On January 31, 2005, jury selection began for Michael Jackson’s criminal trial in Santa Maria. Judge Rodney Melville granted an exception to the gag order he had imposed on the case to allow Jackson to provide reporters with a video of a brief public statement that Mesereau had written. The attorney was incensed that his client had consented to an interview with Geraldo Rivera arranged by Raymone Bain, but broke his own ban on contact with the media when the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings in the Arvizo case were leaked just before Jackson’s criminal trial was to begin. He would never be sure who the source of that leak had been, Mesereau said. “It could have been someone who had worked for me,” he admitted, “someone who was upset about being fired and retaliated in this way. Whoever did it, I felt we had to reply, so I approved Michael’s appearance in that video. It made him feel better, if nothing else.”
Mesereau decided to ignore the advice of his jury consultant to exclude as many women as possible, the idea being that women—mothers in particular—would be especially hostile to a defendant in a sexual molestation case. “Susan and I wanted women,” the attorney explained. “We thought they would be more open-minded about an eccentric artist like Michael Jackson, less prone to judge.” Michael smiled just once during jury selection, when a prospective juror admitted, “I’m not so much into his music, but I sure like his moves.” Before the end of February, Mesereau and Yu had collaborated with the prosecution to empanel a jury of eight women and four men. There were eight Caucasians, three Hispanics, and one Asian. They included a middle-aged man who believed Deepak Chopra was a rapper, an elderly lady whose grandson had been forced to register as a sex offender, and a younger woman who was divorced from a Santa Maria police officer.
Sneddon’s opening statement on March 1 likened Neverland Ranch to a pedophile’s lair, a virtual “Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island”: “The private world of Michael Jackson reveals that, instead of reading them Peter Pan, [he] is showing them sexually explicit magazines. Instead of cookies and milk, you can substitute wine, vodka, and bourbon. It’s not children’s books but visits to Internet porn sites.” Sneddon offered explicit descriptions of masturbation scenes, Jackson’s erect penis, and simulated sex with a mannequin.
Mesereau had focused his own opening statement on the young accuser’s mother, Janet Arvizo, describing her as a serial con artist who had tried and failed to extract money from Jim Carrey, Mike Tyson, and Adam Sandler before finding her way to Michael Jackson: “The mother, with her children as tools, was trying to find a celebrity to latch onto. Unfortunately for Michael Jackson, he fell for it.” Mesereau also hammered on the criminal indictment’s bizarre timeline, something everyone involved in the trial recognized as the greatest vulnerability of the prosecution case. Shortly after Michael Jackson’s arrest in November 2003, Tom Sneddon’s office had produced criminal information alleging that the sexual assaults on Gavin Arvizo had occurred in early February 2003, right around the time the Martin Bashir documentary aired. In January 2004, Mark Geragos had appeared on NBC’s Dateline to assert that his client had a “concrete, iron-clad alibi” for the dates on the prosecution’s charge sheet. Soon after, Sneddon arranged for Michael Jackson to be rearraigned on a conspiracy charge, and moved the alleged molestation dates two weeks forward into mid-February 2003. In order to discredit the defendant’s supposedly “iron-clad alibi,” the district attorney was now attempting to make the case that Michael Jackson, in a panic after the airing of the Bashir documentary, had conspired to kidnap Gavin Arvizo and force him to deny acts of molestation that had not yet taken place, then somehow managed to recover his bearings long enough to commit those terrible acts at the very moment when the whole world was watching him. “Can you imagine a more absurd time for it to happen?” Mesereau asked, and at least a couple of jurors were seen shaking their heads.
Martin Bashir was called as the trial’s first witness. Sneddon’s brief direct examination, intended solely to authenticate Living with Michael Jackson, was sufficient to reveal Bashir’s farcical pomposity. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi would observe, Bashir was the sort of media creature “who peers through the bedroom windows of famous people and imagines he is curing cancer.” When a question described his productions as documentaries, Bashir sniffed that, “I call them cultural-affairs programs.” On cross-examination, Bashir refused to answer nearly thirty questions about the footage he had left out of his documentary, based on the claim that he was protected by both California’s journalist shield law and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“I asked him one long-winded question after another, mostly of the ‘Isn’t it true . . . ?’ variety,” Mesereau recalled. “Basically, it allowed me to testify on my client’s behalf.” While Mesereau and Yu were pleased by Melville’s warning that he would consider holding Bashir in contempt for his failure to answer questions, they were far more delighted by the judge’s decision that the jury could view the videotapes of Bashir‘s outtakes. “I was pretty sure that they would eventually despise Bashir just as much as I did,” the attorney said.
Sneddon next called to the stand Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy Albert Lafferty, who had been responsible for videotaping and photographing the Neverland Ranch raid. This was in some ways the most difficult hour of the trial for Michael, Mesereau would say later. Lafferty had been part of a veritable army of law enforcement officers who arrived at Neverland at just after nine on the morning of November 18, 2003, and were still searching the premises fourteen hours later. The deputy narrated a twelve-minute DVD offering a virtual tour of Michael Jackson’s private world that was far more detailed and invasive than anything that had been shown in Martin Bashir’s hour-long “cultural-affairs program.”
The exterior shots of Neverland’s main house, arcade, train station, zoo, and amusement park were familiar to much of America, but very few people had ever peeked inside the guest cottage where Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando stayed during their visits to the ranch, or gazed upon the fleet of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys that filled the garage.
Lafferty formally began his guided tour at the ornate wrought-iron entrance gate to the ranch that was staffed by life-size mannequin security figures. From that moment forward, who or what might be “real” became the fundamental, if unintended, theme of the deputy’s video. More mannequins appeared in frame after frame once Lafferty was inside the main house, many of them child-size figures hiding in corners, or doing handstands and somersaults in hallways or foyers. There were white marble naked cherubs posed on the magnificent parquet floors along with blowups, cutouts, and papier-mâché statues of characters that included Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and most of the cast of the Star Wars movies, along with Mickey Mouse, Michael Jordan, Tinker Bell, Indiana Jones, Bruce Lee, the Ninja Turtles, and assorted knights in shining armor. Life-size photographs of Shirley Temple, Charlie Chaplin, and the Three Stooges were strewn among huge posters depicting the characters from The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Bambi, and Singin’ in the Rain. The stiff-backed members of a kitchen staff costumed in formal black-and-white outfits looked like mannequins themselves for a moment until one of them moved suddenly, drawing gasps from the jury and the courtroom gallery.
The piles of stuff cluttering the house, especially Michael’s bedroom, were staggering: Christmas decorations, coffee-table books, tennis racquets, Game Boys, boom boxes, stuffed animals, stacks of books, heaps of DVDs, hats of every conceivable description, and hundreds of toys still in boxes, some half opened, others still sealed. Peter Pan was everywhere: There were giant posters and cutouts dangling from strings, there were photographs of Bobby Driscoll as Peter in the Disney film, and the camera took in a jewel-encrusted Peter Pan figurine. Lafferty showed his audience the bedroom filled with dolls, the huge gold throne where a mannequin of a child was doing a handstand in the seat, and the glass cases filled with the most valuable collection of Disney figurines not owned by Walt’s relatives. The deputy’s camera led them around a living room so large that it was hung with three crystal chandeliers, and lingered at length on the elaborately fashioned small-scale castle—complete with moat and guarded by child-size figurines—that took up much of the floor space. Lafferty had been equally attentive to the enormous paintings of Michael that hung all over the walls of the lower level of the main house, most depicting him as either a king or an angel. The deputy gave the courtroom crowd a long but blurry look at the sparkly blue comforter on Michael’s bed and The Last Supper painting that hung above it. He then showed them the closet where Michael’s clothing hung in color-coordinated sections, letting the jurors see that he possessed an apparently limitless supply of the crisp white dress shirts, striped black slacks, and brocade vests he wore to court each day.
After the courtroom’s TV screen went blank Michael’s lower lip trembled and tears smudged the makeup at the corners of his eyes. Mesereau stood to make the point that the authorities in Santa Barbara County had used more police manpower to raid Michael Jackson’s home than had ever been used in the pursuit of a serial killer anywhere in the United States.
The first Arvizo called to the stand was Gavin Arvizo’s eighteen-year-old sister Davellin, the most sympathetic and likeable member of her family. She told the jury about her family. While growing up poor in East Los Angeles, Davellin explained, her brother Gavin had been diagnosed with a mysterious but terrifyingly aggressive stage-four cancer that by the age of thirteen had cost the boy a kidney, his left adrenal gland, the tip of his pancreas, his spleen, and multiple lymph nodes. A sixteen-pound tumor had been removed from his abdomen and a double round of chemotherapy had left him throwing up blood in the middle of the night.
The girl described at length how the family had gained access to assorted celebrities through a “comedy camp” for inner-city kids held at the Laugh Factory on the Sunset Strip, and how her mother Janet passed along Gavin’s “dying wishes” to the club’s owner, Jamie Masada. At the top of that list was meeting his heroes Chris Tucker, Adam Sandler, and Michael Jackson. The Arvizos never got near Sandler, but were taken under the protection of both Tucker and Jackson, each of whom showered Gavin and his siblings with gifts and attention. Michael had seemed so kind and humble back at the beginning, Davellin remembered, regularly calling Gavin at his grandparents’ home to tell the boy how to visualize his healthy cells eating up the cancer cells “like Pac-Man.” After her parents split up and her father took off with the family car, Michael gave her mom a Ford Bronco she could use to drive Gavin to and from his doctor appointments.
Everything seemed to change, though, Davellin said, after the Bashir documentary aired on ABC. She and her family flew from California to Florida aboard Chris Tucker’s private jet on the day that Living with Michael Jackson was to be broadcast. When they arrived at the Turnberry Isle resort near Miami, where Jackson was putting them up, Davellin recalled, Michael seemed “kind of, like, upset” and said he didn’t want them to watch the program. Michael and Gavin met “privately” for several minutes, Davellin said, and afterward her brother began to act differently, “very hyper, very talkative, running around, very playful, more talkative, more jumpy.”
As they prepared to return to Neverland, her brother was given a $75,000 watch and a rhinestone-studded jacket as gifts (Sneddon had called them “bribes” in his opening statement). Back at the ranch, Dieter Wiesner gave her and the rest of the family a list of “nice things” to say about Michael when they appeared in what would become known as the “rebuttal video,” Davellin testified, and told them not to talk about “what goes on at the ranch.” The girl then described walking into the wine cellar at Neverland to find Jackson pouring wine into cups for her brothers Star and Gavin, who were twelve and thirteen at the time.
Sneddon had already told the jury that it was during this stay at Neverland that Jackson began to sexually abuse Gavin Arvizo. How had her brother’s behavior changed during that time? Sneddon asked Davellin. “He didn’t want to be hugged, he didn’t want to be kissed,” the girl replied. “It just hurts because I’m his older sister.” Had she seen the defendant touch her brother inappropriately? Sneddon asked. “Michael Jackson was constantly hugging [Gavin] and kissing him on the cheek or on the head,” the girl replied.
Davellin then described how the Arvizos were “held captive” (Sneddon’s words) at the Calabasas Country Inn after leaving Neverland in spring 2003, under the constant observation of Jackson employees and Frank Cascio and Vinnie Amen. (Because Cascio and Amen had been named by Sneddon as “unindicted coconspirators,” the two were prevented from testifying themselves.) “Vinnie and Frank said not to leave,” the girl testified. “We couldn’t leave the room, so we didn’t even bother to ask [to go out] because we knew the answer would be no.” It was for their own good, the family was told, according to Davellin: “There was one time when Frank told us there were death threats on us.”
What Mesereau wanted the jury to hear was the audiotape of an interview the Arvizos had given to Mark Geragos’s private investigator, Bradley Miller, back in February 2003. That interview had proceeded on two tracks, one in which the family praised “Daddy Michael’s” kindness and generosity, and another in which it offered graphic descriptions of the “demonic ways” that characterized the children’s biological father. Janet Arvizo and each of her children made David Arvizo, a warehouse worker for a supermarket chain, out to be a fiend who had beaten and abused them in every conceivable manner before disappearing from their lives. Davellin said David had broken her tailbone during one beating. Her youngest brother, Star, told Miller that his dad had kicked him in the head. Gavin Arvizo claimed that their father had knocked him around even when he was being given chemotherapy treatments. Janet described being slapped, punched, and thrown into walls. Clumps of hair had been torn from her head while the children watched, she said. The violence had been so extreme that she was granted a five-year restraining order that kept David away not only from her and the three children, but also from the family dog, Rocky, who had been abused every bit as terribly as the rest of the family.
Sneddon had reason to be pleased with this portrayal of David Arvizo, who had told reporters that he believed his wife was making the accusations of sexual abuse against Jackson because she wanted Michael’s money. The thrust of the family’s interview with Bradley Miller, though, was to contrast David Arvizo with the man who, as Janet described him on the audiotape, “delivered [us] from this evil.” Michael Jackson had been the first person to show her children the meaning of “unconditional love,” Janet had told Miller. On the Miller audiotape, Janet and her children spoke of how “safe” and “protected” they felt with Michael, how he had become “the father figure” the kids longed for and seemed intent only on making all of them “as happy as possible.” It was Gavin who had first asked if he and Star could sleep in Michael’s room at the main house, the family all told Miller, because he felt safer there than in the guest quarters, where David could get to him.
The Miller interview was conducted just two weeks after Living with Michael Jackson aired on ABC, and all of the Arvizos professed to be outraged and offended by what first Bashir and then the media had done to both Gavin and Michael. Now, only a little more than two years later, Davellin Arvizo was telling the jury in Santa Maria that she and her mother and her brothers had made it all up, having been coerced or manipulated into defending Michael Jackson as part of an elaborate plan to smother the truth.
During her cross-examination, Davellin insisted to Mesereau that no one in her family had ever seen the Bashir documentary, but the jury had already heard Janet Arvizo make a contradictory claim several times on tape. Mesereau let the girl explain that her mother had said a number of things that were exaggerated, then reminded Davellin that it was not only on the Bradley Miller audiotape or on the Marc Schaffel–produced “rebuttal video” that she and her family praised Michael Jackson, but also in interviews with state social workers. Some of what the Arvizos said was true, and some of it wasn’t, Davellin explained. “So you’d lie about certain things, and tell the truth about certain things,” Mesereau asked. “Yeah,” Davellin answered.
The jury had viewed a section of the famous “rebuttal video” immediately before Mesereau began his cross-examination of Davellin and they would see more of the video each time the attorney prepared to interrogate another Arvizo family member. The panel had watched and listened as the purported victim’s sister described Michael Jackson as “a loving, kind, humble man [who] took us under his wing when no one else would.” More significantly, the rebuttal video was what had given the jurors their first look at the rest of the Arvizo family. They had seen and heard Star Arvizo say of Michael, “He actually seemed more fatherly than, like, our biological father.” They had studied Gavin Arvizo as he said of the man he now accused of molesting him, “He was a loving, kind, humble man, and all he wanted to do was good and happiness.” They had listened at length while Janet Arvizo lambasted both Martin Bashir and the media that had been sent into a frenzy by his documentary: “It breaks my heart because they’re missing out on something very beautiful that they have tainted.” The jury seemed to be paying especially close attention as Janet Arvizo recalled the day her son had asked Michael Jackson, “Can I call you Daddy?” Michael had kindly answered, “Of course.”
Fourteen-year-old Star Arvizo was supposed to be a far more potent prosecution witness than his older sister. While Davellin had admitted that she never saw Michael Jackson touch either of her brothers in a sexual way, Star’s claims in that regard were graphic. Among the things he had seen in the master suite at Neverland, Star said, were various pornographic sites that Michael Jackson and his friend Frank Cascio had shown him and his brother Gavin while Prince and Paris Jackson were sleeping on the bed nearby. He told Sneddon that when an image of a woman with large bare breasts flashed onto the screen, Michael had joked, “Got milk?” At another point, Star continued, Michael had whispered in his own son’s ear, “Prince, you’re missing some pussy.” Michael also shared porn magazines with him and Gavin, Star said, and simulated having sex with a mannequin while he and his brother watched. Once, while he and Gavin were watching a movie in the bedroom, Michael waltzed in buck-naked, Star said: “Me and my brother were grossed out. [Michael] sat on the bed and said it was natural,” then walked out of the room, still nude. Had he noticed anything “unusual” about Jackson’s appearance on that occasion? Sneddon inquired. No, Star answered. Sneddon asked again, twice, before Star remembered that, oh, yes, Jackson’s penis had been fully erect.
The jurors were squirming in their seats by the time Star told Sneddon about how Michael had given him and his brother wine while they were flying between Florida and California in a private jet. “He leaned over and handed it to me,” Star said. “I thought it was Diet Coke so I didn’t want to be rude. It smelled like rubbing alcohol. I asked him what it was and he said it was wine.” During that same flight, he saw an intoxicated Jackson licking Gavin’s head (a description that had appeared previously both in Jordan Chandler case documents and in Bob Jones’s book Michael Jackson: The Man Behind the Mask) “for about six seconds,” Star said. Just like his sister Davellin, he had seen Gavin drinking red liquid from a 7 Up can. After a few sips, Gavin “wasn’t acting right,” Star said. “He was, like, saying weird stuff that didn’t make sense.” Star also described a drinking game Michael made the Arvizo boys play in the master bedroom: Each of them had to make a prank call, and if the number they dialed didn’t exist, they had to take a drink of wine. Michael usually called wine “Jesus juice,” Star remembered.
Star echoed his sister’s story of being held captive by the “unindicted coconspirators” in the case. Dieter Wiesner had told him “always say good things about Michael Jackson” before his appearance with his family in what became known as the rebuttal video, Star said. Frank Cascio had warned him that if he said anything he shouldn’t say, there were “ways that my grandparents could disappear,” Star testified.
When Star was asked by Sneddon if he had actually witnessed Jackson’s molestation of his brother Gavin, the boy said he had, twice: The first time, “I saw directly onto the bed. I saw my brother was outside the covers. I saw Michael’s left hand in my brother’s underwears (sic).” Two days later, “I went upstairs,” Star said. “The same thing was happening, but my brother was on his back. My brother was asleep and Michael was masturbating while he had his left hand in my brother’s underwears (sic). I didn’t know what to do. I just went back to the guest room where my sister was sleeping.”
Sneddon finished with Star by asking if Michael Jackson had ever warned him to keep his mouth shut about what went on in the master suite at Neverland. Yes, Star said: “One time, me and my brother and Eddie Cascio were sitting on the bed and [Jackson] told us not to tell anyone what happened, ‘even if they put a gun to your head.’ He told us not to tell Davellin anything. He was afraid she might tell our mom what we were doing.” What was it they were doing? Sneddon asked. “Drinking,” Star answered.
Mesereau began his cross-examination by bringing back the image of the Barely Legal magazine that Star had identified (after Sneddon projected it onto a screen for everyone in the courtroom to see) as the one Michael Jackson shared with him and Gavin. Yes, that was the magazine, Star told Mesereau, who promptly pointed out that the date on the magazine was “August 2003”—months after Arvizo family’s final visit to Neverland Ranch. Star began to squeeze his hands together. “I never said it was exactly that one,” he testily told the attorney. “That’s not exactly the one he showed us.”
The defense attorney’s cross-examination segued to the deposition Star had given in a civil case that had been brought by the Arvizo family against JCPenney some years earlier. Mesereau wanted to save the details of the case for Janet Arvizo’s appearance on the stand, but the jury got the gist of it. Back in 1999, Gavin Arvizo had “taken” an item of clothing from a JCPenney store to try to “trick” his father into buying it. Security guards followed the Arvizos out of the store and then, according to the family, they roughed up and groped Janet Arvizo. The Arvizos eventually won a six-figure settlement, but it was now clear that the family had fabricated evidence and perjured themselves in depositions. Among the claims Star had made in that case was that his parents never fought and his father never hit him. “Were you telling the truth?” Mesereau asked. “No,” Star admitted, far too readily. Mesereau asked why he had lied, and Star replied dismissively, “I don’t remember. It was five years ago. I don’t remember nothing.” When Mesereau wondered if “someone” had told him to lie in the JCPenney case, Star gave exactly the same answer to the question that his sister Davellin had: “I don’t remember.”
With that, Mesereau moved to Star’s claims that he had witnessed his brother’s molestation by Michael Jackson, establishing immediately that the boy had not said a word about any of this to anyone until he and his family met with Larry Feldman, that Feldman had sent Star to see Dr. Stan Katz, and that it was Katz’s complaint that had resulted in criminal charges being filed against Michael Jackson. The attorney probed a few small discrepancies between the boy’s testimony on direct examination the previous day and what he had told Katz eighteen months earlier, then became steadily more specific—and graphic. Referring to the second alleged molestation, Mesereau asked, “Did you tell Stanley Katz that Michael Jackson had his hand on your brother’s crotch?” Yes, Star answered, just as he had testified the day before.
“That’s not really what you told him, is it?” Mesereau said.
“What are you talking about?” Star asked, and for the first time looked apprehensive.
“Well, you told Stanley Katz that Michael Jackson was rubbing his penis against Gavin’s buttocks, didn’t you?”
Star hadn’t said anything like that during his direct examination. “No,” he answered.
“Would it refresh your recollection if I showed you [Katz’s] grand jury testimony?” asked Mesereau. The attorney retrieved a copy from the defense table, but Star refused to look at it, and insisted he had never said anything like that to Dr. Katz.
Star had earlier denied that he ever wanted to be an entertainer, but Mesereau quickly established that the boy had attended a dance school and a comedy school, and had asked Michael Jackson to help him become an actor. He and his brother had also entered the main house at Neverland “hundreds of times” without Jackson’s knowledge. Michael had given them the house alarm code when they returned from Miami to California after the airing of the Bashir documentary, Star explained; he and Gavin could go anywhere they wanted in the house, including Michael’s bedroom. Mesereau asked about a time when Star and Gavin had been caught drinking in the Neverland wine cellar during one of Jackson’s absences, but the boy denied it, and the attorney appeared pleased that he had. Star’s attitude grew increasingly arrogant and dismissive as the cross-examination continued. He visibly lost the sympathy of most members of the jury when he admitted carving up Michael’s expensive, leather-bound guest book, the one that had been signed by all of his most famous houseguests. Jessica Simpson seemed to be the only guest Star could remember, and the boy seemed far from contrite about what he had done.
On direct examination, Star had said his nickname at Neverland was “Blowhole,” and under Sneddon’s questioning this sounded distinctly suggestive. On cross-examination, though, Star admitted that he had given himself the nickname. Mesereau produced a card Star had given to Michael Jackson on Father’s Day in 2002, with an inscription that read, “Michael, we love you unconditionally, to infinity and beyond forever. Thank you, Michael, for being our family. Blowhole Star Arvizo.” More than a dozen other cards and notes written to Jackson by the Arvizos were then offered into evidence. In one of them, Star had written, “When we get our hearts broken into tiny little pieces, we always still love, need, and care about you with every tiny little piece of our heart, because you heal us in a very special way.” That note didn’t mean anything, Star said: He’d copied the words from a card his grandmother had bought at the supermarket.
Fifteen-year-old Gavin Arvizo took the stand in Santa Maria looking nothing at all like the frail, sweet-faced boy the jury had seen in three separate videos. This Gavin Arvizo was a broad-shouldered, bull-necked adolescent who wore a blue button-down shirt and dark slacks and had a buzz cut that gave him the look of a recent Marine Corps recruit. He had obviously been shaving for some time and spoke in a voice that was deep even when he tried to make it soft. Nevertheless, the teenager melted the guarded expressions of several jurors at the beginning of his direct examination with a recapitulation of the ordeal his life had been during the years when he battled cancer in a one-bedroom East LA apartment that overflowed with the violent tumult of his parents’ relationship. He thought Michael Jackson was “the coolest guy ever” when the star began to phone him at the hospital—more than twenty times, Gavin said—before they ever met face-to-face. That opinion held when Michael started to invite him and his family for weekends at Neverland.
Mesereau observed that the jurors began to take notes right around the first time Gavin contradicted what he had said on the rebuttal video, claiming in court that it was Jackson’s idea to have him and his brother Star sleep in the master bedroom. He and Star watched The Simpsons on TV that first night, Gavin said, but became distracted when Michael and Frank Cascio began to show them “female adult materials.” He repeated his brother’s story about Jackson looking at topless women and joking, “Got milk?”
The recitation was oddly stilted and the boy’s manner curiously detached. The only genuine emotion Gavin showed on the stand came when he recalled his next six visits to Neverland, and being told each time that Michael was either not there or not available. There was real hurt and anger in the boy’s voice as he described how, on one of those occasions, he “bumped into” Michael after being told the star was away on business. Gavin also grew animated as he told the jurors that almost immediately after the interview with Martin Bashir was taped, Michael left Neverland and did not return until the Arvizos were gone. He never heard from Michael again, Gavin said, until the Bashir documentary aired in the UK.
Jackson’s own emotions were on the surface all during Gavin’s testimony, just as they had been when Davellin and Star occupied the witness stand. His fury had seemed to darken with each successive appearance by the Arvizo children, and he became increasingly agitated as Gavin sneered that Michael had coached him to tell Martin Bashir that “he pretty much cured me of cancer.” Mesereau laid a hand on his client’s arm, as if pressing him to remain seated, fearing, he would admit later, a repetition of what had happened during Davellin Arvizo’s testimony. Just as the girl told the jury that she had seen the defendant repeatedly kiss her brother on the forehead, Michael abruptly stood and stormed out of the courtroom. Mesereau, looking flustered for the first time during the trial, had chased his client, then returned moments later, flushed and slightly disheveled, to tell Judge Melville, “Mr. Jackson had to go to the bathroom, Your Honor.”
The drama of that scene was eclipsed on the morning of Gavin Arvizo’s return to the witness stand. Just before court was to convene at 8:30 a.m., Mesereau took an emergency call from his client. “Michael said he had been up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and was walking around Neverland in the dark when he fell and hurt his back,” the attorney recalled. Just moments later, Mesereau responded to Melville’s incredulous “The defendant’s not here?” question by answering, “No, Your Honor, Mr. Jackson is at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Ynez with a serious back problem . . . he does plan to come.” Enraged, the judge warned that if the defendant was not in his courtroom within one hour he would issue a warrant for Jackson’s arrest and revoke his bail. “I knew the judge meant it,” Mesereau would say later. The defense attorney was so distraught that he barely seemed to notice the cameras and sound booms that followed him into the parking lot, where he paced nervously and could be heard repeating, alternately pleading and demanding, “Michael, you’ve got to get here now!” Michael’s return to the courthouse in a big black SUV at five minutes past the 9:30 deadline would become the most emblematic moment of the entire trial. Amid a throng of feverishly concerned fans, Jackson emerged from the vehicle looking distinctly groggy and glassy-eyed as he tottered through the crush of the crowd wearing a blue blazer over a white T-shirt, iridescent blue pajama bottoms, and Gucci slippers.
“I had told Michael he couldn’t go home to change,” Mesereau explained. “We couldn’t take the chance of bail being revoked. He had to get to court as quickly as he could. So we just threw a jacket over the pajamas. The funny thing is that the jurors told me later that they didn’t even notice,” Mesereau recalled. “Michael was sitting down at the defense table when they came in, and the fact that he had pajama bottoms on made no impression on them at all. When they heard about it later, they couldn’t believe there had been so much fuss.”
The “pain medications” Michael had taken at the hospital were probably what got him through a day of testimony in which Gavin Arvizo described the various acts of sexual abuse he claimed had been perpetrated on his person by Michael Jackson. It had all been set up, the boy insisted, when Michael served him wine on the private jet that carried them back to California from Florida the morning after the Bashir documentary aired on ABC. Michael continued to serve him alcohol during the Arvizos’ subsequent stay at Neverland, where he and his brother Star spent the night in Michael’s bedroom, Gavin testified, but Jackson did not touch him sexually. It was during this time that Michael began to call him “son,” Gavin said, and he returned the favor by calling Jackson “Daddy.” District Attorney Sneddon introduced as evidence a note Michael had written to Gavin that read, “I want you to have a good time in Florida. I’m very happy to be your DADDY. Blanket, Prince, and Paris are your brothers and sisters. But you really have to be honest in your heart and know that I am your DAD and will take good care of you. DAD.”
“Nothing bad happened,” Gavin continued, until after the taping of the rebuttal video on February 20, 2003. That very evening, Michael had walked naked into the bedroom where he and Star sat watching TV. In contradiction of his brother, though, Gavin said that Michael did not have an erection. The strangest quality of the boy’s testimony continued to be the flat, rote tone of it. He might have been talking about what he had eaten for lunch as he described the evening when Michael began to talk about masturbation and told him it was “normal.” “He told me that if men don’t masturbate, then they can get to a level where they might rape a girl,” Gavin told the jurors, who looked far more uncomfortable than the boy did. Michael asked him if he masturbated, and, “I told him that I didn’t,” Gavin went on. “And then he said he would do it for me . . . And I said that I really didn’t want to.” But Michael put his hands under the covers, reached inside his pajamas, and began stroking his penis. Eventually he ejaculated, Gavin said, then became embarrassed, but Michael again told him it was “natural,” and they both fell asleep. Michael masturbated him again a few nights later, when they were sitting on the bed watching TV, Gavin continued. “He said he wanted to teach me. And we were laying there, and he started doing it to me. And then he kind of grabbed my hand in a way to try to do it to him. And I kind of pulled my hand away, because I didn’t want to do it.”
After Gavin told Sneddon that these were the only two instances of sexual molestation by Mr. Jackson, the prosecutor turned the boy over to Mesereau, who began by asking the witness to recall his years as a student at John Burroughs Middle School in Los Angeles, where he had twice told the dean that Michael Jackson “didn’t do anything to me.” Mesereau then walked Gavin through the litany of complaints from teachers at the school who had described the boy as “disruptive.” Assorted memoranda that noted Gavin’s bad behavior and refusal to do homework were introduced into evidence. The boy seemed barely able to suppress a smile when Mesereau read that a Miss Bender had complained he was regularly defiant, but disagreed vehemently when shown that the same teacher had written that he had “good acting skills.”
Mesereau then played the entire rebuttal video for Gavin, stopping every few minutes to ask if what he and the other Arvizos had just said was true or a lie. The boy called himself and his family liars so many times that even Judge Melville became visibly disgusted with the witness, swatting away Sneddon’s objections with a dismissive backhand.
When Mesereau asked Gavin about riding in chauffeured limousines and a Rolls-Royce, the boy offered a reply that cracked up the courtroom: “I only rode in a Rolls-Royce when I was escaping.” After establishing that during his “escapes” Gavin had gone shopping at Toys “R” Us and visited an orthodontist who removed his braces, all at Michael Jackson’s expense, Mesereau produced a sheaf of receipts (courtesy of Marc Schaffel) showing that while they claimed to have been held prisoner in Calabasas, the Arvizos had run up thousands of dollars of bills for cosmetics, designer clothing, spa and beauty treatments, expensive restaurant meals, and lodging, charging it all to Neverland Valley Entertainment.
Mesereau got Gavin to admit that he and his family had met with Larry Feldman before speaking to either the police or the district attorney’s office about Michael Jackson’s alleged misconduct. The boy insisted he did not know that he could profit financially by filing a lawsuit against Jackson before he turned eighteen. Gavin then acknowledged he had told detectives it was not Michael Jackson but his grandmother who said that men masturbate “so they do not rape women.” Mesereau used a series of questions that he knew Sneddon would never permit the boy to answer to make the jurors aware that Gavin had been caught drinking alcohol at Neverland, searching for porn on the Internet, and masturbating during times when Michael Jackson was not at the ranch. The attorney finished by asking Gavin if he and his family were angry that after the boy’s cancer went into remission, Michael Jackson had stopped inviting the Arvizos to the ranch. “You felt he had abandoned you, right?” Mesereau asked. “Yes!” Gavin answered. It was the most emotionally expressive moment of the boy’s entire examination.
The media in general, and the cable television correspondents in particular, seemed to convince Sneddon that he was gaining ground with the jury when he was in fact losing it. “Again and again you’d see the TV reporters run outside to talk to the cameras when some salacious detail was presented,” Mesereau recalled, “and they wouldn’t even be in the courtroom when the witness was taken apart on cross-examination. One witness after another was shown to have a financial motive for testifying, or to have contradicted earlier sworn statements, or to have a shady background that made them suspect, but you weren’t hearing a word about it from the media. The media was completely invested in convicting Michael Jackson, because that’s where they thought the ratings and revenue were. And I could see that Sneddon believed he was winning the case because the media said he was winning the case. But the jurors couldn’t run out of the courtroom after the direct examination. They had to sit through the cross-examination, and I could see that at least a couple of them were getting more and more disgusted with the prosecution witnesses. I didn’t know about the rest, but I could see that at least a couple didn’t believe a word Gavin Arvizo said.”
Still, Mesereau refrained from saying as much to his client. “I don’t know if Michael understood that the prosecution case was falling apart,” Mesereau said. “I just know that he was very scared. Very scared. He would call me or Susan Yu at three or four in the morning, crying. He was always worried that somebody somehow would corrupt us. He said over and over again, ‘Please don’t let them get to you.’ We didn’t even know who ‘they’ were. Sony, I guess. Anyway, even though we were doing well, and he knew it, the trial turned into an immensely exhausting and painful experience for Michael, and for us. We were far from finished when Gavin Arvizo left the stand. Michael understood that. We all believed that the most dangerous prosecution witnesses were yet to come. But we were completely in the dark about who and what Sneddon was going to use to back up his claim that Michael had molested five other boys. And that was scary.”
On March 30, 2005, Judge Melville ruled that the prosecution would be permitted to introduce into evidence the allegations against Michael Jackson involving Jordan Chandler and four other boys: Jason Francia, Wade Robson, Brett Barnes, and Macaulay Culkin. “I knew that three of those boys—Robson, Barnes, and Macaulay Culkin—were not going to testify for the prosecution,” Mesereau recalled. “And I wasn’t that afraid of Jason Francia. The Jordan Chandler allegations, though, those were of major concern. I knew we might win or lose this case on whether or not the jurors believed Michael had molested Jordie Chandler.”
Mesereau was aware of the lengths to which the prosecution had gone to make Jordan Chandler a witness against Michael Jackson. Sneddon’s most dedicated deputy, Ron Zonen, had flown to New York to personally threaten, cajole, and finally plead with Jordie to fly out to California to testify at the criminal trial. No one outside the district attorney’s office knew that Zonen had been unsuccessful, and both the defense and the media were similarly unaware that the Santa Barbara County prosecutors had prevailed upon the FBI to assist them with their problem. In June 2004, Zonen and another deputy district attorney assigned to the case, Gordon Auchincloss, had flown to Virginia to meet with agents from the FBI’s Behavior Analysis Unit to ask if the bureau might become involved in the case against Jackson, perhaps even initiate a federal prosecution. After an August 30, 2004, conference call between the BAU agents and the Santa Barbara prosecutors, as an FBI memo produced two weeks later recalled, it was agreed that the bureau’s agent in Santa Maria would “open a case.” In September, two FBI agents met with now twenty-nine-year-old Jordie Chandler at a hotel in New York City, but the young man was just as adamant about avoiding an appearance at Michael Jackson’s trial as he had been when Zonen met with him. According the report filed by the FBI agents, Jordie said he “had no interest in testifying against Jackson” and “advised that he would legally fight any attempt” to compel him to do so. “I don’t think Jordie was concerned with vindication or with what people thought about him,” said his uncle Ray. “He was concerned with being left alone, with being safe.”
Larry Feldman took the stand as a witness for the prosecution on April Fools’ Day, less than forty-eight hours after the judge had ruled that the jury could hear evidence of alleged prior acts of sexual molestation by Michael Jackson. Sneddon left it to Mesereau to connect the Jordan Chandler case to Feldman, asking the attorney only about his 2003 meeting with the Arvizos. The family had come to him initially to discuss pursuing a case against Martin Bashir and ABC for taping the Arvizo children without their consent, Feldman said. Unable to make “heads or tails” of what he was hearing, Feldman said, he sent Gavin and Star to see Dr. Stan Katz. After the boys’ second meeting with the psychiatrist, Katz had sent him a report stating that Gavin and Star were alleging that Michael Jackson had molested Gavin.
Feldman said he personally contacted the head of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, who suggested he report the suspected abuse to someone in law enforcement. It was then that he phoned District Attorney Sneddon and initiated the process that ultimately led to Michael Jackson’s arrest and the raid on Neverland Ranch. He was not involved in any civil lawsuit against Michael Jackson, Feldman said, and had no plans to become involved in such a lawsuit. In fact, he had formally resigned as the Arvizos’ attorney in October 2003, shortly before the warrant for Michael Jackson’s arrest was issued by the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department.
Mesereau immediately picked up where Sneddon had left off, compelling Feldman to agree that there was nothing to prevent him from representing Gavin and Star Arvizo in some future civil case, and that, irrespective of the outcome of the criminal case, Gavin and Star had until the age of eighteen to file a lawsuit against Michael Jackson claiming millions of dollars in damages. And if there was a conviction in the case now before the jury, “the only issue remaining would be how much money you get, correct?” Mesereau asked. “Probably. I think that’s close enough,” Feldman answered, and permitted himself a slight smile. A criminal conviction in this case would be crucial in offsetting the cost of the trial for the attorney, wouldn’t it, suggested Mesereau, who got Feldman to admit that financing the investigation of the Jordan Chandler allegations back in 1993 had cost him a substantial part of the eventual settlement. When Feldman attempted to quibble over details, Mesereau used the opportunity to let the jury know that Michael Jackson had sued the Chandlers for extortion back in 1993 and that the eventual settlement had included language in which “neither side admits wrongdoing to the other.” Mesereau left it to the jury to decide whether the fact that two attorneys and their associate psychiatrists who had been key players in the Jordan Chandler case in 1993 had also driven the prosecution of Michael Jackson for the abuse of Gavin Arvizo in 2003 was merely, as Feldman had it, “a coincidence.”
Mesereau then began to flatter Feldman, who seemed pleased to agree that he was “one of the most successful plaintiffs’ lawyers” in the country, an attorney who had won “numerous multimillion-dollar awards” for his clients. “Say it again for the press,” Feldman replied, smiling. Mesereau then noted that while Feldman claimed not to be representing the Arvizo family, he had in fact appeared in court as the attorney for Janet Arvizo’s mother “in an attempt to prevent us from seeing if [Janet] deposited money into her parents’ account.”
The prosecution case continued to be undermined by their own parade of witnesses who witnessed nothing, contradicted the Arvizos’ claims of exhibiting good behavior at Neverland (former Neverland maid Kiki Fournier claimed Star had pulled a knife on her in the kitchen), and admitted peddling false stories to the media for money. Former Neverland house manager Dwayne Swingler almost came across as refreshingly honest by comparison to other witnesses when he replied to Mesereau’s question about trying to sell stories to the tabloids by saying, “Look, I was going to cash in like everyone else.” Even Sneddon seemed to realize he had lost momentum by the time he summoned the woman whom he anticipated—correctly in this instance—would be his most powerful witness.
Now nearly fifty, June Chandler was still an exotic beauty packaged in elegance, from the designer suit fitted to her slim but shapely figure to her graceful carriage and crisp enunciation. As June began to tell the sad and slightly sordid story of her life, however, the glow around her dimmed. Failed marriages to an abusive dentist and a man who rented used cars for a living had left her coarsened in some regretful way, and disillusioned.
When she described being swept up into the enchanted centrifuge of Michael Jackson’s private world back in 1993, there was a distinct if unspoken sense that this lovely lady had at last been living the life she was meant for, and enjoying it so thoroughly that she was blinded to the costs and the consequences. A genuine fondness for the Michael Jackson she came to know in those first weeks and months still sounded in June’s voice as she admitted being surprised and impressed by what “a regular guy” he was, so generous and polite and unassuming. There was still the faint echo of a thrill in her voice as June recalled the gifts Michael had lavished upon her and the trips aboard private jets to Monaco and Florida that she and Jordie and Lily made with their famous new friend. Both June’s story and her tone grew colder and grimmer, though, as she described the next trip she and her children took with Michael, the one they made to Las Vegas later in 1993. She was shocked and alarmed, as June told it, by her discovery that Jordie had apparently spent the night sleeping in the same bed with Jackson.
Speaking through an emotional strain that was quite convincing, June delivered the most devastating moments of testimony against Michael Jackson that were heard during the entire trial. Shortly after telling her son that he would not be allowed to stay in the same suite with Michael unless they slept in separate bedrooms, June recalled, she heard a knock at the door of her own hotel room. It was Michael Jackson, June told the jury. He stood before her sobbing, she remembered, his cheeks bathed in tears, wanting to know if what Jordie had told him was true: “He was crying, shaking, trembling. ‘You don’t trust me?’” Michael asked her, according to June. “‘We’re a family! Why are you doing this? Why are you not allowing Jordie to be with me?’ And I said, ‘He is with you,’” June remembered. “He said, ‘But my bedroom. Why not in my bedroom?’” Michael’s “histrionic tantrum” had gone on for another half-hour, said June, before she finally caved in and agreed that Jordie could sleep in Michael’s bedroom, and, as she told it, lost her son.
The icy ferocity with which Mesereau attacked the woman on the witness stand was an abrupt and startling transition from the adoration in which an obviously smitten Sneddon had bathed June Chandler. Michael’s attorney immediately hammered June with a series of questions that suggested she and Dave Schwartz had been in dire financial circumstances back in 1993, deeply in debt and desperate for a way out. June’s denials were shaky from the first and grew more uncertain as Mesereau bombarded her with dates and numbers. “I don’t recall,” became her answer to most of the attorney’s questions, though she occasionally managed an “I don’t think so.” She could scarcely recall a single detail of the lawsuit that she and her two ex-husbands had filed against Michael Jackson back in 1994 and professed not to even be aware that Jackson had answered with a lawsuit that accused the three of them of extortion.
June appeared almost relieved when Mesereau changed the subject to her son Jordie’s relationship with Michael Jackson, recalling with palpable pleasure and pride how, years before the two met, her son had taken to dressing up like Michael and would entertain her by imitating his dance moves. It was like a dream come true for Jordie when he actually got to meet Michael and become close to him, June agreed, and she had been particularly appreciative of the paternal interest Michael seemed to take in Jordie, especially since the boy’s natural father, Evan Chandler, was barely involved in his life at that point. Yes, it was true that Michael had spent at least thirty nights at their little house in Santa Monica and that she had encouraged the entertainer’s relationship with her son. Each of the jurors and everyone else in the courtroom were leaning forward in their seats, utterly silent, as June described Michael’s joining the family at the dinner table, helping Jordie with his homework and playing video games with the boy for hours on end. She looked at Michael Jackson as being “like a child,” June told Mesereau. Yes, it was Jordie who had insisted on staying in Michael’s room whenever they visited Neverland, June said, complaining to her that other kids, including Macaulay Culkin, were allowed to sleep in “the big boys’ room.” Yes, Culkin’s father was with him at Neverland, June agreed; most of the children who visited the ranch were accompanied by a parent. June’s demeanor became increasingly flat and remote as she answered questions about flying with her son in private jets that belonged to Sony and to Steve Wynn, about the trips she and her children took with Michael Jackson to Orlando and Las Vegas, about meeting Elizabeth Taylor, Nelson Mandela, and Prince Albert of Monaco. She seemed to recognize that Mesereau was painting her as a gold digger, and yet could summon up no better response than to go numb. Several of the women on the jury wore reproving expressions when June admitted that her ex-husband Evan Chandler had suggested that the family’s relationship with Michael Jackson could be “a wonderful means for Jordie not having to worry for the rest of his life.”
Mesereau was still absorbing the realization that June would be the only Chandler called to testify in Santa Maria when Tom Sneddon summoned Janet Arvizo to the stand. “I had a feeling this would be the most important moment of the entire trial,” Mesereau said later. “And I was right.”
For weeks the jury and the gallery had been watching clips of Janet Arvizo from the rebuttal video that had been shot in the spring of 2003. Two years and twenty pounds later, there was no sign of the giggling coquette whose teased and permed curls, red-lipsticked mouth, and too-tight sweater had given her the look of an oversexed Kewpie doll. This real-life Janet Arvizo was a pear-shaped woman on the cusp of middle age, her broad face scrubbed clean. She wore a baggy pink sweatshirt and had straight dark hair that she had clipped into place with sparkly barrettes better suited for a six-year-old girl.
Judge Melville prefaced Janet’s testimony by explaining that Mrs. Arvizo was invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and would refuse to answer any questions about welfare fraud or perjury. Mesereau had prepared the jury with an opening statement in which he alleged that Janet Arvizo was a professional scammer who illegally obtained months of welfare payments during a time when she had more than $30,000 in bank accounts, and now was the subject of a criminal investigation that had been initiated by the California Department of Social Services.
Sneddon delegated the task of rehabilitating Janet Arvizo in the jury’s eyes to his assistant, Ron Zonen, who gave it a heroic effort. The prosecutor’s questions led Janet through a tale of illness, poverty, and abuse that had filled most of her adult life, beginning with her marriage at age sixteen to a drug addict who beat her constantly, broke his own children’s bones, and even tortured their pets. Eventually, though, Zonen had to turn his witness toward the subject at hand, the supposed “captivity” that Janet and her children had endured after Michael Jackson phoned to say he wanted the Arvizos to join him in Miami for a press conference to respond to the Bashir documentary.
In Janet’s telling, Michael had said her family might be “in danger” after Living with Michael Jackson aired in early February 2003 and that he wanted to place them under his protection because there had been “death threats.” Once they arrived in Florida, Michael decided that no press conference was necessary, but from that moment forward the entire family was under the control of Jackson’s “people,” Janet said. She described being “locked up” in Michael’s huge suite at the Turnberry Resort, where her children spent all their time with Prince and Paris Jackson and the three Cascio kids, Frank, Marie Nicole, and Eddie. The entire time, Janet said, Michael and his adult associates were “scripting” the media response to the Bashir documentary that eventually became the rebuttal video.
Under Mesereau’s cross-examination, Janet Arvizo used derivations of the word “script” as a verb, noun, or adjective in nearly every answer she gave, no matter how unrelated to the question.
“Now, Mrs. Arvizo, you said you and your children were neglected and spit on, right?” Mesereau began.
“Yes,” she answered.
“And who were you referring to?” Mesereau asked.
“They took elements of my life and my children’s life that were truthful, and they incorporated them into their script,” Janet Arvizo answered. “And this happened in the initial meeting in Miami. They were already in the works on this. It took me a while to find out.”
Mesereau pressed on: “Who neglected your family?”
“In this script, everything is scripted,” the witness replied.
Mesereau tried again: “When you said your family was spit upon, who were you referring to?” the attorney asked.
“On this rebuttal thing, everything is scripted,” Janet answered. “They took elements of mine and my children’s life which were true, and incorporated them there.”
“When you said, ‘We weren’t in the right zip code, and we weren’t in the right race,’ what were you referring to?” Mesereau inquired.
“This was all scripted,” was Janet’s only reply.
Janet insisted she had no idea that Gavin and his siblings had been interviewed on camera by Martin Bashir before Living with Michael Jackson aired. She conceded that she pursued, then abandoned, a lawsuit against Granada Television for using her children’s images without permission. Janet vehemently insisted that the sexual abuse of Gavin had begun after the Bashir documentary aired, then admitted that she had never seen Michael Jackson do anything sexual with her son, other than lick his hair on the flight from Florida back to California.
Using a sheaf of receipts provided by Marc Schaffel, Mesereau took Janet through each of the expenses she had rung up while deciding whether to participate in the rebuttal video, allowing Michael Jackson to pay for her family’s extended stay at the Calabasas Country Inn, where they spent their days on shopping sprees and spa treatments, and ate in expensive restaurants nightly. During this period of what she called “captivity,” she had even taken her son Gavin to an appointment to have his braces removed at Mr. Jackson’s expense. Had Mrs. Arvizo considered calling the police to report that she was being held prisoner while she sat in the orthodontist’s office for five hours? Mesereau asked. She hadn’t contacted the authorities because, “Who could believe this?” Janet explained.
Mesereau chose that moment to play outtakes from the rebuttal video. The jurors appeared riveted by footage in which Janet Arvizo told her children to sit up straight and behave themselves, and in particular a section of tape in which Janet suggested to the videographer that she and Gavin hold hands, then urged the camera to move in for a close-up. Was this footage “scripted,” too? Mesereau asked. Jurors shook their heads as Janet insisted that it was: “Everything on there was choreographed. It’s all acting.” “I’m not a very good actress,” she added a moment later. Mesereau replied, “Oh, I think you are.”
Janet Arvizo grew steadily more histrionic as the cross-examination continued, turning to the jurors at one point to tell them, “Don’t judge me.” Seemingly out of nowhere, she began to snap her fingers at the jury to punctuate her points. “A number of the jurors told me later that they wanted to tell her, ‘Don’t snap your fingers at me, lady,’” Mesereau recalled.
Jurors also said later that they were amazed by Janet’s determination to lie about even the smallest detail. During a discussion of her spa treatments in Calabasas, she insisted that she had gotten only a leg wax, then sat sullenly when Mesereau showed her a receipt she had signed for a full body wax. No, it was only a leg wax, Janet said after a few moments. So the receipt was fabricated? Mesereau asked. Janet replied by pointing to Michael Jackson: “He has the ability to choreograph everything.”
To Mesereau, it seemed a good time to introduce records showing that Janet Arvizo had collected $19,000 in welfare payments by making false claims about her financial status. The attorney followed this by establishing that the Arvizos had used money donated for Gavin’s cancer treatments to buy a big-screen TV, among other items, then introduced a newspaper article in which Janet had claimed that the family was paying ten times the actual cost of Gavin’s chemotherapy sessions. A typo, Janet insisted. Mesereau had saved for last the evidence he believed would completely destroy Janet Arvizo’s credibility in the jurors’ eyes: She and her family had collected a $152,000 settlement after suing JCPenney for alleged physical and sexual assaults by store security guards, on the basis of lies and falsified evidence.
Mesereau focused at length on Janet’s assertion in a deposition that one of the security guards had twisted her nipple between ten and twenty-five times. When Janet attempted to explain that there were “inaccuracies” in her deposition and that she had tried to get her attorney to make “corrections” before the case was settled, Mesereau turned her attention to the fact that both of her sons, Gavin and Star, had supported the nipple-twisting story. Star had gone so far as to state under oath that he had to put his mother’s breast “back into her bra” after this abuse, and that he had seen one of the guards grope his mother’s vaginal area. Janet had claimed that the guards punched her repeatedly, using their handcuffs as if they were brass knuckles, and had also said that she saw Gavin and Star being punched by the guards.
Shortly after these supposed assaults, she was booked into the West Covina city jail, where she was photographed and fingerprinted, recounted Mesereau, who then showed Janet police reports that noted that she showed no sign of injury and did not need medical treatment. Yet only two days later she showed up at an attorney’s office claiming to have been physically and sexually assaulted, and was photographed displaying bruises that covered her arms and legs. Her son Gavin had been photographed at the same time with a broken arm. These photographs were the main evidence of her civil case.
Janet admitted to Mesereau that she had lied under oath; it was in fact her husband who had beaten her and Gavin. Mesereau also pointed out that each of the woman’s children had testified on the witness stand at this trial that it had been their father who abused them and their mother, and that Janet Arvizo had obtained multiple restraining orders against her ex-husband. Gavin in fact had once accused his mother of assaulting him also, triggering an investigation by the Department of Children and Family Services. Janet’s attempts at answering these questions became more and more incoherent, a series of non sequiturs that bore little connection to the questions she had been asked. She turned to speak directly to the jury several times and addressed Michael Jackson personally on a number of occasions.
As Mesereau excoriated Janet Arvizo for her ingratitude to Michael Jackson after all the man had done for her and for her family, the witness was roused to the first comprehensible reply she had made during the past two hours. Janet Arvizo’s voice rose when she insisted that Michael Jackson “really didn’t care about children, he just cared about what he was doing with the children.” Glaring at the defendant, she continued, “He’s managed to fool the world. Now, because of this criminal case, now people know who he really is.”
After watching Janet Arvizo’s disintegration under cross-examination, Sneddon recognized that the time had come to play his ace in the hole—Debbie Rowe. Other than their fear that Jordan Chandler would show up in court, Mesereau and the defense team were more concerned about the testimony of Michael’s ex-wife than they were with any other part of the prosecution case. What Mesereau, his associates, and their client knew that neither the media nor the public did was that Debbie had been working with Santa Barbara County law enforcement for months to prepare the criminal case against Jackson. She had provided Sneddon and his investigators with dozens of documents and scores of names and dates—anything they wanted. Most alarming was that Rowe had cooperated with Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies to tape numerous phone conversations with the various “unindicted coconspirators,” including at least a half-dozen with Marc Schaffel. Caught up in the excitement and drama of playing her part in an undercover police investigation, Debbie (who referred to the man she was dating at the time as “a murder cop”) had described her ex-husband to the deputies as a shallow narcissist who saw his children as mere possessions, barely more real to him than the mannequins who populated the hallways at Neverland. As far as the kids who visited the ranch, Debbie added, they were nothing more than playthings to Michael, animated, life-size toys that he discarded as soon as they ceased entertaining him.
Mesereau had prepared twenty notebooks filled with the material he intended to use for his cross-examination of Michael’s ex-wife, more than for any other single witness. “But moments after Debbie got on the stand, I started to push that pile of notebooks away,” the attorney recalled. “I could see that as soon as she took one look at Michael, everything changed. The reality of it all hit her. It wasn’t a game anymore. He was vulnerable, and she didn’t want to hurt him.”
Zonen knew he was in trouble only a few minutes after beginning his direct examination of Rowe. Debbie acknowledged speaking to Michael Jackson about appearing in the rebuttal video, but said there was no discussion of what she would say. Sneddon had promised in his opening statement that Jackson’s ex-wife would characterize her participation in the rebuttal video as “completely scripted,” but Rowe did exactly the opposite on the witness stand. Asked to describe her conversation with Michael Jackson, Debbie replied, “I asked him how he was. I asked him how the children were. And I asked if I could see them when everything settled down,” she recalled. When Michael asked if she would appear in what became the rebuttal video, “I said, as always, yes,” Debbie told Zonen. “I was excited to see Michael and the children when all this was over. I promised I would always be there for him and the children.” Before arriving in court today, she had not seen Michael, Debbie admitted, since the day of the last divorce hearing in 1999. She had not seen Prince or Paris in that time, either. She came across as sad, but not angry.
Rowe described arriving at Marc Schaffel’s house in Calabasas for the taping of the rebuttal video on February 5, 2003, accompanied by attorney Iris Finsilver, who had remained with her the entire time. When Zonen asked if she was given a script, Debbie answered tersely, “No.” But she had been given a list of questions, Zonen asked, and moved forward in anticipation when she answered yes. The prosecutor was back on his heels a moment later, though, when Debbie added that she never looked at the list of questions and that nothing she said on the rebuttal video had been scripted. “I didn’t want anyone to be able to come back to me and say my interview was rehearsed,” she explained. “As Mr. Jackson knows, no one can tell me what to say.”
Mesereau probed the subject of Debbie Rowe’s legal dispute with Michael Jackson, but with a gentle approach that bore no resemblance to the attack for which he had prepared. Debbie’s eyes filled with tears as she gazed at Michael during her questioning on the subject, as if trying to communicate how saddened she was that it had come to this. Her expression was a plea for acknowledgment. Michael refused to give it. “He knew she had betrayed him by working with the police,” Mesereau recalled, “and he was not ready to forgive her for it.”
Michael’s attorney, though, recognized that Debbie was trying to do all she could to make amends. Rowe denounced the “unindicted coconspirators,” Konitzer, Wiesner, and Schaffel in particular, as a pack of predators whose strategy was to give Michael Jackson as little information as possible about what they were up to. “In my past knowledge, [Michael is] removed from the handlers, the people who are taking care of business, and they make all the decisions, and there are many times when they don’t consult him,” Debbie said. “And you thought these three guys, Schaffel, Dieter, and Konitzer, were doing just that, didn’t you?” Mesereau asked. “Very strongly,” answered Debbie, who moments later described the three as “opportunistic vultures.” She was especially tough on Schaffel, the only one of the three with whom she could claim anything like a friendship. Marc had boasted more than once about saving Michael’s career, and making millions for himself in the process, she recalled scornfully: “He just bragged about how he had taken advantage of an opportunity. He said he was going to make sure Michael’s career was saved. He’s like everybody else around Mr. Jackson. He wouldn’t tell him everything. Obviously, he’s full of shit.”
Debbie finished by telling Mesereau that everything she had said on the rebuttal video was honest and spontaneous, that she wanted the world to know that Michael Jackson was a good father, a family man at heart, and someone she still cared about. She gave her ex-husband one more imploring glance, but Michael still seemed to be looking through her.