For the moment, it wouldn’t matter what questions remained about the will or the signature on the trust. It wouldn’t matter whether John Branca failed to resign as the executor of the Michael Jackson estate as he should have or kept Michael’s will if he had an obligation to return it. It wouldn’t matter what had happened to the will that made Al Malnik the executor of the Jackson estate, or why Michael had asked in the spring of 2009 for the creation of a new will and trust agreement that made no mention of John Branca or John McClain. It wouldn’t matter whether Branca really had been hired back as Jackson’s lawyer a week before Michael’s death.
All of those questions were moot because in the end the struggle wasn’t about right or wrong, good or evil, justice or injustice. It was about money, Michael Jackson’s money, and there was enough of that to go around for everyone—everyone except Michael himself, of course. There’d never been enough money for him because what he wanted and needed most, money couldn’t buy.
Nearly as often as he lamented the childhood he lost to celebrity, Michael had cursed the day he bought the Beatles catalog. He regularly compared himself to the boy with the golden goose: Everyone he met wanted to take it away from him. His mother Katherine said it was Michael’s wealth far more than his fame that had set him apart from the rest of the family and then separated the rest of them from one another. The resentment, the infighting, the scheming—all of that had been much more about Michael’s millions than his superstar status, Mrs. Jackson said. Michael and his mother had always been so much alike, full of the same sweetness and sentiment, and so similarly blind to their own contradictions. In much the same tone in which Michael mourned the carefree youth he had never really known, Katherine reminisced about their days back in Gary, and said again and again that they had really been so much happier then, so much more of a family. She would never have gone back if given the choice, of course, and neither would Michael, but it was lovely to imagine for a moment a world in which they might have.
His mother wasn’t the only one in his family Michael loved, but she was the only one he trusted, and for years it was through her that his generosity had been distributed to the other Jacksons. Now, when he was gone, it was Katherine who would decide exactly how they divided whatever would ultimately be obtained for the Katherine Jackson Trust—half of Michael’s estate after the donations to charity, according to Mrs. Jackson’s advisors. It was a burden, Katherine said. They would all be coming after her, all trying to tell her what she should do and how she should do it. She already felt a clearer sense of what it must have been like for Michael.
In fact, family intrigues were already set in motion. For reasons of his own, John McClain had leaked the news to the oldest Jackson son, Jackie, that this new lawyer of Katherine Jackson’s had cut some sort of deal that might potentially give Katherine control of hundreds of millions of dollars in Michael Jackson estate assets. Some of Mrs. Jackson’s advisors believed that McClain was trying to scuttle the deal, fearful that if it went through Katherine would discover that he had been less than candid with her about how much money he was making as an executor of the estate. Whether that was true or not, Jackie had passed along what he heard from McClain to his father and brothers. Joe and Randy immediately began lobbying to stop the deal Perry Sanders had made, whatever it was, insisting that to leave Branca in charge was a mistake, that the only way to go was to take him down and gain control of the estate themselves.
In early May 2011, Joe won a sort of victory over Katherine when his wrongful death lawsuit against Conrad Murray was tied to Mrs. Jackson’s lawsuit against AEG. Judge Yvette Palazuelos, who was already hearing Katherine’s case, had scheduled a May 3 hearing on the “notice of related cases” filed by Brian Oxman on Joe’s behalf. Katherine’s attorneys fiercely opposed the attempt to tie Joe’s suit to hers, insisting to Judge Palazuelos that Mrs. Jackson’s claim “has distinct factual and legal issues of AEG’s direct negligence and whether or not it employed Dr. Conrad Murray.” AEG also objected to joining the two cases. “Whereas the vast majority of the factual allegations in Joseph Jackson’s complaint concern the day of Michael Jackson’s death and subsequent events, the allegations in Katherine Jackson’s complaint almost entirely concern events prior to Michael Jackson’s death,” the company’s attorneys argued in court. The judge, though, had sided with Oxman’s argument. Joe was now certain to be a major player in whatever went forward and to have his own piece of the action. It was likely that, in order to streamline the process and cut down on the cost of litigation, the two “related cases” would eventually be combined into a single lawsuit.
Other family members and factotums looked to cash in on different fronts. Janet, Jermaine, and La Toya all published books. Frank Cascio had announced a book, too, and Dieter Wiesner said he was working on one also.
Frank Dileo intended to write his own tell-all book as well, but was confronted with a chapter he hadn’t expected to write. The sixty-three-year-old Dileo, who had suffered from heart problems for years, checked into a hospital near his home in Pittsburgh in March 2011 to prepare for open-heart surgery that included a bypass and valve replacement. “Complications” had swiftly ensued and Dileo suffered a heart attack on the operating table that caused an interruption in the supply of oxygen to his brain. He remained in a coma for weeks, and never fully regained consciousness before his death on August 24, 2011.
Dr. Arnold Klein had no immediate plans for a tell-all book though at that point in his life could have used the revenue. Confined mostly to a wheelchair and denying reports he was afflicted with multiple sclerosis, Arnie was also broke. According to Klein, his assistant Jason Pfeiffer had teamed up with his accountant Muhammad Khilji to clean him out. Klein was claiming embezzlement in reports to the Beverly Hills police department, but Marc Schaffel doubted it was quite that cut and dry. “I know for a fact that every Friday they used to give Klein a packet of papers to sign—payroll, checks, documents, and basically anything they put in front of him, he signed. He didn’t even look at what it was.” It sounded eerily like Michael Jackson. “But I don’t think even Michael was that careless,” Schaffel said.
Among the papers bearing the doctor’s signature were powers of attorney that had allowed the two men not only full access to all of his bank accounts, Klein said, but also the ability to take out equity loans on all of his homes: the historically registered $9 million mansion on Windsor Square in Los Angeles, the $12 million Frank Gehry–designed beach house in Laguna, and the $1.9 million desert retreat in Palm Springs. Pfeiffer and Khilji had leased themselves Bentleys in his name, the doctor said, and had opened credit card accounts billed to their employer with spending limits so high they could cover purchases well into six figures. In January 2011, Dr. Klein was forced to file bankruptcy.
Desperate, Klein had gone to the FBI, claiming wildly that his accountant, Khilji, had stolen his money to turn it over to a terrorist organization. “Arnie’s lost it a little bit,” Schaffel said. “He’s saying, ‘Those weren’t my signatures,’ then he’s saying, ‘I didn’t know what I was signing.’ He thinks he’s gonna sue them civilly and get the money back. I said, ‘Arnie, the money’s gone. They’ve spent this money like water.’ Not only is all his money gone, but they left him ten million in debt. They mortgaged all his properties, dried up all his cash. He owes his medical supplier $250,000 and can’t afford to pay it.”
Pfeiffer and Khilji insisted that it was Arnold Klein’s profligacy, not any scheme by them, that had driven him into bankruptcy. Klein’s disregard for the bottom line had caught up with him after 2007, when his two top-grossing medical partners left the practice, Khilji said, and by 2011 his reported gross monthly revenue of $90,872 was a far cry from the $20,000 a day he had boasted of in a 2004 interview with the New York Times. “To say I’m a thief? He still owes me $50,000 from outstanding invoices,” the accountant told the Daily Beast and promised to sue Klein for slander.
Klein, for years as admired a raconteur as Beverly Hills could boast, now lived in dread of the Conrad Murray trial. The defense had subpoenaed Klein’s medical records going back to the beginning of his relationship with Michael Jackson and clearly intended to build a case around the argument that the dermatologist had been encouraging Jackson’s drug abuse for decades.
“I used to consider Arnie the most intelligent person I’ve ever met,” said a saddened Schaffel, “and Michael saw him the same way. You could learn so much from a conversation with Arnie. He was so articulate and well-read. But now he’s less and less coherent. He babbles, something he never did before.”
Perhaps nothing left Klein so distraught as the fact that Liz Taylor had cut him off from contact during the last months of her life. Taylor had been furious when Klein gave an interview that seemed to support Jason Pfeiffer’s claim that he had been Michael Jackson’s lover, and in May 2010 she had openly denounced Arnie on her Twitter account for the treachery she saw in his public comments about Michael’s sexuality: “It seems he supplies not only women, but men too . . . how convenient. Just what we want in our doctors. And then to say he did not betray Michael’s confidence. No wonder he has death threats . . . I thought doctors, like priests, took an oath of confidentiality. May God have mercy on his soul.”
Klein would retract his statements about Michael Jackson and Jason Pfeiffer, and apologize for suggesting things that weren’t true. It was too late, though, to repair his relationship with Liz. “Arnie tried to call her but she wouldn’t take his calls,” a mutual friend said. “Arnie sent her Christmas gifts, she returned them. When she went into the hospital [in March 2011], Arnie sent her flowers, but Liz rejected them. Arnie tried to go over to see her at the hospital before she died, but they wouldn’t let him in.”
Klein at least had been able to enjoy the public humiliation of his longtime rival Dr. Steven Hoefflin. Thanks in large part to Michael Jackson’s old nemesis Diane Dimond, Hoefflin now owned a reputation for weirdness that matched anything the reporter had ever attributed to Jackson.
Dimond had gotten hold of a Los Angeles police department report that chronicled a recent history of “delusional” behavior by Hoefflin that, she reported, had resulted in officers from the LAPD Threat Assessment Unit being assigned to monitor him. Dimond went on to detail a sequence of bizarre behavior which, if true, indicated Hoefflin was in serious need of psychiatric help. What distressed Arnold Klein was that, despite this, Hoefflin claimed to be the Jackson family’s “authorized medical representative” in the weeks after Michael’s death, sitting in with the family as they discussed plans to file wrongful death lawsuits against various physicians (Dr. Klein among them) as well as Lloyd’s of London and AEG Live. Jackson family insiders denied Hoefflin’s claim to this title.
In Las Vegas, the Palomino hacienda was being offered as “Michael Jackson’s Last Las Vegas Residence.” The brochure didn’t mention that Michael and his children had lived in the guesthouse, instead emphasizing the “lower level” of the home where Michael had stored “his vast collection of memorabilia, book collection, and art, and also kept his personal studio and art room,” which sounded a far cry from the dingy basement and oppressive clutter that Tohme Tohme and others recalled from their visits to the house while Michael lived there. Still, the price of $8.8 million was a pittance compared to the $29 million that Hubert Guez wanted for the Carolwood chateau where Michael Jackson had come to the end of his life.
Even the cash-strapped State of California was looking to cut itself in on the booming market in Michael Jackson–related real estate. At a time when the new governor, Jerry Brown, was moving to close down any number of state parks, Assemblyman Mike Davis was proposing to add a new one, introducing a bill to finance a study to determine the feasibility of letting the California Department of Parks and Recreation join in a public/private partnership with Colony Capital to run Neverland Ranch as a state-sanctioned tourist attraction. The owners of Oxnard-based Channel Island Helicopters certainly believed there was still widespread interest in Michael Jackson’s former home. The company announced that on June 25, 2011, the second anniversary of Michael’s death, it would begin offering half-hour flights over Neverland at a cost of $175 per person.
Enduring as the fascination with Michael Jackson seemed to be, there was reason to wonder whether his estate could sustain the fantastic earning power it had demonstrated in the first year after the star’s death. Sales of Jackson’s classic records had subsided during 2010 to approximately the level they had been at before his death. After more than 33 million Jackson albums had been purchased worldwide in 2009 (most of them in a six-month period) sales had dipped to less than 6 million units through the first eleven months of 2010 and the disparity was even greater domestically. From 12.6 million downloads of Michael songs in the United States during 2009, the number had fallen to 1.1 million in 2010. Sony was disappointed by sales of the This Is It soundtrack but that album had sold more than twice the number of copies that Michael did. In the third, fourth, and fifth weeks of its release, Michael’s domestic sales dropped to 27,000 units, then 18,000 units, and finally to 11,000 units, making it evident that Sony would have what Billboard called “an inventory liability problem” on its hands.
The estate reported that Michael’s enormous debt had only been partially paid off, even though most of what the estate had earned thus far, John Branca said, had been dedicated to that purpose. Money was still pouring in, of course, largely as a result of the contracts that Branca had negotiated prior to the release of Michael. The executors’ public report at the end of 2010 listed $310 million in profits for the Michael Jackson estate during the past eighteen months. The total value of the deals that the estate had made in just the first twelve months after Michael’s death was estimated at $756 million, and continued to pay off at the rate of tens of millions per month. “There’s something unique about Americans,” Robert F. X. Sillerman told the New York Times. “We root against people and look for the negative while they’re alive, and then we’re very forgiving, whether they deserve it or not, and we celebrate their success in death.”
Other observers, though, wondered whether Michael Jackson’s estate really would continue to be the most valuable in the entertainment industry. “The question is: Is he Elvis or is he not?” Bob Lefsetz, the former entertainment lawyer whose blog The Lefsetz Letter was widely read throughout the music industry, told the Times. Personally, he didn’t think so, Lefsetz said, not without some Graceland-like destination for fans to flock to. The failure to make a Michael Jackson monument of Neverland Ranch, Lefsetz believed, would cost the estate hundreds of millions of dollars over the long term.
Potential revenues were no doubt a good reason to reconsider the question of a King of Pop shrine at Neverland Ranch, but perhaps not the only one. The debate that arose from the possibility of a final return to Neverland encompassed the complexity of Michael Jackson’s legacy like no other public discussion possibly could. On one side was that for nearly fifteen years Michael had cherished Neverland in a way that he never did and never would again love any other place on earth. The ranch was a universe custom-fitted to his character and, as Tom Mesereau put it, “the only place he had ever really felt comfortable.” It was his vision as well as his home. The other side of the argument was that Michael had told one person after another during the last four years of his life that Neverland was lost to him, describing his former residence as a ruin of faded hopes and forgotten dreams that he would always associate with suffering and humiliation, and with the profound sense of betrayal that had shredded the last fibers of his trust in people. Neverland had been Michael Jackson’s fantasy land and his true-life residence, an imaginary redoubt of eternal youth and an actual repository of the questions about the star’s “personal life” that would shadow his memory far into the future.
At Neverland, Michael Jackson had learned that “going on” with what remained of his life after the settlement of the sex abuse charges against him in 1994 would take far more from him than he had bargained for. And it was of little if any consolation to him that the man on the other side of that deal had been even more destroyed by it than he was.
In the Chandler family narrative, the characterization of Michael Jackson was surprisingly sympathetic even though they all agreed, without reservation, that he was a pedophile. “Michael had needs,” one of the Chandlers (speaking anonymously) would explain shortly before the second anniversary of the star’s death. “Among these was to love and be loved, to touch and be touched. He had sexual urges. It was just that his emotional growth in that area was stunted because of his childhood experiences. Michael was the most sensitive one among the Jacksons. And as the most sensitive one, he was the one most affected by what he saw and felt.
“With Jordie and with the others, he was just trying to meet his needs. To a normal heterosexual male, having sex with a twelve-year-old is icky. To Michael, having sex with an adult was icky. That was who he was. From his point of view he wasn’t trying to hurt anybody.”
This version of Michael owed much to the research and thought of Evan Chandler’s younger brother Ray, who had put together a portrait of the star that other members of the family adopted, with varying degrees of condemnation. Ray was also the one person in the family—the one person on earth, perhaps—who insisted on a compassionate portrait of Evan.
In the years since the settlement with Jackson, members of the Chandler family—Ray in particular—had repeatedly pointed out that neither Evan nor Jordie ever said a single public word about what had happened in 1993 and 1994. “Everything people heard came from the Jackson camp,” one member of the family noted. “They began staging these worldwide media events, and that’s what whipped up the press.” The Chandlers remained most unforgiving of the “smear campaign” they accused Jackson of allowing his representatives to run against them during those weeks and months. “When Michael was faced with what he’d done, he had a choice to make,” one of them explained. “If he truly loved Jordie he would not have done what he did by setting his dogs on the family like that.”
By the time the $20-million-plus settlement was made, the Chandlers said, they were a fragmented family made up of frightened individuals. During a meeting with the deputy district attorney and the lead detective who were handling the criminal investigation in Los Angeles, Evan and Ray were told, “You’ll be looking over your shoulder for the next ten years,” then warned that, “It only takes one nut with one bullet to kill you.” The relentless barrage of threats against not only Evan and Jordie, but every member of the family, sent them all into hiding. “The British were by far the worst,” recalled one of the Chandlers. “They were actually coming here to the States to hunt us down.”
It would be reported years later in Vanity Fair that Jordie’s life had been “completely broken by his association with Michael Jackson,” while a UK newspaper described him as “a lonely, introverted young man.” But that might have been nothing more than another way of saying that he had spent the subsequent ten years hiding from reporters and photographers. Jordie had endured a great deal, though, and “broken” was certainly a fair description of his family.
The “Jackson saga” had grown “like a cancer in the family,” Ray Chandler would say in 2009, “and it affected us all.” No one was more decimated than Evan, in Ray’s telling. “Evan was at one point the most vilified person on the planet,” his brother explained, “because he had accused the most loved person on the planet of something heinous. And when you are the most vilified person on the planet, it affects you. All of the adults who were touched by this came out of it broken and ruined, but Evan was the most broken and ruined. He spent the rest of his life being afraid.”
When Jordie was still thirteen, his father had won custody of the boy by claiming in court that his ex-wife June had, effectively, prostituted her son to Michael Jackson. Even Ray wouldn’t defend his brother’s decision to abandon his two young sons, Nikki and Emmanuel, when he headed east with Jordie. The relationship with the boys’ mother Nathalie had turned so nasty that he couldn’t bear to deal with her, Evan explained, but he intended to remain in his sons’ lives. He would come out to visit them, Evan promised, more than once, but he never did. After more time passed, he said he would develop a relationship with the boys when they got older, but that didn’t happen either. In the Chandler family chronicle of events, Nikki and Emmanuel were just two more of Michael Jackson’s victims.
Evan fled with his oldest first to Germany, then to a Long Island beach community, before returning the boy, at age fourteen, to Los Angeles, where Jordie found some sense of family in the home of his former stepmother Nathalie, his two half-brothers, and Nathalie’s new husband, the screenwriter Robert Rosen, who by all accounts was doing stellar work as a stepfather. The teenager refused to have any contact with his mother, though. The skateboard that June had delivered to her son on his birthday in 1996 sat for years untouched in the garage of the Brentwood house where he lived.
Jordie paid his own way through the Crossroads School, an exclusive and expensive arts-oriented academy in Santa Monica whose alumni roster was well stocked with celebrities (Zooey Deschanel, Taylor Locke, and Spencer Pratt were among Jordie’s schoolmates during his years there). One of the first major business investments Jordie made was in the very school he was attending; after contemplating his $20,000-plus annual tuition and the prime piece of property that encompassed the campus, the boy had become one of Crossroads’ owners. He was successfully playing the stock market by the time he graduated from high school and then enrolled at UCLA, growing wealthier year-by-year with the assistance of a vice president at Santa Monica Bank who had become his financial advisor. By the time Jordie had transferred to New York University, he was hiring the best private instructors and became a skilled skier and windsurfer whose lifestyle included regular snorkeling adventures in the Bahamas and winter sojourns in Taos and Vail. He appeared to be thriving. His stunning looks, cheerful personality, and willingness to pick up one check after another made him popular among fellow students in both high school and college.
Still, Jordie’s existence remained a furtive one. Threats against his life were regularly posted on the Internet by Michael’s most rabid fans. Evan Chandler had refused to return to Los Angeles after 1994, the year a twenty-four-year-old British woman began stalking him at home and at work. Other more aggressive fans had taken her place and everyone related to Jordie knew they had to watch out for both him and themselves. “We’re coming to take your blood. Your blood and your shitty little son’s blood,” was just one of the many frightening messages that had been left on Evan’s answering machine, according to Ray. After receiving a package at his dental office that contained a decapitated rat and a note reading, “You’re next,” Ray said, Evan arranged for his son to take shooting lessons at the Beverly Hills Gun Club. The tabloids put their own sort of bounty on Jordie’s head, offering six figures for candid shots of the boy.
By the time he turned twenty, Jordie was once again living mainly in New York, where he felt safer. He had developed by then into a young man who was every bit as good-looking as he had been as a thirteen-year-old boy. He owned luxury properties on both coasts and was enormously wealthy, having more than doubled his payout from the Michael Jackson settlement by investing in Mobil, Chevron, and Texaco at the exact moment when oil company stocks were about to enter a period of explosive growth. He moved between his beachfront house in West Hampton and his apartment in a Manhattan building that featured a rooftop swimming pool and an indoor running track, working briefly as a dancer, interning at a record company, and dabbling as a songwriter in collaboration with a young Greek-American woman named Sonnet Simmons who wanted to be a pop star. As long as he stayed out of the media’s eye, life was good. People around the young man were protective. Jordie was increasingly disturbed, though, by what was happening to his father.
What the public knew Evan Chandler best for during those years were his legal conflicts. He was accused in 1994 of attacking and beating Dave Schwartz in Larry Feldman’s office for calling him an extortionist. Two years later, Evan filed a $60 million lawsuit that accused Michael Jackson of violating the terms of their confidentiality agreement in his interview with Diane Sawyer and in the lyrics of a song from the HIStory album. Along with the demand for money, Evan had insisted that he be permitted to release his own album, to be titled EVANstory, with songs that included “DA Reprised,” “You Have No Defense (For My Love),” and “Duck Butter Love.” The lawsuit was thrown out in 1999.
Handsome as he was (a better-looking version of Rob Lowe was how one relative described him), Evan had been unable to form another relationship with a woman after leaving Nathalie. He spooked the few he got to know. Though diagnosed as bipolar, Evan refused to take his medicine, complaining that it turned him into a “zombie.” Both his depressions and his manic episodes grew more pronounced as he aged. He could be vaguely dangerous and definitely scary when he transitioned from one state to the other. He also became nearly as addicted to plastic surgery as Michael Jackson. Inordinately vain and spectacularly insecure, Evan had subjected himself to at least nineteen separate cosmetic procedures in the years after the Jackson settlement. Evan would claim that part of the reason for his repeated surgeries was that he wanted to alter his appearance to avoid being recognized by the Jackson fans that were constantly promising online to chase him down and do him in. This, however, didn’t explain why he injected himself on a monthly basis with Botox and cosmetic facial fillers. The result of all this “work” was a face that still appeared remarkably striking and youthful from a distance, yet eerily smooth up close. People who met him for the first time got the impression of an old man who was wearing the unbearably tight mask of some youthful movie character they couldn’t quite place.
Evan was also growing financially depleted, regularly asking his much wealthier son for loans that he never repaid. Money was a constant source of friction between the two.
The filing of criminal charges against Michael Jackson in 2003 was viewed by some of the Chandlers—Ray in particular—as an opportunity for vindication. In the run-up to the trial, the media began dredging up information about the Chandler case that had never been reported earlier, and almost all of it reflected badly on the accused.
Among the many unfortunate developments afflicting Michael was that Lisa Marie Presley’s debut album, To Whom It May Concern, was released in early 2003, when the effect of the Bashir documentary was still being felt. Lisa Marie, the one person in the world who was in a position to speak the truth about Michael’s sexuality, had agreed to a series of national interviews to promote her album and was distressed but probably not surprised to discover that the subject most interesting to reporters was her marriage to Michael Jackson. To her credit, she never suggested that Michael might be a child molester—quite the opposite—but her wish to distance herself from her ex-husband, combined with whatever residual ache she felt about it all had resulted in some edgy observations about Michael’s ability to manipulate people by pretending to be someone he was not.
“You think he used you?” Howard Stern asked her.
“Mmm . . . you know, sketchy,” she answered.
“Sketchy?” Stern asked.
“Mmm. Timing-wise,” Lisa Marie replied.
In a one-on-one interview with Diane Sawyer, Lisa Marie described herself as “naïve as hell,” when she married Michael: “I never thought for a moment that someone like him could actually use me for any reason like that. It never crossed my mind, and I don’t know why—I’m sure it crossed everyone else’s.”
The most devastating observation about Michael, though, was the one she offered to GQ in early 2004, two months after his arrest: “He’s somewhat asexual, but he can be whatever he wants to be when he wants to be.”
The impact of Lisa Marie’s remarks was mild in comparison to the blow NBC delivered with its Michael Jackson Unmasked special that ran on Dateline around the same time that the first single from To Whom It May Concern was released. The program featured a Chicago private detective named Ernie Rizzo who had worked on the Chandler case. Rizzo gave NBC the names of multiple witnesses who agreed that back in 1993 Michael had gotten into the habit of phoning Jordie every weekday at 3:15 p.m., the moment the boy got home from school, and that the two of them regularly stayed up late into the night talking on the telephone. Several witnesses corroborated Rizzo’s claim that he had seen “lots of love notes” written by Michael to Jordie, and that Michael liked to play a game with children that he called “Rubba”—“You rubba me and I rubba you.”
NBC quoted lines from Jordie’s sworn statement to the police that had never been seen or read before by the public, including those that described what had happened during their trip to Monaco for the World Music Awards. Jackson had rented two hotel suites, the boy said, one for his mother and Lily, the other for him and Michael. It was in that hotel suite, Jordie had claimed, that Michael first sexually seduced him.
The same file of police reports included Evan Chandler’s recollection that when he confronted Jackson about the relationship with Jordie, Michael’s reply had been, “It’s cosmic. I don’t understand it myself. I just know we were meant to be together.”
NBC had also found the maid who worked for Evan and Nathalie Chandler back in 1993, Norma Salinas, who described the “strange things going on” in the Brentwood house after Michael Jackson began to spend the night. Michael usually showed up “all by himself, no bodyguards or anyone,” Salinas recalled. Jordie introduced the star to her as “my best friend,” the maid remembered: “They were hugging, laughing. They looked very happy, like a couple.” On the first Friday night that Michael stayed over, Nathalie told her to pull out the trundle beneath Jordie’s bed, Salinas recalled, because that was where Michael would be sleeping. The two of them, man and boy, had spent nearly the entire weekend behind the closed door of the bedroom Jordie normally shared with his half-brother Nikki, according to the maid, who remembered coming into the room on Saturday morning to discover that the trundle had not been slept in.
Nothing delighted the Chandlers so much as the fall of Anthony Pellicano, whom they regarded as the person most responsible for spreading lies about their family. Almost a year before the November 2003 raid on Neverland Ranch, FBI agents had swarmed Pellicano’s offices in Los Angeles, searching for evidence that he was behind a threat against Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch, who had discovered a dead fish with a rose in its mouth and a sign reading “Stop” on the cracked windshield of her car. The FBI obtained its warrant to search Pellicano’s offices after learning that Busch had been working on a potentially shocking story about the private investigator’s client, the actor Steven Seagal. During their search, FBI agents found two military practice grenades modified to serve as homemade bombs and enough C-4 explosive to take down a jumbo jet, along with illicit telephone recordings of Tom Cruise speaking on the telephone to his estranged wife Nicole Kidman. Pellicano had pleaded guilty to illegal possession of dangerous materials and was sentenced to thirty months in federal prison. By the time Michael Jackson was preparing to go to trial in Santa Barbara County, federal authorities were already deep into an investigation that would result in wiretapping and racketeering charges against Pellicano, and an additional federal prison sentence of fifteen years.
Ray Chandler began asking reporters if they still thought Mary Fischer’s GQ article about Evan Chandler’s dealings with Michael Jackson was so great.
It became much easier to believe people like Robert Wegner, Neverland’s former chief of security, who told NBC that during the police search of the ranch back in 1993, he had received a phone call from Pellicano ordering him to collect all records involving guests who had slept in Michael’s bedroom and to delete the files from his computer. Dateline also quoted anonymous sources who said that Pellicano had been tape-recorded begging Neverland employees not to talk to the police, and reported that some of these people had been so shaken by Pellicano’s subsequent threats that they “still cower when they speak of him.”
Ray Chandler would create a similar if slightly smaller sensation with the publication of his book All That Glitters: The Crime and the Cover-Up. He had been moved to pen his “exposé,” Evan’s brother said, when he saw the Martin Bashir documentary. Among the fresh revelations in Ray’s book was that the first to realize what was happening between Michael and Jordie was Nathalie Chandler, who had shouted at her husband one afternoon, “Can’t you see what’s going on? They’re in love!”
Ray also produced a list of “six wishes” that he said Michael had given Jordie, telling the boy to repeat them three times a day to make them come true. These were:
1. No wenches, bitches, heifers, or hos.
2. Never give up your bliss.
3. Live with me in Neverland forever.
4. No conditioning.
5. Never grow up.
6. Be better than best friends forever.
The most significant impact of all, though, was the publication of Jordan Chandler’s detailed and undeniably disturbing description to police investigators of how a sexual relationship had developed between Michael Jackson and him:
“Physical contact between Michael Jackson and myself increased gradually. The first step was simply Michael hugging me. The next step was for him to give me a brief kiss on the cheek . . . He then started kissing me on the lips, first briefly, and then for a longer period of time. He would kiss me while we were in bed.
“The next step was when Michael put his tongue in my mouth. I told him I didn’t like that. Michael started crying. He said there was nothing wrong with it. He said that just because most people believe something is wrong, doesn’t make it so . . . Michael told me another of his young friends would kiss him with an open mouth . . .
“We took a bath together. This was the first time we had seen each other naked. Michael named certain of his children friends that masturbated in front of him . . . Michael then masturbated in front of me. He told me that when I was ready, he would do it for me. While we were in bed, Michael put his hand underneath my underpants. He then masturbated me to a climax. After that Michael Jackson masturbated me many times both with his hand and with his mouth . . .
“He had me suck one nipple and twist the other nipple while he masturbated. On one occasion when Michael and I were in bed he grabbed my buttock and kissed me while he put his tongue in my ear. I said I didn’t like that. Michael started to cry . . .
“Michael told me I should not tell anyone what had happened. He said this was a secret.”
All that saved Jordie, Ray Chandler would say, was that “Evan separated him from Michael before it got to anal sex.”
Evan Chandler’s brother took satisfaction in seeing former Michael Jackson defenders turn on the star. Among these was young actor Corey Feldman, who completely contradicted what he had told reporters back in 1993. “I started to look at each piece of information, and with that came this sickening realization that there have been many occurrences in my life and in my relationship with Michael that have created a question of doubt,” Feldman explained to Martin Bashir, who interviewed him for ABC’s 20/20.
What “occurrences” were those? Bashir inquired: Was there “anything inappropriate”?
“If you consider it inappropriate for a man to look at a book of naked pictures with a child that’s thirteen or fourteen years old, then your answer would be yes,” Feldman replied. It had happened during a stopover at the Hideout on the way to Disneyland, Feldman said: “We went to his apartment, and I noticed a book that he had out on his coffee table. The book contained pictures of grown men and women naked. And the book was focused on diseases and the genitalia.” When he asked what it was all about, Michael sat down with him and began to explain the pictures, Feldman recalled. “I was kind of grossed out by it,” he said. “I didn’t think of it as a big deal. And for all these years I probably never thought twice about it . . . But in light of recent evidence, I have to say that if my son was fourteen years old, thirteen years old, and went to a man’s apartment that was thirty-five, and I knew they were sitting down together talking about this, I would probably beat his ass.”
Ray Chandler didn’t see it as especially significant that Feldman had followed up by admitting that Michael “never did anything out of line” and that “the closest he ever came to touching me was maybe slapping me on the leg once.” Evan’s brother simply dismissed boys like Ahmad Elatab, a New Jersey teen who said he had begun to spend extended periods of time at Neverland in the mid-1990s, when he was nine years old. After a New York columnist wrote that Jackson disliked Middle Easterners, Elatab recalled, Michael had arranged to bring a bunch of Arab kids to a private studio in New York City where he explained that this was not true. He and Michael developed a phone relationship, Elatab said, and eventually started “hanging out” at Neverland. He slept in the same room with Michael on multiple occasions, Elatab said, and knew any number of kids who had spent the night in the same bed with Michael. Those evenings had been nothing more than really fun slumber parties, Elatab told CBS News: “He’s not sexual with kids. He’s not a molester. He’s not a pedophile. He just likes to help children.”
Ray retorted that, “Michael only made sexual advances to a select few of the boys he spent time with. He was quite selective.” During Jackson’s criminal trial, Jordie’s uncle was employed by the networks as a sort of self-made authority on pedophiles, having read dozens of books and spoken to nearly that many psychiatrists about the subject. He liked to quote Sam Vaknin, whose writings on the “roots of pedophilia” sounded to some people like a personality profile of Michael Jackson. “Sex with children is the reenactment of a painful past,” Vaknin had asserted. “Children are the reification of innocence, genuineness, trust, and faithfulness—qualities that the pedophile wishes to nostalgically recapture . . . Through his victim, the pedophile gains access to his suppressed and thwarted emotions. It is a fantasylike second chance to reenact his childhood.” Ray noted that pedophile “profiles” described common characteristics that sounded like an inventory of life at Neverland Ranch, such as a “fascination with children and child activities,” a tendency to refer to children “in pure or angelic terms using descriptives like ‘innocent,’ ‘heavenly,’ and ‘divine,’” the cultivation of “childlike hobbies such as collecting popular expensive toys and keeping reptiles or exotic pets,” the use of “childlike decor,” and a preference for “children close to puberty who are sexually inexperienced but curious about sex.” Ray particularly liked pointing out that pedophiles commonly targeted single-parent familes. “What made Michael different,” Evan Chandler’s younger brother said, “is that the average pedophile can only offer candy and video games. Michael offered the world.”
He was perplexed by the fact that his brother Evan and nephew Jordie were unhappy with him for going on television, Ray admitted. The two of them wanted nothing to do with the criminal case in Santa Barbara County. Jordie was especially displeased when his Uncle Ray publicly implored him to testify in court against Michael Jackson. He was not going to sacrifice his privacy—not to mention risk his physical safety—to take the stand in California, the younger Chandler said. “Jordie’s attitude is, ‘Think what you want. I don’t care. Just leave me alone,’” explained one of his relatives. During the trial, Jordie tried to hide out at a Lake Tahoe ski chalet in the company of school friends who included Sonnet Simmons but was photographed on the slopes wearing a big smile and expensive ski wear, an image of cavalier indifference that caused him to be more hated than ever among Michael’s fans.
By the time of Michael’s acquittal in June 2005, Jordie and Evan were sharing a luxury apartment on the sixteenth floor of the Liberty Towers in Jersey City. Tall windows offered a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline, but Evan was largely indifferent to it. He was sixty-one now but looked much older, despite the Botox and wrinkle filler injections. What made Evan age faster than other men was the degree of his suffering. The agony he experienced did indeed come from deep inside, as so many of those who despised him suggested it should, but the primary source of Evan’s hurt was a rare genetic disorder called Gaucher’s disease. In Gaucher’s patients (an unusually high percentage of whom are Ashkenazi Jews), the deficiency of an enzyme that disperses lipids causes a fatty substance to accumulate in white blood cells. Among the most common symptoms are bone lesions that eventually result in constant racking pain.
The ache in his bones made Evan increasingly irritable and exacerbated the mood swings of his untreated bipolar condition. Jordie was his only companion but relations between the two grew more and more strained. Evan would explode into rages and blame his son for all that had happened to him and to the family. In September 2005, Jordie filed a motion with the Hudson County Family Court for a restraining order against his father, claiming that Evan had attacked him from behind with a twelve-pound barbell, sprayed him in the face with a can of Mace, and then attempted to choke him. When Evan refused to leave the apartment, Jordie did, moving back into Manhattan by himself.
By the summer of 2009 Evan was sixty-five years old and a virtual hermit. The only people he conversed with were the staff at the Colanta Hematology and Oncology Center in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he went for his pain medication prescriptions. His Gaucher’s disease had progressed to the point that Evan found it impossible to make it through even part of a day without being doped up. He wasn’t living, he was existing, Evan told his brother Ray during one of their infrequent phone conversations.
Now almost thirty, Jordie spent much of his time in California, taking guitar and surfing lessons. He had cowritten a frothy song with Sonnet Simmons called “You’re So Good for Me” that became a minor pop sensation. In Los Angeles, Jordie was surrounded by friends and family. He and his two half-brothers remained close, supporting one another in their refusal to have anything to do with the man who had fathered each of them.
Neither his sons nor anyone else knew what Evan Chandler made of Michael Jackson’s death, because by that time even his brother Ray had stopped speaking to the man. Alone with his agony and unwilling to swallow another pill, Evan allowed himself to feel the pain in his bones for a few hours on a day in the middle of November 2009, not quite four months after Michael Jackson’s passing. It might have been the fourteenth or the fifteenth—nobody would ever be sure. He sat on his bed in the Liberty Towers apartment with the inspiring view of the Manhattan skyline and held a snub-nose .38 revolver, a pistol he had purchased years earlier to protect himself against a feared attack by some deranged Jackson fan. He wrote no note before raising that revolver to his head and pulling the trigger.
The Liberty Towers concierge found his body sprawled across the bed, the gun still in his hand, late on the afternoon of November 17, 2009, after doctors from the Colanta Center phoned to say that Mr. Chandler had missed his regular appointment.
Ray Chandler would chafe at Internet reports that Evan had taken his own life out of remorse over what he had done to Michael. “It had absolutely nothing to do with Michael Jackson,” Ray said. “That was the last thing on his mind. He was just in a lot of pain. He and I had talked a lot about euthanasia, about how if either of us got in the position of being in a hospital bed with the tubes and all that, that we would see to it that the plug was pulled. Evan just decided to pull his own plug while he still had the strength to do it.”
When a reporter phoned him from London’s Daily Mail, Ray said he was waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements, but by then Evan’s body had already been cremated. “Actually, no one was there,” a staff member at the Jersey City funeral home where the cremation had taken place told the Mail’s reporter. “We were instructed that no one would want to go. It was very sad. They still haven’t decided what to do with the ashes.”
Evan Chandler’s bleak end occasioned cruel celebration among dozens of Michael Jackson fans who posted about it online. “Good riddance, you piece of shit,” wrote one. “Hope you rot in hell!!” Evan was “a very, very evil man,” wrote another fan. “He should have been punished. This seems the easy way out.”
One of Jordie’s relatives said the young man hoped that the successive deaths of Michael Jackson and Evan Chandler might be “two very important events for him, because he thought that people would finally lay off of him, that it would all die down and he’d finally get some anonymity.” It quickly became clear this wouldn’t be the case. The postings on Jackson fan sites were as vicious and threatening as they had ever been. “Jordan Chandler, I hope you dream of Michael every night. Nightmares for the rest of your life. Guilt should rack your soul forever,” wrote one. Added another, “If I ever see him he’d better run . . . a brick will be headed for his bitch-ass head.”
Jackson fans posted the Old Meadow Boulevard address of Jordie’s $2.35 million West Hampton home on the Internet and warned him not to return there. They created a “tracking” blog where people described various sightings of the young man and listed the places he frequented in both New York and Los Angeles, urging one another to keep up the “hunt” for him.
Shortly after a British tabloid offered $300,000 for a photograph of “the Michael Jackson boy,” Jordie left LA and headed for Europe. A supposed “confession” by Jordie that Michael had never molested him and that he only made such a claim because “my father made me do it” popped up on dozens of Web sites. The confession was a fraudulent attempt at solace sent to Katherine Jackson by someone posing as Jordan Chandler. The Jackson family insisted that it was authentic, though, and after Jermaine Jackson arranged its dissemination in cyberspace Jordie’s “confession” achieved a kind of de facto substantiality. The young man himself refused to comment, telling those closest to him that people could believe whatever they wanted to believe, he didn’t care.
A week after the discovery of Evan Chandler’s body in the Liberty Towers apartment, his two youngest sons gathered with friends and family for a Thanksgiving dinner at their mother’s house in Los Angeles. A Hollywood producer at the table was taken aback by the animosity that Nikki and Emmanuel expressed toward Michael Jackson. “They literally couldn’t speak his name without cursing him,” the producer said. “They blame him not only for what they believe he did to their brother, but also for what they believe he did to their family.”
None of the Chandlers had recanted their conviction that Michael Jackson was a child molester, and they weren’t alone. Ron Zonen, years removed from the prosecution of Michael in Santa Barbara County, remained convinced that the defendant had been guilty as charged. During a September 15, 2010, Los Angeles Bar Association “Frozen In Time” symposium, Zonen betrayed a barely suppressed bitterness about the outcome of the criminal trial and a dogged insistence that justice had not been done. In front of an audience that included Tom Mesereau, Larry Feldman, Carl Douglas, and Judge Rodney Melville, Zonen told his audience about what a fine young man Gavin Arvizo had turned out to be.
After moving out of state and changing his name, Zonen said, Gavin became a high school football star, until his identity was revealed by a Michael Jackson fan who had linked his Myspace page to the social network connections of every other student at his school, then posted a lengthy attack on the teenager’s character. Gavin was twenty years old now, Zonen said, and in his third year at a prominent East Coast university where he was an honor student with a 3.5 GPA pursuing a double major in history and philosophy. He wanted to become, of all things, a lawyer. Gavin was deeply religious, Zonen told the crowd, and had been in a relationship for the past three years with the daughter of a minister. He continued to refuse to accept so much as a penny from the numerous media organizations that were offering him six-figure sums for an interview and was paying his way through school with a half-scholarship supplemented by student loans. That Gavin had risen so far above his family background to develop into such an admirable person spoke volumes, in Zonen’s opinion, about the truth of his accusations against Michael Jackson, accusations that he had never withdrawn.
Mesereau frowned and shook his head. The crowd observed an uncomfortable silence.