme park and inviting lots of kids to come play there with him–to nightmare extremes.

Stars, even frayed ones, don’t keep a lot of no-men on their payroll. But even at this early point in the trial, it must be getting through to Jackson that not only could he lose his liberty, perhaps until he’s in his 60s, but that–win or lose–he will never again be seen in the old, genial way. The testimony of a boy who was one of his biggest admirers a few years ago will deprive Jackson of fans in the future. –Reported by Matt Kettman, Cathy Murillo and Ethan Stewart