The competing schemes, hidden agendas, and factional conflicts that churned and seethed beneath the superficially united front of the Jackson family provided all the points of vulnerability that John Branca required to break down their challenge to his administration of the Michael Jackson estate.
By the late summer of 2009, Randy Jackson was leading the opposition to Branca, in coordination with his father. Both men, and most of the Jackson family for that matter, were suspicious of the July 2, 2002, will and the Michael Jackson Family Trust document that Branca had produced out of his law firm’s files. They had what several attorneys told them were solid reasons for that suspicion. Branca’s possibly questionable decision to permit his own firm to prepare a will that named him as the executor of an estate that included one of the most valuable properties in the entire entertainment industry—a half-share of the Sony/ATV catalog—was just one of several potential fault lines.
Attorneys who specialized in probate law agreed almost unanimously on how badly drawn both the will and the trust appeared to be. Each document was much shorter, much simpler, and much less detailed than one would have expected in the disposition of such a large personal fortune. The absence of provisions that would have protected Michael Jackson’s estate from tax burdens was perplexing to a number of lawyers who had read the trust agreement. The failure was so glaring that it raised questions about a breach of fiduciary duty, several of them said. Then there was the fact that the trust had been prepared and executed in March 2002, nearly four months before the date on the signature page of the will. Commonly (though not always) a person’s will and his trust agreement are executed on the same day.
The observation that resonated most loudly among Michael’s family, though, was that his children had not been listed by their proper legal names. The oldest boy’s name in the will was written “Prince Michael Jackson, Jr.” when in fact his name is Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr. (no “Prince”); the girl’s name in the will omitted the hyphen between Paris and Michael, and the youngest was identified as “Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II” when it is actually Prince Michael Jackson II (no “Joseph”).Every one of the Jacksons, along with most of those who had spent any time with Michael during the previous decade, understood how particular he was when it came to his kids. “Michael would never sign something where his kids’ names were not spelled right,” Joe Jackson said, and for once his entire family agreed with him.
The biggest questions of all, though, continued to be how and why John Branca had managed to remain in possession of Michael Jackson’s will and trust agreements until July 2009. Jackson lawyer Brian Oxman had secured a copy of the letter with which Michael had dismissed Branca as his attorney in February 2003. In it, Branca had been “commanded” to “deliver the originals” of “all of my files, records, documents, and accounts” to the new attorney, David LeGrand. He did in fact deliver several boxes of papers to LeGrand. In 2004, after LeGrand was dismissed, Brian Oxman took possession of those documents. “I had access to every file and I had to go through them,” he said. “And I did. There was no will. There was no trust. It just showed up after he died.” Randy Jackson said (and eventually signed a sworn statement to this effect) that he had made a follow-up demand to Branca for Michael’s documents in 2004, specifically mentioning the will. Branca had told him he would turn over the documents still in his possession only if he was paid monies he claimed to be owed for recent services. Under United States law, an attorney is obligated to turn over all documents upon request whether bills have been paid or not. Branca never sent the will, Randy Jackson said.
Branca’s failure to turn over the will the first time he was asked to surrender all documents would have been a reasonable basis for referring him to the State Bar for disciplinary action, Oxman said. That he had refused two subsequent requests for his former client’s documents nearly ensured that Branca would have faced some sort of investigation from the bar, added Oxman, who was in a position to know, having been twice suspended by the State Bar himself for failing to follow proper procedures.
The Jacksons knew about Oxman’s reputation in the local media for unseemly pursuit of television airtime. The family also knew, though, as did a good many attorneys in Los Angeles, that however bad his personal judgment might be, Oxman was a smart lawyer and a terrific researcher. When he suggested hiring a team of private investigators to see if there were still more reasons to be suspicious of the Michael Jackson will that Branca had submitted to Judge Beckloff, Randy Jackson agreed and so, eventually, did the rest of the family.
In October 2009, Janet Jackson hosted the family meeting at which the contents of the report were revealed. The very first fact laid out on the table was the most startling: Michael Jackson had been in New York City on July 7, 2002, the date on which, according to the handwritten annotation on the signature page of the will, he had executed that document in Los Angeles.
The date in question had fallen right in the midst of the four days in the summer of 2002 when Michael Jackson was laying a very public siege to Sony Music and its chairman, Tommy Mottola, a period in which he had been seen, photographed, and written about as he rolled up Madison Avenue in a double decker bus packed with protesters from Harlem organized by the Reverend Al Sharpton, waving a photograph of Mottola upon which he had drawn horns and a pitchfork. All of the city’s daily newspapers, including the New York Times, had chronicled the entire drama. News photographs of Michael Jackson had been taken in New York on July 6, July 8, and July 9, but, oddly, not on July 7. Michael had spent most of that day hiding out in his hotel suite, his bodyguards said, blistered by the backlash against him throughout the recording industry and in the national media. He had, however, attended a meeting in Harlem during the afternoon, according to Al Sharpton.
The private investigators had also gotten hold of the Interfor report that was commissioned by Michael Jackson (through David LeGrand) back in late 2002. “Interfor’s investigation found a tight relationship between Branca and Tommy Mottola,” the second paragraph of the report on Branca began, “primarily in regard to the affairs of Jackson. Interfor had begun investigating the flow of funds from Jackson through Mottola and Branca into offshore accounts in the Caribbean,” the company stated in the dossier provided to Jackson, but there was no actual evidence provided to support Interfor’s claim of “a scheme to defraud Jackson and his empire by Mottola and Branca by diverting funds offshore.” Even Brian Oxman recognized that Interfor was making accusations against Branca that the company couldn’t back up, while at the same time pleading for “additional time and a proper budget.” What he himself could prove, though, Oxman said, was that Michael had terminated Branca a short time after the Interfor report was delivered to him because he firmly believed that his attorney was in cahoots with Tommy Mottola.
All the Jacksons knew was that Michael had spent most of the next six years insisting that he wanted nothing to do with the attorney and that no one who was in business with him should also be in business with Branca. “Even after Michael died I found notes that he had written to himself,” Katherine Jackson said: “John Branca has nothing else to do with my business from this day on, from this day forward, nothing.” Was it reasonable to believe that in June 2009, just days before his death, Michael would suddenly do an about-face and hire Branca back? Taking all of what they knew together, there was plenty of evidence to challenge John Branca’s right to serve as the administrator of the Michael Jackson estate, Oxman told the Jacksons. This was a winning case, in his opinion.
Armed with all the facts that Oxman and the private investigators had assembled, it looked as if Katherine Jackson and her children might be poised to try to push John Branca aside and seize at least partial control of the estate and its assets. The family’s facade of a united front, though, was cracking into pieces. The world outside the Hayvenhurst compound might not see it, but Branca did.
The weak points were several, and located mainly in the characters of the Jackson brothers. Randy was the one pushing hardest to take Branca down, but the rest of the family was concerned that Randy also imagined that he might take Branca’s place as a trustee. Branca and his attorneys were continually telling people what a rotten character Randy was. And in fact the Jacksons themselves viewed Randy as the most selfish and conniving among them. He was a chip off the old block, visitors to the family compound said, far more like Joe than any of his brothers—and no one intended that to be a compliment. His brothers and sisters all remembered that Michael had accused Randy not only of entangling him in dirty deals and mismanaging his affairs during 2004 and 2005, but also of stealing from him. Katherine knew Randy as the son who came to visit only when there was something he wanted, even though he had two children living in the Hayvenhurst house. She wasn’t about to let him take over running things.
Jermaine, as always, could be gotten to. He was weak for women, but took little responsibility for the children they bore him. Margaret Maldonado, the former common-law wife who had borne him two sons, said she had never received a penny from Jermaine, even with a court order allowing her to collect it. “I just said, ‘Forget it,’” explained Maldonado, who supported her sons by setting up an agency that represented photographers and stylists in Hollywood. “It wasn’t worth going to court and fighting with him.” Alejandra and her attorneys, though, had kept careful track of the more than $90,000 Jermaine owed her. The estate was unwilling to clean up Jermaine’s child support arrears (or Randy’s either) but sent a message that it might help him earn the money to do it himself. Joel Katz suggested that he might be able to get Jermaine a recording contract at Universal. Branca sent a message that the estate could find a place for Jermaine in the Cirque du Soleil show deal they were negotiating, performing live with Janet and collecting fat checks, but of course only if he was on board with the men in charge. We should try to work with Branca and them, Jermaine began telling Katherine.
Jackie was the son who visited Hayvenhurst most often, spending nearly every other weekend there, and was in some sense the estate’s inside man. Jackie had been friends with his former high school classmate John McClain since the two were teenagers and was the one who introduced McClain to the Jackson family. Now each nearly sixty, the two men continued to speak on the phone almost daily and it was McClain who had helped Jackie win the right to make a profit from his failing clothing business by selling Michael Jackson designer T-shirts. Branca and the estate would only let Jackie sell five hundred shirts at a time, but that was enough to bring in $10,000, $15,000, or even $20,000 a month, which was a lot better than Jackie had been doing before. And McClain said he was working on Branca to let Jackie expand, that it would come in time.
McClain was also talking regularly to Katherine Jackson, calling her just about every morning to chat for a few minutes. He still called Mrs. Jackson “Mother,” just as he had done decades earlier, and promised that he was looking out for her interests. According to Katherine, McClain professed to dislike Branca every bit as much as any of the Jacksons did, and told her he was protecting her from the man and his law dogs. “I’m on your side, Mother,” John McClain told her. “I’m there for you.”
Katherine was starting to wonder. McClain had sent an air treatment system he raved about to the Hayvenhurst estate that sat boxed in the utility room for weeks. He kept calling to ask if the Jacksons had set it up, and “seemed really intent on making sure they did,” a family advisor said. Suspicious that there was some sort of listening device secreted inside, Joe and Randy had convinced Katherine to move the box, still unopened, out into the garage.
Unable to comprehend the financial analysis of the estate submitted by Branca and his cocounsels, Katherine’s confidence in her own representation was being shaken by the constant complaints of Joe and Randy Jackson. Her probate attorney Burt Levitch, widely regarded as one of the best lawyers in Los Angeles, was actually preparing to take exactly the sort of aggressive actions Joe and Randy urged, including one court filing that accused the executors of submitting a fraudulent will and another that demanded the appointment of a Jackson family member as the estate’s third executor. Doubts about what Levitch was up to intensified within the Jackson family during October when the estate requested a hearing on its motion to greatly expand the powers of Branca and McClain, allowing the two executors the right to negotiate deals and settle debts at their own discretion. Not long after the hearing was scheduled, Randy Jackson convinced his mother to fire Levitch for dragging his feet and to hire Adam Streisand, a partner at Loeb and Loeb who had been involved in courtroom battles over more celebrity estates than just about any other lawyer in the country, including those of Marlon Brando, Ray Charles, William Randolph Hearst, and Michael Crichton. That Streisand was best known as a litigator appeared to signal that Mrs. Jackson was about to go to war. The new man didn’t exactly get off to a scintillating start in his first appearance as Katherine’s attorney, though, when Streisand missed most of the October 22 hearing at which Judge Beckloff had already agreed to expand the administrative powers of Branca and McClain. After listening to Howard Weitzman explain that the executors had initiated deals that would bring in at least $100 million in earnings to the estate, much of that money resulting from the This Is It movie that would premiere the following week, Beckloff ruled that the pair should have greater freedom to settle with creditors and negotiate new contracts. “I want this estate to move forward,” the judge said.
His client Mrs. Jackson continued to feel that the executors were keeping her in the dark about both the deals they had made and their plans for the future, Streisand told Beckloff when he finally arrived in court. She and the entire Jackson family were frustrated with their inability “to get this case going,” Streisand told Beckloff, seeming to suggest that Katherine Jackson still intended to challenge Branca’s control of the estate. The judge’s response was not encouraging. Branca and McClain were in charge of the estate for now and would remain in charge for the time being, he said, “And while we are proceeding in this posture, I want Mrs. Jackson to have information about what is going on, and I don’t want to be in court all the time.”
Local TV stations reported that Streisand had been hired because of “new evidence” that questioned the signature on Michael Jackson’s will, and that the attorney would be presenting it to the judge in his next court appearance. And in fact, Streisand doubted the will’s legitimacy, according to Katherine Jackson. The attorney also told her, though, Mrs. Jackson said, that she’d be well advised not to challenge the document. If she did not prevail, Katherine could be cut out entirely, Streisand said. Even should she prevail in court, if Michael was found to be intestate his estate was likely to be thrown into probate and chewed up by whatever bank was chosen to run it. Challenging John Branca was not necessarily a smart move either; Branca probably understood the value of Michael Jackson’s assets and how to expand that value better than anyone else alive. All things considered, allowing him to remain in charge might be the lesser of evils. The best course, Streisand said, according to Katherine, was to make peace with the man and to begin working with the estate. Perhaps Branca could win her “a seat at the table” by arranging for a Jackson family member to be named as the third executor.
Katherine suggested that her grandson Taj might be that person; one of Michael’s favorite nephews (along with Tito’s two other sons),Taj was a solid, dependable young man with good sense. Branca flatly refused, claiming that to name a Jackson family member as an executor would create a clear conflict of interest. By early November, Streisand had convinced Mrs. Jackson that continuing the fight was counterproductive and that Braca was prepared to make certain concessions, including an increase in her monthly allowance, if she ended it. Also, Streisand wanted her to distance herself from Joe, who seemed determined to draw Katherine into his own bid for a piece of the estate.
Joe Jackson remained intent on putting his one truly talented son to work for him, even in death, and his campaign continued to be the featured program of the ongoing family drama as it played out in the media. One day after the This Is It movie made its debut and raked in $20 million at the box office, Joe told the TV program Extra that his son was “worth more dead than alive.” For once, Joe seemed to realize what had just come out of his mouth and quickly added that, “I’d rather see him alive.” Three days after this, the Jackson patriarch was filing a petition in Judge Beckloff’s court to request “his own independent family allowance” from an estate that had “earned more than $100 million in the first seven [7] weeks following Michael Jackson’s death.” He needed $15,425 per month to cover his expenses, Joe’s moving papers claimed, including $2,500 per month for eating out, $2,000 for air travel, and $3,000 for hotel bills. Joe had worked out some sort of contingency arrangement with the one attorney he knew would accept an opportunity to stand before the TV cameras in lieu of a cash retainer: Brian Oxman.
Joe was demanding that Katherine weigh in on his behalf, but Streisand was only one among many who warned her that would be a mistake. Being seen as attached to Joe would not only alienate fans, but also provide ammunition to anyone who wanted to argue that she should not have custody of Michael’s children. It was time to come to terms with Branca and get on with things.
On Tuesday morning, November 10, 2009, Streisand arrived in Judge Beckloff’s courtroom to make the stunning announcement that Katherine Jackson was withdrawing her objections to John Branca and John McClain’s continuing to serve as the estate’s administrators. His client felt that it was “high time that the fighting end,” Streisand told the judge, and was making this decision in the best interests of her grandchildren. “She feels that Mr. Branca and Mr. McClain have been doing an admirable job,” Streisand went on. “We’re going to try to partner with them and work closely with them to make sure that the estate is doing the best that it can for the legacy of Michael Jackson, for the kids, most importantly.”
He and Mrs. Jackson had reached this decision independently, Streisand told the judge. His client had actually kept it a secret from the rest of the family until a meeting with them all on the previous Saturday, and he was pleased to report that the Jacksons all agreed with what she was doing. Well, no, not Joe Jackson, Streisand told Beckloff; he hadn’t been invited to the meeting, but the entire rest of the family was present, and not one of them had objected to Mrs. Jackson’s decision.
Brian Oxman was objecting, though, loudly and angrily when he stepped out of the courtroom to speak to the media horde. Katherine Jackson’s reversal was “one of the most despicable displays” he’d ever seen in a legal proceeding, Oxman declared. By making a secret deal with Branca and the estate attorneys behind her husband’s back, Katherine had “reneged on her obligation to her family,” Oxman added. Neither he nor Joe was going to simply stand by and let it happen.
Streisand shot back by telling reporters that this accusation of a secret deal was “not only baseless, but just a product of Mr. Oxman’s imagination.” There was no deal and Mrs. Jackson’s decision had been just as much of a surprise to the estate as it was to the rest of the Jackson family. “Before I announced my decision [to the estate’s lawyers], Mrs. Jackson and I were the only two people in the world who knew what I was going to say.” As for Joe Jackson, Streisand added, “He has no rights in the assets of the estate.”
At the same time he’d denied Joe’s right to challenge the executors, Judge Beckloff had ruled that Michael Jackson’s father could pursue his petition for an allowance, though the judge could scarcely conceal his amusement when Brian Oxman told him, “The executors discriminated against my client by not giving him an allowance and giving one to Katherine Jackson.” A hearing to consider the matter was scheduled for December 10, 2009, then postponed until January 2010.
Through Adam Streisand, Katherine let it be known that she wouldn’t oppose Joe’s request for his own allowance. The lawyer who had just been appointed to serve as the guardian ad litem (legal representative) of Michael Jackson’s children, however, insisted that Joe Jackson had no right to any money from the estate. Margaret Lodise, one of the top trust and estate attorneys in Los Angeles, argued that Joe was not entitled to any stipend for the same reason he was not permitted to challenge the executors: Michael had not named him as a beneficiary of the estate. Lodise quickly lined up as a John Branca ally, siding with the estate administrator when Katherine Jackson objected to elements of the merchandising and memorabilia deals that Branca had made with Bravado, and again when Branca insisted that Mrs. Jackson had to sign confidentiality agreements before she was allowed to see any of the contracts he had either negotiated or was in the process of negotiating. Judge Beckloff ruled in Branca’s favor on both points. So far, the judge had come down on the executors’ side every time a member of the Jackson family challenged Branca. On the question of Joe Jackson’s petition allowance, though, Beckloff announced he was putting off a decision until May 2010.
With both momentum and the judge on their side, Branca seized that moment to submit a request to Judge Beckloff that he and John McClain, in their capacities as the special administrators of the Michael Jackson estate, be permitted to collect and split a 10 percent commission on the earnings of the estate, twice what they had been getting and more than triple the statutory fee for executors. They were asking for such “extraordinary compensation,” Branca and McClain told the court, because they were providing “extraordinary services,” in part compelled by the relentless efforts of Joe Jackson to collect an inheritance that had not been left to him, and by Katherine Jackson’s attempts to gain control of the estate for herself. Added to that, they had been forced to deal not only with the eleven lawsuits that were pending against Michael Jackson at the time of his death, but also with the dozens of others that had been either filed or threatened in the months since.
The estate had in fact swiftly dispatched the two most grandiose court claims, made by AllGood Productions and Raymone Bain. The latter lawsuit was dismissed in May 2010 by a New York court judge who scarcely bothered to conceal his disdain for such a meritless money grab, ruling that the release document Bain had signed on December 27, 2007, in exchange for a payment of $488,820.05 had “unambiguously covered ‘all monies, known or unknown,’ owed under ‘any and all agreements whether written or verbal.’” The estate had not even needed to show the court that Bain was not involved in making the deal with AEG for the O2 Arena shows. Still, the onslaught of court filings, in particular those made by the Jackson family, had created a working climate in which their own “business reputations and the character and reputation of Michael Jackson were repeatedly assaulted by personal and unfounded attacks,” the executors explained (through Howard Weitzman) to Judge Beckloff, forcing them to answer back publicly in order to protect the Michael Jackson brand. To a lot of onlookers, it appeared as if Branca was concerned about protecting himself, but as the man running the estate, Branca could claim that the complaints made against him were actually assaults on Michael Jackson and Michael Jackson’s children.
The executors were also being forced to sort through scores of financial claims being made against the estate, Weitzman told the court. The executors were offsetting such payments, Weitzman explained, by pursuing millions of dollars in funds that had been “improperly lost” when various business partners took advantage of Michael Jackson’s drug addiction. Their work on all of this was complicated, the executors pleaded to the court, by the fact that Michael Jackson had neglected to pay taxes during the years 2006, 2007, and 2008, and made no quarterly payments in 2009.
Even as the executors unwound Mr. Jackson’s debt and sorted through the myriad claims made against him and his legacy, Weitzman pointed out, Branca and McClain were negotiating deals that would yield hundreds of millions of dollars to the estate. At the same time, they were required to engage the dozens upon dozens of people who were attempting to profit from either real or imagined relationships with Michael Jackson. Christian Audigier insisted that he and Michael had collaborated on a collection of T-shirts, jackets, and sequined gloves that he was anxious to put into production, and produced assorted e-mails as documentation. At the same time, the estate was forced to involve itself in such sleazy situations as the one created by Eric Muhammad, a former member of Michael Jackson’s security detail who had been caught on videotape attempting to sell a surgical mask he said was worn by the entertainer the night before he died. “This is a very personal item,” Muhammad had told the businessman to whom he offered the mask at a price of $150,000. “This is the only way I could, you know, preserve it. This was his and you are more than welcome to DNA it. It still has his makeup on it. It still smells like him.”
Dealing with all of that, and more, had forced the executors to keep a seven-days-a-week, fourteen-hours-a-day work schedule, Branca and McClain pleaded to Beckloff when they requested that the judge allow them to collect 70 percent of what they were owed, pending the court’s approval of the full amount. In addition, the two added, they needed more than $3 million to pay the assorted law firms who had handled matters for the estate that ranged from probate issues to extortionary demands.
What Weitzman didn’t mention (along with the fact that his was one of the firms collecting those enormous legal fees) was that increasing the combined commission paid to the executors from 3 percent to 10 percent would potentially add tens of millions of dollars to their individual earnings—possibly hundreds of millions if they remained in charge for a decade or two. Weitzman defended the arrangement as one by which the executors had forfeited guaranteed compensation to gamble on their ability to make the estate profitable: “Basically, the coexecutors only get paid if they generate income for the beneficiary of the estate.”
Branca and McClain achieved total victory when Judge Beckloff not only granted each of the requests they had made in their petition for extraordinary compensation as “special administrators” of the Michael Jackson estate, but also agreed that they should be paid immediately. He was making this decision in part, the judge noted, because Katherine Jackson had decided to abandon her efforts to supplant Branca and McClain, and now seemed anxious to work with them. Finally, they could all get on with things, the judge said.
While he awaited a ruling on his allowance petition, Joe was trying to make ends meet promoting his record company whenever a microphone was placed in front of him. He had also been meeting in Las Vegas with Gary, Indiana, mayor Rudy Clay to discuss plans for the “Jackson Family Project,” a museum, hotel, and performing center complex that a spokesperson for the mayor conceded was still in “the proposal and concept stage.” Brian Oxman filed an appeal of Judge Beckloff’s ruling that Joe had no standing as a representative of Michael’s estate, but it was clear by early January that the attorney and his client had come to believe that cobbling together some sort of wrongful death claim was now their best shot at achieving both a big money award and a continuing presence on cable television.
In late January 2010, Oxman filed a motion in Los Angeles Superior Court demanding that Michael Jackson’s medical records be turned over to his father, so as to ascertain the exact cause of death. The filing also complained that the Michael Jackson estate was refusing to file a case on Joe Jackson’s behalf, forcing Michael’s father to incur further expenses, which, Oxman argued, should be paid by the estate. Attorneys for the estate questioned Joe’s “intentions” by implying what everyone already knew for certain: If they found any basis for a wrongful death claim, Joe and his attorney were certain to make such a claim.
The two were already moving in that direction by March 29, 2010, when Oxman began to outline the case he would be making against Dr. Conrad Murray, beginning with the claim that doctors at the UCLA Medical Center had briefly detected a heartbeat in Michael Jackson’s chest while trying to save him. This indicated that, if paramedics “had been called right away, chances are he could have been revived,” Oxman observed. Two days later, the attorney pledged that his client would file a lawsuit against Dr. Murray within the next ninety days. Describing what he knew about the variety and quantity of the drugs that had been injected into Michael Jackson’s bloodstream, Oxman told reporters that it was like playing Russian roulette with a revolver that had bullets in all of its chambers.
Most observers assumed that Joe’s real aim was to somehow bind himself to Katherine and collect a piece of whatever came her way. Katherine and Joe would be reunited that spring when they were named, along with Jermaine, as codefendants in a court claim made by Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Segye Times newspaper. Reverend Moon and his Unification Church had been waiting almost fifteen years for this opportunity. Back in the early 1990s, the Moonies had filed lawsuits that demanded the return of all the money and gifts they had doled out in their campaign to stage a concert tour of South Korea headlined by Michael Jackson. Michael himself had settled with the Segye Times back in 1992. Katherine and Joe, though, failed to show up when the case against them went to trial in 1994 and the Moonies had won a $4 million judgment against the couple. Two years later, in 1996, the Unification Church moved to take possession of the Hayvenhurst estate. Joe and Katherine transferred ownership of the estate to Michael and La Toya, then in 1999 listed the Moonies’ judgment against them as part of a $24 million bankruptcy filing. The property transfer to La Toya, though, had provided the basis for a fraud claim that exempted the Moonies’ judgment from discharge in bankruptcy court. The Reverend Moon’s attorneys let the claim lie dormant for years, but then pressed it vigorously in the late summer of 2009 when they learned that Katherine Jackson had, arguably, inherited 40 percent of the Michael Jackson estate. They wanted the full amount of the original judgment against the Jacksons, plus interest, the Moonies demanded in their 2010 Los Angeles court filing, which brought the total balance due to more than $13 million. In order to collect, they moved once again to foreclose on the Hayvenhurst property.
Through Howard Weitzman, Branca offered a shaken Katherine Jackson a way to both separate herself from Joe and to insulate herself from the Moonies claim: The estate would agree to pay the $5 million mortgage on the Hayvenhurst mansion if ownership of the property was transferred to the estate. Katherine would be guaranteed the right to live at Hayvenhurst free of cost for the remainder of her natural life, and would be well taken care of without possessing any assets that could be attached by the Moonies.
It was his bitterness about his sense that Katherine was being taken care of while he was cast aisde, sources close to the family said, that had prompted Joe to sit down with the News of the World in early June 2010 for a presumably paid interview in which he seemed to blame his estranged wife for their son’s death. When they had visited the mortuary where Michael’s body was being prepared for burial, they saw their son’s corpse lying on a table and Katherine broke down into sobs, Joe said, “but I didn’t give her a hug because I was mad at her for crying.” She could have saved Michael if she had listened during May 2009 when he told her their son was “looking kinda funny and frail,” Joe said. He asked Katherine to spend some time with Michael and “keep him cheered up,” Joe went on, and the two of them argued after Katherine refused because she didn’t want to invade her son’s privacy. After Michael’s death, “I said, ‘This would never have happened if you had went and been with him.’”
Adam Streisand replied on Katherine’s behalf by observing, “The world knows who Joe Jackson is, and he seems bent on never letting us forget it.”
Joe Jackson’s lawsuit against Conrad Murray was filed by Brian Oxman on a date the two knew was certain to maximize media coverage—June 25, 2010, the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death. Sure enough, the court claim became the lead-in for any number of TV news stories about the events of the day, which had included the first real mingling of fans and Jackson family members at Michael’s grave site. The Jacksons had pulled their private security guard from the Sanctuary of Ascension back in February, six months after Michael’s interment, arranging for Forest Lawn security to monitor the crypt for as many as twelve hours out of every day. By early March, though, the memorial park’s management had decided that dedicating its manpower to the observation of a single burial spot was unreasonable and instructed its guards to patrol as usual. In early May, Lisa Marie Presley had visited Michael’s tomb and afterward expressed dismay at the empty space surrounding it, posting a plea on her MySpace page for fans to fill that space with sunflowers, Michael’s favorites. The owner of the sunflowerguy.com Web site was quick to seize the opportunity and delivered three hundred bushels of sunflowers in black vases. Lisa Marie had returned with her own bushel of sunflowers, in a purple frame inscribed with the words, “I will always love you.” Some of Michael’s fans brought flowers also, but just as many arrived at Holly Terrace with the Sharpies they used to inscribe the sarcophagus with various dedications. Security was out in force at the Great Mausoleum on June 25, to enforce strict rules on fan decorum that included no releasing of doves or balloons, and no sale of memorabilia.
On September 15, 2010, Katherine Jackson and her attorneys filed their own eighteen-page wrongful death lawsuit, accusing AEG of being responsible for Michael Jackson’s death. Mrs. Jackson’s suit alleged that the company had failed in “multiple duties of reasonable care,” and named its causes of action as breach of contract, fraud, negligence, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and employer responsibility. Among the few indisputable passages in Mrs. Jackson’s court filing was a description of the deal between her son and AEG: The company would “put up the funds and production expenses” for the O2 concerts while Michael provided “the talent and fame to make the venture a success.” The claim grew murky, though, when Katherine’s attorneys alleged that AEG had advanced large sums of money to Michael Jackson (and provided him with the Carolwood chateau) because they knew that if the London production flopped, the company could seize Michael’s assets, including his stake in the Sony/ATV song catalog, to recover its losses. This was, the lawsuit contended, a way of forcing Michael to hold up his end of the deal despite serious health problems. AEG became upset when Michael missed “some rehearsals” in spring 2009, the lawsuit went on, and insisted that he separate himself from his “treating physician,” Arnold Klein, then hired Conrad Murray to take Klein’s place. “By injecting themselves between Michael Jackson and his treating physician, and telling Michael Jackson what to do medically,” Mrs. Jackson’s attorneys concluded, “AEG committed independent negligence against Jackson.” Specifically, AEG was accused of failing to provide “key lifesaving equipment” (a defibrillator) that should have been available to the physician attending to Michael Jackson in his home and of inadequately monitoring the cardiologist it had hired to take care of him.
Michael himself was portrayed in his mother’s lawsuit as a helpless, hapless pawn of corporate malfeasance, one who was “confused, easily frightened, unable to remember, obsessive, and disoriented” in the weeks preceding his death. “He was cold and shivering during the summer rehearsals for his show, and as shown in photographs of him, he uncharacteristically wore heavy clothing during the rehearsals, while other dancers wore scant clothing and were perspiring from the heat,” according to the court filing. However, instead of cutting back on Michael’s rehearsal schedule, AEG had “insisted that he attend every rehearsal in a grueling schedule, threatening that if he missed even one more they would cancel the tour,” the lawsuit went on, all this so that the company “could reap staggering profits from the tour.”
The “great trauma and emotional distress” that Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. had suffered by witnessing the injuries “caused by AEG” that led to his father’s death was cited as a basis for damages. Paris also had been present in her father’s bedroom as Conrad Murray attempted to revive Michael Jackson on the morning of June 25, 2009, but, curiously, her pain and suffering were not listed as a cause of action. No precise amount of money was claimed in Katherine Jackson’s lawsuit, but the demand for economic, noneconomic, and punitive damages meant that AEG could be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars if Michael’s mother’s claims were sustained at trial.
“The purpose of this lawsuit is to prove to the world the truth about what happened to Michael Jackson, once and for all,” the attorney who had filed it on Katherine Jackson’s behalf, Brian J. Panish, said in a statement released to the press. Money might enter into it as well, of course, given that Panish was best known for having won the biggest personal injury and product liability award in United States history, $4.9 billion, in a lawsuit that found the General Motors Corporation guilty of selling Chevy Malibus with faulty fuel systems.
AEG’s own attorneys denounced the lawsuit as “meritless.” Contrary to the description of Michael Jackson in his mother’s claim, AEG’s attorneys wrote in an answer filed with the court more than three months later, the entertainer “was not helpless or incompetent; he lived in his own home, negotiated his own contracts, engaged his own attorneys, and cared for his own family.” Jackson “controlled his own medical care and hired his own longtime personal physician,” the company’s papers stated. AEG “did not choose or hire Dr. Murray, it merely conducted negotiations aimed at retaining him as an independent contractor on the tour.” All AEG’s executives knew of Dr. Murray, aside from the fact that Michael had chosen him, the company’s attorneys argued, was that he was “a licensed physician with no history of malpractice.” Clearly it was unforeseeable that Dr. Murray would administer propofol in a personal residence “and that Michael Jackson would die as a result.” This lawsuit should be thrown out immediately, AEG’s attorneys argued, finally, because Katherine Jackson and her grandchildren “lack standing to bring these claims other than as wrongful death theories” and their action had been filed, in effect, on behalf of Michael Jackson himself. Another month passed before Judge Yvette Palazuelos denied AEG’s motion to dismiss, though she also ruled that Katherine Jackson’s attorneys would have to show actual evidence of fraud, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy to prevail at trial: “If the object was to get him to rehearsals, I don’t see that as a wrongful or illegal act.”
Among the many specters raised for AEG by the Katherine Jackson claim was that, if the case ever reached the point of determining damages, the company might have no choice but to argue that Michael Jackson was, as Joe Jackson so choicely observed, “worth more dead than alive.” Billboard estimated that Michael Jackson had generated $1 billion in income in the first year after his death, an amount that exceeded what all but a handful of artists produce in their entire careers. The Jackson estate had collected more than $250 million of those earnings, approximately five times what was taken in that same year by the most valuable estate in the history of the entertainment industry: Elvis Presley’s. The 31 million Michael Jackson albums sold worldwide in 2009 had far eclipsed that of any other recording artist, and the 8.3 million of those albums sold in the United States were nearly twice the number sold by the second best selling artist, Taylor Swift. Sony had paid the estate an advance of $60 million for the rights to the This Is It film, which grossed $261 million worldwide. The merchandising deal with Bravado and the dance game licensed through Ubisoft Entertainment had earned the estate a $26 million advance. The MiJac Music catalog had spun off payments of $25 million on the copyrights to Michael’s own compositions, due to radio play that had increased ten-fold after his death. Sony/ATV had paid the estate the $11 million due under its agreement with Michael, and John Branca was said to be negotiating a new deal that would pay twice that amount annually. The reissue of Michael’s autobiography Moonwalk, plus his piece of AEG’s commemorative ticket sales and other ancillary income, had added another $25 million to the coffers. No one knew how much the estate would earn from the two Michael Jackson–themed shows it had licensed to Cirque du Soleil, but $250 million was the guarantee on the contract that Branca eventually negotiated with Sony. The deal gave the company the right to distribute Michael’s recordings through 2017, along with ten Jackson albums that would be made up of unreleased material, remixes, and reissues of his classic albums, plus DVDs of Michael’s music videos. Not only was the Sony contract worth more than twice the $120 million that Madonna would earn from the “blockbuster” deal she had made with Live Nation, but the Jackson estate had retained control of the enormously valuable merchandising and “likeness” rights that Madonna was forced to surrender. And of course Michael would not be touring, as Madonna was required to do to earn her millions.
What was most startling about Michael Jackson’s postlife success was how completely death seemed to have rehabilitated his public image. “His sainthood began the moment that he died,” David Reeder, a vice president at GreenLight, the licensing agency that handled the estates of Johnny Cash and Steve McQueen, among others, observed to the New York Times. “That’s been beneficial for the estate. They haven’t had to overcome a lot of obstacles that might have made him less desirable commercially.” John Branca wanted to make sure that he and John McClain received credit for how redeemed Michael was in the eyes of the American people. “We felt we needed to restore Michael’s image,” Branca told the Times, “and the first building block of that was the movie. People came away from that movie with a completely different view of Michael. Rather than being this out-of-control eccentric, they saw him as the ultimate artist, the ultimate perfectionist, but at the same time respectful of other people.” The estate’s executors were praised in the New York Times for having made maximum use of both the passion and the fascination that people felt for the entertainer. “What they’ve done brilliantly is that they’ve taken advantage of the emotion surrounding the tragic and unexpected passing of Michael Jackson,” said the Elvis Presley estate’s Robert F. X. Sillerman, “and [they’ve] done it in a way that’s tasteful yet profitable, and that’s challenging.”
Not everyone was impressed. “What they’ve done, anyone could have done,” scoffed Tohme Tohme. “They’re selling Michael Jackson to a world that wants Michael Jackson. It’s not difficult.”