On May 5, 2005, when the procecution rested its case in People v. Michael Joe Jackson, Mesereau asked for a recess to consider whether he should bother with putting on a defense. “I was pretty confident that we had at least a hung jury,” he explained. “It was all over the faces of several jurors. But when I thought about it, I realized that a hung jury and a mistrial was not the outcome we wanted. I was certain that Sneddon would refile, and I was pretty sure that the next trial would be much tougher for us. I knew the judge was on the prosecution’s side, and that he was unlikely to make some of the rulings that had helped us the first time around if there was a second trial. The prosecution would have been educated about the weaknesses of its case and would be much better prepared the second time around. Also, I was hearing from Randy Jackson and everyone else around Michael that he didn’t have it in him to survive a second trial. I could see myself that it was true. Michael was getting weaker day by day. He wasn’t eating. He went to the hospital several times.” The only place Michael could sleep, Grace Rwaramba explained, was in a hospital room.
The strain was wearing Mesereau down as well. He was waking up at 3:30 every morning to a new stack of filings, reports, and information that were added to the tens of thousands of pages of documents already generated by the case of People v. Jackson. He had been braced for months against his possible dismissal as Michael Jackson’s attorney. Randy Jackson had told him that Mark Geragos was pressing relentlessly to be reinstated, warning that Mesereau had no real concept of what a high-profile trial required. The three-ring circus of chaos that engulfed Michael Jackson was also a constant distraction. The wall of the sentry post at the entrance to Neverland was covered with the photographs of various undesirables, accompanied by captions like, “Has been loitering near the gate,” “Believes she is married to Mr. Jackson,” and “Might be armed.”
Some of these same people had infiltrated the “Caravan of Love” formed by Michael’s supporters outside the courthouse, who were every bit as obsessive as Mesereau had been told they would be. Amid the Michael Jackson impersonators and the women who claimed to be the real Billie Jean were hundreds of lost souls who had made the pilgrimage to Santa Maria from all over the world, people for whom being Michael Jackson fans was the most consuming reality of their lives. The wailing, shrieking, and sobbing that rose from this crowd each morning as Michael emerged from the big black Suburban that delivered him to the courthouse charged the atmosphere with some weird blend of dread and delirium. The congratulations he could expect if he won this case, the defense attorney knew, would be short-lived by comparison to the condemnations that would follow him for the rest of his days if he lost it.
For Mesereau, who had refused to speak to the media from the beginning of the trial, the realization that some version of the mad scene surrounding the courthouse had been Michael Jackson’s reality since he was ten years old engendered both pity and exhilaration. In this alternate universe of supercelebrity, it seemed at once perverse and appropriate that more than half the crowd was composed of the twenty-two hundred reporters, producers, and researchers who had been credentialed by the Santa Barbara County authorities. Since only thirty-five of them a day would be seated in the courtroom, the rest loitered amid the sea of media tents, ready to chase down anyone who would serve them up a dollop of drama.
From the start of the trial, most of the distractions Mesereau had dealt with were produced by people who were supposed to be on his side. “Michael himself was the nicest client Susan and I have ever had,” Mesereau said. “The problem was the people around him. A lot of the time, we were more at war with our own camp than with the other side. Celebrities in general tend to be surrounded by those that try to keep them off balance, to keep them scared, as a way to create a reason they’re needed. And Michael Jackson was probably the biggest target ever of those types of people.” Mesereau included Raymone Bain, Jesse Jackson, and Grace Rwaramba prominently among those “types,” and was increasingly concerned that certain members of the Jackson family had become the instruments of other parasites that were attempting to attach themselves to his client.
“That’s what’s so exhausting about a high-profile case,” Mesereau recalled. “You have to spend half your time dealing with things that have nothing to do with the actual trial happening in the courtroom.”
Convinced as he was that the prosecution had failed to make its case in court, Mesereau had to admit his doubts. “You think you know, but you’re not sure that you know,” he explained. “I don’t believe there’s a lawyer alive who hasn’t been surprised by a jury’s verdict. Plus, Sneddon looked like he thought he had won the case, and the reporters were all fawning over him like they thought so, too.”
Mesereau’s dismantlement of Gavin Arvizo on cross-examination went almost entirely unreported on television or in newspapers. Big-city tabloids actually bannered proclamations that the testimony of the “victim” had cooked Jackson’s goose. “SICKO!” howled the New York Daily News headline. “Jacko: Now Get Out of This One” gloated the New York Post. In London the Sun article describing Gavin Arvizo’s appearance as a witness ran under the heading, “He’s Bad, He’s Dangerous, He’s History,” while the Mirror made its headline into a veritable endorsement of the accuser’s story: “He Said If Boys Don’t Do It They Might Turn into Rapists: Cancer Boy Gavin Tells Court of Jacko Sex.”
For reporters like Diane Dimond and Maureen Orth, the revelation of Janet Arvizo’s sleazy character served as little more than further evidence of Michael Jackson’s guilt. “As I watched the mother on the stand,” Orth wrote for Vanity Fair, “one thing seemed clear to me: Michael Jackson would probably never have spent more than a moment’s time with this poor, dysfunctional family if he hadn’t had an ulterior motive.” Dimond chipped in with a New York Post article in which she pointed out that, “Pedophiles don’t target kids with Ozzie and Harriet parents.”
Mesereau tried not to hear the roar of impending doom sounding all around him, but that was not entirely possible. The attorney saw little choice but to mute the assurances he wanted to offer his client. “I felt sure I was right about where the case stood, but I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I hadn’t admitted that I could be wrong,” Mesereau reflected. He was “terribly tempted” to rest without offering a defense case, the attorney said: “I knew Michael desperately wanted this to be over, but at the same time he understood that his life literally depended on the outcome of this trial.”
The knowledge of the sentence he faced had overwhelmed Michael from the day the grand jury returned its indictment. “Discussing the specifics of that was probably the hardest part of the whole thing,” Mesereau recalled. “The numbers were just so scary to Michael.” If convicted on all charges, Jackson would be sentenced to at least eighteen years and eight months in state prison. Should the “aggravating circumstances” argued by the prosecution be factored in, Judge Melville had the right to impose a sentence of up to fifty-six years in prison.
“In the end, I decided that the stakes were just too high to do anything less than go all out,” Mesereau decided. “We were going to put on our full defense.”
Mesereau knew that his case would begin with a devastating rebuttal of the prosecution case that was also a high-risk proposition for the defense. Sneddon had told the jury during his opening statement that they would hear evidence that Michael Jackson had sexually abused five other boys besides Gavin Arvizo, and the prosecutor mentioned each of the five by name. Jordan Chandler’s refusal to testify at trial had reduced Sneddon to the point of attempting to introduce an eleven-year-old document with a motion submitted under the heading: “Plaintiff’s Motion to Admit Evidence that Jordan Chandler had Knowledge of, and Accurately Described Defendant’s Distinctly Blemished Lower Torso and Penis in 1994; Declaration of Thomas W. Sneddon Jr.; Memorandum of Points and Authorities.” In the end, Sneddon was able to call only one of those five boys, Jason Francia, to the stand, and Francia had been, at best, marginally effective. “He came across as someone who thought he deserved $2 million for being tickled,” Mesereau recalled.
The defense attorney would be widely criticized for putting up as witnesses a series of young men who admitted they had spent the night in Michael Jackson’s bedroom, but as Mesereau recalled, “Three of the five young men whom the prosecution described as ‘Michael Jackson’s other victims’ were willing to testify for the defense that it wasn’t true.”
Wade Robson was a dancer who had joined Michael Jackson’s world at the age of seven, during the Australian leg of the Bad tour, when he began performing with Michael onstage. Later he appeared in three Jackson music videos, traveling regularly with the star and staying with him at Neverland on and off for more than a decade. Robson was now twenty-two, lean and handsome, a “celebrity choreographer,” according to the tabloid press, who was best known for being sexually involved with Britney Spears while she was married to fellow dancer Kevin Federline. He had slept in the same bed with Michael Jackson on approximately twenty separate occasions, Robson told Mesereau on direct examination. When the attorney asked what “activities” he engaged in while staying in Mr. Jackson’s bedroom, Robson replied that they mostly played video games or watched movies. “We had pillow fights every now and again,” he added, with a smile. “Mr. Robson, did Michael Jackson ever molest you at any time?” Mesereau asked. “Absolutely not,” the young man answered in a tone that suggested he was more contemptuous of the suggestion than scandalized by it.
Brett Barnes was considerably more indignant about being named as one of Michael Jackson’s playthings. “Has Mr. Jackson ever molested you?” Mesereau bluntly asked the young Australian shortly after he took the stand.
“Absolutely not!” Barnes answered loudly. “And I can tell you right now that if he had, I wouldn’t be here right now!”
“Has Mr. Jackson ever touched you in a sexual way?” Mesereau went on.
“Never!” Barnes answered with even greater intensity. “I wouldn’t stand for it!”
“Has Michael Jackson ever touched any part of your body in a way that you thought was inappropriate?” Mesereau continued.
“Never! It’s not the type of thing I would stand for,” answered Barnes, who seemed barely able to control his fury when Mesereau asked how he felt about being described by prosecutors as one of Michael Jackson’s “victims.”
“I’m very mad about that,” replied Barnes, who obviously was. “They’re pulling my name through the dirt, and I’m really, really not happy about it.”
Macaulay Culkin was an even more effective witness. “I can’t tell you how impressed I was by [him],” Mesereau recalled. “I met with him and his attorney and his manager and his agent beforehand, and he was the most relaxed person in the room. The others were all terrified and trying to convince him that it was a terrible idea for him to take the stand, that he shouldn’t do it.” But in the meeting with Mesereau, “Culkin just sort of shrugged and said, ‘Look, if Michael needs me to tell people the truth, then I’m going to do it,’” the attorney recalled. “He was really a stand-up person, just like Chris Tucker—and unlike the rest of Michael’s other so-called celebrity friends.”
Now in his mid-twenties, Culkin appeared as relaxed on the witness stand as he had been in the meeting with Mesereau. He began his direct examination by saying that he was godfather to two of Michael Jackson’s children, then tried to describe for the jury the nature of the unique bond he shared with Prince and Paris’s father. There was a loneliness to the life of a child star that only other people who’d experienced it—people like him and Michael and Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley Temple—could understand, Culkin explained: “We’re part of a unique group of people. [Michael had] been through that, so he understood what it was like to be put in that position I was in, to be thrust into it. Anyone who was a child performer, we keep an eye out for each other.”
He’d been a guest at Neverland more than a dozen times between the ages of ten and fourteen, Culkin said, often accompanied by his younger brother, his two sisters, and his father and mother. He and the defendant remained friends to this day, and he had visited Michael as recently as a year earlier. When Mesereau turned to the matter at hand and described the allegations of former Neverland employees that they’d seen Michael Jackson touching him sexually, Culkin dismissed such stories with evident disdain.
“What do you think of these allegations?” Mesereau asked.
“I think they’re absolutely ridiculous,” Culkin answered. He hadn’t learned of these claims from the prosecution, Culkin told Mesereau, but from a cable television news program. “I just couldn’t believe it,” Culkin recalled. “I couldn’t believe that, first of all, these people were saying these things—let alone that it was out there, and people were thinking that kind of thing about me. And at the same time it was amazing to me that nobody approached me and asked me whether or not the allegations were true. They just kind of threw it out there, and they didn’t even double-check it, basically. I mean if they assumed that I knew the answer, what got me was they didn’t even ask.”
“Are you saying that these prosecutors never tried to reach you to ask your position on this?” a wide-eyed Mesereau wondered.
“No, they didn’t,” Culkin replied.
“Are you aware that the prosecutors claim they are going to prove that you were molested by Michael Jackson?” asked Mesereau.
“Excuse me?” asked Culkin, whose expression of incredulity communicated a good deal more than his words did.
Mesereau called a couple dozen other witnesses, nearly all of them put on the stand to further discredit the Arvizos. The orthodontist and the dental assistant who had removed Gavin Arvizo’s braces at Jackson’s expense told the court that they saw no sign the Arvizos were being held against their will. They remembered Gavin Arvizo as an especially rude kid, the two said, one who rifled through drawers when their backs were turned, forcing them to throw out sterile items. Janet Arvizo insisted upon keeping her son’s ruined braces, they remembered, because she intended to use them as evidence in a claim against the doctor who had put them on.
Chris Tucker’s ex-girlfriend Azja Pryor testified that Janet Arvizo not only wasn’t trying to escape from Michael Jackson, but complained repeatedly that Dieter Wiesner and Ronald Konitzer were keeping her family away from Michael. “They won’t let us around him because they know the children tug at his heartstrings,” Pryor remembered Janet telling her. A Neverland housekeeper backed Pryor’s story, testifying that Janet Arvizo had complained about being held hostage, but only by Dieter Wiesner and “two others” who were “interfering” in her relationship with Michael. Neverland’s housekeeping supervisor, Gayle Goforth, told the court that Janet Arvizo not only didn’t want to leave Neverland, but begged for a job on the ranch and was furious about being turned down.
Neverland security chief Violet Silva testified that there was a directive issued that the Arvizo children not be allowed to leave the property, but said this was only because of their bad behavior and their mother’s lack of supervision. Gavin and Star were “reckless” kids, Silva said, who regularly drove off in ranch vehicles without permission. Neverland property manager Joe Marcus not only confirmed Silva’s testimony, but also told the court that he was the one who had issued that directive, because the Arvizo boys were stealing ranch vehicles whenever they got the chance, and he didn’t want them on public roads. Marcus scoffed at the notion the Arvizos were being held hostage, telling the court they could have left at any time. On the one occasion when Janet said she wanted to return home, Marcus said, he allowed a ranch employee to drive her and her family in one of Mr. Jackson’s Rolls-Royces. Marcus laughed when asked if this brief departure from Neverland could have been called an “escape.” The Arvizos always seemed “excited” to be at the ranch when he saw them there, Marcus said.
A former security guard at Neverland described catching Gavin and Star in the wine cellar of the main house while Mr. Jackson was away from the ranch. The two had an open wine bottle, the guard said, from which “some of the contents were missing.” One of Neverland’s assistant chefs told the court about a time when Star Arvizo demanded that he mix liquor into a milk shake, and threatened to have him fired if he didn’t. The chef described Gavin Arvizo as an astoundingly obnoxious kid who said things like, “Give me the fucking Cheetos.” The chef said he had developed a “romantic relationship” with Davellin Arvizo, and that the girl never complained once about her family being held at the ranch against their will.
The judge and the jury grew restless under an onslaught of character assassination testimony that grew increasingly redundant. Some of the witnesses Mesereau called to the stand, though, provided testimony that was both more singular and of greater consequence. Irene Peters, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services social worker who interviewed the Arvizo family in February 2003, testified that Gavin Arvizo “became upset” when she asked whether he had had a sexual relationship with Michael Jackson. “Everybody thinks Michael Jackson sexually abused me,” Peters recalled the boy telling her. “He never touched me.” Gavin also said that he never slept in the same bed with Michael Jackson, and described Mr. Jackson as someone who “was very kind to him” and behaved toward him like the father he had always wished for. Janet Arvizo had also described Mr. Jackson as a father to her children, “and she felt he was responsible for helping Gavin to survive his cancer,” Peters told the court. She found the Arvizos entirely convincing, Peters said, which was why she filed a report stating that the allegations of sexual abuse by Michael were “unfounded.”
A forensic accountant was called to testify that the Arvizo family received $152,000 from the settlement of its lawsuit against JCPenney, and deposited $32,000 of the money in an account in the name of Janet Arvizo’s mother, then used some of the remaining money to buy a new vehicle. The Arvizos set off on a $7,000 shopping spree shortly after arriving at the Calabasas Inn in early 2003, the accountant testified, purchasing $4,800 worth of luggage and clothing in just two days and putting everything on Mr. Jackson’s bill. The accountant also testified that Janet Arvizo had deposited the welfare checks she received from Los Angeles County into her then-boyfriend’s account and used the money to pay their rent. After the accountant, an intake worker from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services was called to the stand and described in detail the fraud Janet Arvizo had committed in her application for welfare payments.
An editor from the weekly Mid Valley News testified that she felt “duped” by Janet Arvizo into writing articles that raised money for her son Gavin’s medical treatments. She had accepted Janet’s claim that Gavin’s chemotherapy sessions were costing $12,000 apiece, the editor said, only to discover that the real cost was $1,200 per session. After the editor stepped down, Janet’s former sister-in-law took the stand to recall for the jury being so moved by the Mid Valley News articles that she had decided to start a blood drive for Gavin, but was rebuffed by Janet: “She told me that she didn’t need my fucking blood, that she needed money.”
The coup de grâce was delivered by a “surprise witness” Mesereau had promised the jury during his opening statement. Paralegal Mary Holzer took the stand to say that she had formerly worked at the law firm that represented the Arvizos in their lawsuit against JCPenney. In private conversation, Holzer testified, Janet confided that the injuries she was claiming had been caused by store security guards were actually inflicted by her husband on the night of the incident. When Holzer said she couldn’t suborn perjury, Janet responded by warning that her husband’s brother was in the Mexican mafia, “and that she knows where I live and they would come and kill me and my nine-year-old daughter.” She became truly frightened of Janet, Holzer said, when she accompanied the woman to a doctor’s appointment at which “she threw herself down on the ground, started kicking and screaming, carrying on that the doctors were the devil and the nurse was the devil and they were all out to get her.” Janet also told her that she had enrolled the kids in acting classes so they could become convincing liars, Holzer testified: “She said she wanted them to become good actors so she could tell them what to say.”
As Mesereau had planned from the first, the attorney used two and a half hours of outtakes from the Martin Bashir documentary to let his client speak directly to the jury without facing cross-examination. The British journalist had begun the interviews by flattering Michael Jackson as “the greatest musical artist alive today,” then insisting that he wanted the world to know more about the international charity work the entertainer had done to help children all over the world. When Michael complained that the media reported only “negative things” about him, Bashir dismissed tabloid reporters as “scum,” then described the recent stories he had seen about Michael as “disgusting” and promised that he would never produce such “rubbish.”
The utterly strange and unique amalgamation of grandiosity and naive yearning in Michael’s voice as he lamented the loneliness imposed upon him by stardom was mesmerizing. He never got to know what people were really like, he said, because “when people see Michael Jackson, they’re not themselves anymore.” In some ways, he felt more lonely when he was in a hotel room listening to the people outside chant his name than he did at any other time, Michael told Bashir a few moments later, and often cried during such experiences: “There’s all that love out there. But still, you really do feel trapped and lonely. And you can’t get out.” Every once in a while he went to a nightclub, Michael said, but the DJs always played his music and the fans began begging him to dance and the whole thing started to feel like he was working, not playing.
Michael began to talk for the first time about a subject that related to the Arvizo accusations when he described the recoveries of several young cancer patients who’d visited Neverland. Just as he started to describe the curative powers of love and prayer, Bashir turned to his camera operator and said, “Cut.”
Bashir ended the tape by telling Michael that making people aware of his dedication to children was what made this documentary so important: “People are scum, and there’s so much jealousy. The problem is, nobody actually comes here to see it. But I saw it here yesterday, the spiritual.” Several jurors said after the trial that if Bashir had been in the courtroom that day, they might have spit on him.
Mesereau would say later that he believed the Bashir outtakes could have tipped the outcome of the trial from hung jury to outright acquittal. On the one hand, he remained certain that a hung jury was the worst outcome his client had to fear. On the other hand, the overwhelming public perception surrounding the trial was that Michael Jackson would soon be a California state prison inmate. Every doubt the attorney harbored about his ability to read a jury magnified and tortured his thoughts. “It’s a terrible thing when you see a client suffering and you want to reassure them with a sense of certainty you don’t have,” Mesereau admitted. “No one has it in that situation. You just can’t know.”
The defense attorney at least had been able to deliver one last blow to Tom Sneddon on the final day of the trial. After the judge ruled that a videotape of Gavin Arvizo’s police interview from two years prior could be shown to the jury, Mesereau demanded that the Arvizo family return to Santa Maria to face further questioning. Sneddon and his team were happy to comply, putting the Arvizos up in a “secure location” near the courthouse where the prosecutors spent hours prepping Janet and Gavin for a return to the witness stand. This would be a welcome opportunity to rehabilitate their star witnesses, the prosecutors believed, to show the jury that these people were not the low-life grifters Mesereau had made them into during his cross-examinations. When Sneddon finished his rebuttal case, though, Mesereau answered with just three words: “The defense rests.”
The cable news programs were reporting that Gavin Arvizo’s police interview had sealed the prosecution’s victory. The district attorney and his team had already scheduled what amounted to a celebration dinner for the following evening, so certain were they that Michael Jackson would be found guilty of at least some charges. Ron Zonen made the prosecution’s case to the jury, taking nearly two full hours to try to cement the conspiracy charges against Jackson before turning to the subject of child molestation. As Sneddon had done in his opening statement, Zonen returned in his final argument to the theme that Neverland Ranch was much like Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island: “They rode rides, went to the zoo, ate whatever they wanted—candy, ice cream, soda pop. There was only fun . . . And at night they entered into the world of the forbidden. Michael’s room was a veritable fortress with locks and codes that the boys were given . . . They learned about sexuality from someone only too willing to be their teacher . . . It began with discussions of masturbation and nudity. It began with simulating a sex act with a mannequin.”
The Arvizos were a family with problems and issues, Zonen allowed, but “the lion on the Serengeti doesn’t go after the strongest antelope. The predator goes after the weakest.” Those of them bothered by Gavin Arvizo’s demeanor on the witness stand should bear in mind how difficult it must be for a teenage boy to testify about being sexually abused by one of the most famous people in the world, Zonen told the jurors: “It is intimidating . . . He had been molested by a man he once held in high regard.” Everyone in the courtroom knew that Janet Arvizo was less than a sterling character, Zonen conceded, but “for all her shortcomings, Janet, after learning Michael was giving her son alcohol, in thirty-six hours she had her children out of there.” The defense had argued from the beginning and no doubt would argue again that Janet Arvizo was essentially a con artist out to fleece a wealthy celebrity, Zonen said, but the evidence showed that up to this very day, “Janet never asked for one penny from Michael Jackson. She never desired anything from him and she doesn’t today.”
Zonen’s argument finished with an attack on the credibility and character of Michael Jackson’s attorneys. Mark Geragos had accepted $180,000 from Michael Jackson during his first three weeks of representation, but couldn’t seem to recall a single conversation with his client when he was on the witness stand. And Mr. Mesereau, during his opening statement, had recited a long list of famous people who would be testifying as to Michael Jackson’s good character, Zonen observed. Yet almost none of those people had shown up in court.
It was a sore spot with Mesereau, who had been bitterly disappointed by the refusal of the many celebrities Michael had called his friends to speak for him publicly. The defense attorney channeled both his frustration and his fury into an introduction to his final argument that recounted the criticisms that Zonen had aimed at him personally. “Whenever a prosecutor does that, you know they’re in trouble,” Mesereau told the jury. This wasn’t a popularity contest between lawyers, he added, it was a decision about the fate of a human being, about the application of justice under the law.
The jurors had heard enough from and about the Arvizos to know they were a family of “con artists, actors, and liars,” Mesereau went on. Did any of them really doubt that a civil lawsuit would materialize when the criminal case was finished? “Everyone is looking for a big payday at the expense of Michael Jackson,” he said. “There’s going to be great celebration in this group if he’s convicted of one single count in the case.” Examine the motives of all the major prosecution witnesses, Mesereau urged: “Aren’t they all after millions from Michael Jackson? Haven’t you seen one person after another come in this courtroom who have sued Michael Jackson? They’re all lined up.” And the Arvizos were at the front of the line. Larry Feldman had acknowledged that a criminal conviction in this case meant certain victory in the civil case that was sure to follow. The Arvizos and their attorney “want the taxpayers of this county to establish liability for them,” Mesereau told a jury of Santa Barbara County taxpayers. “For this to happen, you have to label [Michael Jackson] a convict. You have to label him a sex offender. You have to label him everything he is not.”
Mesereau resorted to a visual display to emphasize what had always been the weakest link in the prosecution case, the contention that Michael Jackson had waited until the very moment that his relationship with Gavin Arvizo became the object of international media scrutiny to begin molesting the boy. Laying out charts and graphs to create a timeline of Jackson’s relationship with the Arvizo family, Mesereau pointed out how many other, far better opportunities Jackson had had to try to seduce Gavin Arvizo into a sexual relationship. That Michael had passed those opportunities by to seize upon one that was almost certain to result in his exposure could make no sense to anyone who had any.
The Arvizos’ proven pattern of lying under oath was by itself grounds for acquittal in this case, Mesereau told the jurors. It was a proven fact that the Arvizo children had lied at their mother’s behest to further a civil lawsuit filed against JCPenney. And Gavin Arvizo had been the most persuasive among them in telling those lies: “He was very young, he was very street-smart, he had been schooled by his parents.” The JCPenney lawsuit served as a training program for the Arvizos, Mesereau said, one that had prepared them to take down Michael Jackson in the “the biggest con of their careers.”
The attorney knew that in the end he would have to bring his argument back to the character of the defendant. Mesereau told the jury: “If you look in your hearts, do you believe Michael Jackson is evil in that way?” Mesereau asked as he approached the end of his speech. “Is it even possible? It really is not. If you look deep in your heart, do you think it’s even remotely possible that he’s built that way?”
The judge had instructed them to bear in mind that this wasn’t a civil case in which the issue before them was a preponderance of evidence, the attorney observed. Even by that standard, Michael Jackson should prevail. But at this criminal trial the standard was proof beyond a reasonable doubt, Mesereau reminded the jurors, meaning that, “If you have the slightest suspicion [about his guilt], Mr. Jackson must go home. He must go free.”
Court TV’s Nancy Grace, a pioneer in the transformation of criminal trial coverage into serial evening soap opera, flatly predicted that Michael Jackson would be found guilty on most if not all of the ten felony and four misdemeanor counts that had gone to the jury. And her counterpart on Fox News, former prosecutor Wendy Murphy, was every bit as sure: “There is no question we will see convictions here.” Virtually no dissent from these opinions was heard on television or read in newspapers. Only a handful of commentators even admitted uncertainty.
“You have to remember how invested the media was in seeing Michael convicted,” Mesereau said. “The story just wasn’t as good if he was acquitted.” Coverage of the Michael Jackson trial had rivaled the O. J. Simpson murder case in terms of media saturation. The twenty-four-hour coverage kicked in from the moment of the Neverland Ranch raid. Only CNN broke away from Michael Jackson coverage to a press conference shortly afterward at which George Bush and Tony Blair stood side by side to brief the world on a terrorist attack in Turkey. Within weeks of Jackson’s arrest, ABC, CBS, and NBC all had churned out hour-long specials on the accusations against the entertainer. Daily Variety called the Jackson sex scandal “a godsend [for] cable new channels and local stations looking to pump up Nielsen numbers in the final week of the all-important November sweeps.” On December 18, 2003, the date that the criminal charges against Michael Jackson were formally filed, Judge Melville’s court administrator came outside with only five hundred copies and “had to be rescued by sheriff’s deputies,” as the judge recalled it, “after being overrun by the media.”
The jury was still out on the evening of June 10, when Tom Sneddon and his team gathered for their “celebration dinner” at northern Santa Barbara County’s top steak house,the Hitching Post in Buellton. Heady with the praise of their presentation that was being broadcast on one cable news network after another, the prosecutors not only toasted one another repeatedly but seemed to enjoy the audience of television correspondents who kibbitzed from the bar area. Mesereau and Yu, meanwhile, appeared to have gone underground. The defense attorneys wouldn’t even answer their cell phones. “There really wasn’t anything to do but wait,” Mesereau explained. “We ate in our condos.”
Over the weekend, as the jury’s deliberations passed the one-week mark, cable news operations reported that the jury had been requesting “read backs” of testimony, mostly from prosecution witnesses. On MSNBC, Mesereau’s friend Ron Richards, one of the few pundits who had predicted acquittals, said he was becoming “nervous for the defense.”
Just after noon on June 13, 2005, word came that the jury had reached verdicts on all counts. Judge Melville ordered that the parties be present in his courtroom at 1:30 p.m.
Preparations for the media frenzy that would engulf the delivery of the jury’s verdicts at the courthouse in Santa Maria would have suited the theaters either of the absurd or of the grotesque. A security detail that now included the Santa Maria Police Department, the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department, and the interagency Santa Barbara Mobile Field Force, replete with flak-jacketed SWAT teams and bomb-sniffing dogs, herded the hundreds of reporters who had been denied seats in the courtroom and the “overflow room” into the holding pens that surrounded the courthouse. An escalating scale of “County Impact Fees” were paid by those who won the four pool camera positions in the courthouse or the fifty-two TV camera stations outside the front entrance or the fifty kneeling-still camera spots in front of those. There was even a “helicopter pool.” Plans were put together for a jury news conference, a prosecution news conference, and a defense news conference—as well as for camera positions at the county jail, should those be necessary. Gaining access to even the most remote fringes of the tented “Media Area” required reporters to run a staggering gauntlet of rules, regulations, signature sheets, and inspections.
As the appointed hour ticked past, the networks reported that Michael Jackson would be arriving late at the courthouse. Helicopter cameras tracked the motorcade of black SUVs that made its way from Neverland toward Santa Maria. The sheriff’s deputies in charge of crowd control barked orders at the media horde and snarled commands to the legion of Michael Jackson fans that had arranged itself in assorted camps wherever there was open space near the courthouse. Fans pressed as close as they could to the Cyclone fence and steel gate that protected the entrance to the courthouse parking lot, awaiting the defendant’s arrival. The fans appeared “apprehensive,” one television correspondent after another told viewers. The crowd roused themselves to boo and jeer when Sneddon and the prosecution team arrived at the courthouse. They chanted, “Liar! Liar! Liar!” at various reporters and commentators who were considered to be especially prejudiced against Michael. Quoting “law enforcement sources,” at least two cable channels reported that the Santa Maria authorities were concerned that the fans might attack certain members of the media if Michael Jackson was convicted.
Mesereau and Yu had come out of the courthouse to wait in the parking lot by the time Michael’s black Suburban finally pulled through the gate. Many of the fans brandished either camcorders or cell phone cameras. The sunlight glinting off all that shiny metal, combined with the wailing cheer that erupted from their numbers when Michael stepped out of the SUV, produced atmospherics that suggested the siege of an ancient city.
Haggard, gaunt, and heavily made up, Michael moved forward in tiny steps, surrounded by bodyguards who seemed to be keeping him on his feet. Behind his mirrored sunglasses and beneath his black umbrella, he followed Mesereau and Yu to the courthouse entrance. Before walking through the doors, Michael turned to wave to his fans, summoning up a slight smile as their cheers and screams rose to deafening volume. That smile was gone, though, the moment he stepped inside.
“He was strained beyond description,” Mesereau recalled. “He looked more emaciated, more frail, more out of it than I had ever seen him.” The dazed expression and robotic movements evidenced an unprecedented level of self-medication. “I don’t know if he was on drugs,” Mesereau said, “but if he was, who could blame him?”
The six seats inside the courtroom reserved for the Jackson family were taken by Joe and Katherine, Randy, Tito, Rebbie, and La Toya, who managed to spend more time in front of the cameras that day than all the others combined. Janet Jackson waited outside.
Eleven deputies wearing sidearms spread out around the courtroom as the eight women and four men of the jury filed into their seats. At 2:10 p.m. the verdict envelopes were delivered to Judge Melville, who opened and read each one without expression. Tears welled in the eyes of several female jurors. “Every second seemed to last ten hours,” Mesereau remembered. Melville finally handed the verdict sheets to his clerk, Lorna Ray, who read them aloud from the top. “Count One: Conspiracy—Not Guilty. Count Two: Lewd Act upon a Child—Not Guilty. Count Three . . . Not Guilty.” Michael Jackson had been acquitted on all counts.
The media at first couldn’t believe it, then wouldn’t believe it. An incompetent, overawed jury was the default explanation offered up by experts who had predicted multiple convictions. “Not guilty by reason of celebrity,” was the way Nancy Grace described the verdict on Court TV. “I don’t think the jurors even understand how influenced they were by who Michael Jackson is,” Wendy Murphy chimed in on Fox News. In New York, the Daily News and the Post ran their stories on the verdict under the very same headline: “Boy, Oh, Boy!” Those newspapers were restrained by comparison to London tabloids, which baldly asserted that Jacko “got away with it” and excoriated “what they laughably call American justice.”
On the morning after, Diane Sawyer of ABC’s Good Morning America actually tried to convince jurors that Michael Jackson’s enormous fame had overwhelmed them: “Are you sure? Are you sure this gigantically known guy walking into the room had no influence at all?” Tom Sneddon took to invoking “the celebrity factor” in each and every interview he gave, in which he also denied any personal responsibility.
In interview after interview, the jurors made it clear that they were insulted by questions about whether they had been swayed by Michael Jackson’s celebrity, and insisted their verdicts had been based on the facts of the case. Jury foreman Paul Rodriguez said that the videotape of Gavin Arvizo’s police interview had been the single most significant piece of evidence, and that he and the other jurors had viewed it multiple times. The boy simply hadn’t been believable, Rodriguez explained. Nearly every one of the jury’s eight women described Janet Arvizo as both despicable and dishonest. Several jurors said they saw the Arvizos as a family of professional grifters who had tried to frame Michael Jackson. Other members of the panel told reporters that there was no compelling proof of sexual abuse. A few complained that the prosecution had used tawdry evidence that had little relevance to the case before the court in order to mock, insult, and degrade the famous defendant.
The media’s reporting (and posturing) held sway in the immediate aftermath of the verdicts. A Gallup Poll taken hours after Michael Jackson’s acquittal showed that 48 percent of the country (and 54 percent of white Americans) disagreed with the jury’s verdict. More than 60 percent said they believed Jackson’s celebrity was a major reason the panel had voted not guilty on every count. A third of those polled said they were “saddened” by the verdict, and a quarter said they were “outraged.”
“We were all oblivious to what was being said in the media that first afternoon and evening,” Mesereau recalled. The Jackson family, along with Mesereau, Yu, and a handful of invited guests, headed straight back to Neverland. They were awaited by the members of a staff that had lined the ranch’s driveway, holding hands, only a couple of hours earlier, when they sent Michael off to the courthouse without knowing whether they would ever see him again.
The crowd of fans at the gate was so thick and so raucous that Michael’s security team had to help Mesereau and Yu pass through. Inside the main house, though, the atmosphere was remarkably subdued. “It wasn’t really a celebration,” Mesereau remembered. “It was more spiritual, very quiet, very calm—almost serene. Everyone was thanking God.” Mesereau believed that religious faith—Katherine’s religious faith, really—had been what had most sustained Michael during the past nineteen months. “His mother would tell him in a soft voice, but very firmly, that God was with him,” Mesereau recalled. “And I could see the way that soothed Michael. Joe would shake his fist and tell him to keep fighting, but I don’t think that really did a lot of good. Michael wasn’t that person. He wasn’t a fighter. The gentle approach is what worked for him.”
After letting “Michael’s kids crawl all over me” for a couple of hours, Mesereau returned to his condo and went to bed early, so he could be up at 2 a.m. to begin an all-day schedule of television interviews. Neither Mesereau’s triumph nor Jackson’s deliverance were greeted with much enthusiasm, though, by either the American media or the American public. “You cost the worldwide media billions,” Berry Gordy told Mesereau. “We have a less interesting story now,” CNN head Jonathan Klein said to his lieutenants on the afternoon of the verdicts. Klein was proven correct that very evening, when three broadcast networks rushed Michael Jackson acquittal specials onto the air only to see them outperformed in ratings by Fox’s rerun of Nanny 911.
The competence and integrity of the Jackson trial jury would be questioned for weeks, even months, after the verdicts were delivered. Wendy Murphy suggested that the jurors “should take IQ tests.” Ron Zonen described the Jackson jury as inferior to those he usually dealt with in Santa Barbara County. The length of the trial meant that those who led full lives, people with important jobs and those who ran businesses, could not make the expected six-month commitment. “So we were left with the unemployed, the underemployed, and the retired,” Zonen said. “It certainly wasn’t a jury that was as educated or accomplished as I’m used to seeing.”
Mesereau accused Zonen of calling the jurors “idiots” and retorted that the panel included a civil engineer, a man with a master’s degree in mathematics, and a retired school principal. “I thought it was a very intelligent jury,” Mesereau said. “They paid good attention, took excellent notes, and deliberated for almost nine days.”
The district attorney’s office had discovered later that some of the jurors read newspapers during the trial even though they were instructed not to, Zonen said, and that one juror was negotiating a book deal while the trial was in progress. Even if Michael Jackson had been convicted, Zonen said, the verdict would probably have been overturned. Judge Melville offered no opinion on that, instead simply observing the “incredible pressure” that the jury had coped with during the Michael Jackson trial. “We had jurors who reported being followed home by suspicious cars,” Melville said, “and others who said that flowers were sent to their homes with notes attached inviting them to appear on this or that TV talk show.”
Mesereau would be as taken aback as anyone else when, weeks after Michael Jackson’s acquittal, two jurors appeared on MSNBC to say they thought Jackson was guilty, but had voted for acquittal because they felt pressured by other members of the panel. Three of their fellow jurors were such devoted Michael Jackson fans that they had made it clear early on they would never vote to convict him, Eleanor Cook and Ray Hultman said; one woman on the panel even referred to the defendant as “my Michael.” They had caved, Hultman and Cook said, when the jury foreman threatened to have them removed unless they voted for acquittal. At the same time, both Cook, who was seventy-nine years old, and Hultman, who was sixty-two, admitted they had been shopping books and that their deals had fallen apart when Jackson was found not guilty. Cook revealed that she had brought in a medical text during deliberations in order to convince the other jurors that Jackson fit the definition of a pedophile.
Mesereau called the two jurors’ televised remarks “absurd,” and noted that they had been among the most outspoken proponents of Michael Jackson’s innocence when he spoke with the panel immediately after the trial. “The other jurors were upset with them, to put it mildly,” Mesereau recalled.
The guest of honor was nowhere to be seen at the Jackson family celebration of Michael’s acquittal held at the Chumash Casino Resort near Santa Ynez on the evening of June 17. Tito and his band performed and Janet shook hands with her brother’s fans, while Katherine Jackson assured them, “We couldn’t have done it without you.” Nearly every news organization that took note of the party, though, led with the report that one of the jurors had attended, and was quoted as saying she had blinked back tears when “Beat It” began to play on the sound system.
At Mesereau’s urging, Michael had left Neverland less than forty-eight hours after his acquittal. “I just had this gut feeling that the authorities in Santa Barbara weren’t going to let it go, that they were going to find a way to make a new case against Michael,” Mesereau said. In fact, Sneddon and his associates were already discussing how they might charge Jackson for obtaining prescription drugs under false names. A preliminary investigation of this possibility would last well into the next autumn. After a series of phone conversations with Grace Rwaramba and other intermediaries, Mesereau spoke to Michael on the evening of June 15: “I told him, ‘Michael, I know how much Neverland means to you. And that it’s a glorious, enchanted place, and that you’ve known real peace there. But I really believe that its time in your life is passed. We all have to move on. You have to move on. I don’t think you’ll ever be really safe there again. Go somewhere else.’”
Two days later, Jackson’s passport and the $300,000 posted to secure his bail were returned to him and he began to make plans to travel overseas. He had become convinced by then that he was no longer really welcome in the United States.
As a Washington Post editorial put it, “An acquittal doesn’t clear his name, it only muddies the water.” Wendy Murphy described Jackson on Fox News as “a Teflon monster,” and accused jurors of “putting targets on the backs of all—especially highly vulnerable—kids that will now come into Michael Jackson’s life.” In the New York Post, Diane Dimond wrote that Jackson was more dangerous now than ever before: “He walked out of court a free man, not guilty on all counts. But Michael Jackson is so much more than free. He now has carte blanche to live his life any way he wants, with whomever he wants . . .” Maureen Orth reported in Vanity Fair that Michael Jackson was in discussions to put together a world tour called “Framed!” in order to restore his shattered finances. “That was the most ridiculous of all the things reported about Michael,” said Dieter Wiesner. “A world tour was the very last thing Michael would have wanted to do.”
“To me, it was like watching them stick knives in his open wounds,” Mesereau said. “Michael had been drained of his strength, of his happiness, of his hope. He was so hurt by what had been said and written about him. He had been accused of things that he wasn’t even remotely capable of doing. He had told Martin Bashir that he would rather die than hurt a child, and I believed him. But he knew that many people—most of the people in the media—didn’t believe him. I really think that by the time the trial was over Michael wasn’t sure he wanted to live anymore. If not for his children, I’m not sure he would have lived as long as he did.”
On June 19, Michael flew with his children and Grace Rwaramba to Paris. Mesereau didn’t even know that his client had left the country until more than a week later, when Grace phoned Susan Yu to say they had settled in Bahrain. “I think he wanted to get as far away from Santa Barbara County as he could,” Mesereau said. “I think he was looking for the sort of safety, the sense of sanctuary that he had felt at Neverland. I didn’t think it was a bad idea. But at the same time, I think I just assumed that he would come back to the United States eventually. I mean, this was his country.”