Afterword

The theme of the trial of the man accused in Michael Jackson’s death was the same one that had played out so poignantly in Michael Jackson’s life: Where did the fault lie, in what had been done to Michael, or in what he had done to himself? It had been made clear months in advance that the defense would take the second position, while the prosecution assumed the first.

In a case where both sides had revealed their strategies well ahead of time, the biggest surprise was that there were any surprises. The most significant had come even before a jury was selected, when Conrad Murray’s defense team was blindsided by a ruling from Judge Michael Pastor stating that he would not permit the testimony of as many as a dozen people the defense had described as “key witnesses,” among them Tohme Tohme and Dr. Arnold Klein. “As much as possible,” Judge Pastor explained, he intended to “limit” the trial to the last seventy-two hours of Michael Jackson’s life.

The media was nearly as disappointed by the judge’s decision as were Murray and his attorneys. The reporters covering the trial had anticipated that its juiciest moments would come during an examination of Dr. Klein and his medical records. The defense team hadn’t kept it a secret that they intended to convince the jury that Michael Jackson had been reduced to a pathetically vulnerable condition by Klein’s overprescription of narcotics, especially Demerol. As Michael built up greater and greater tolerances to Demerol, Murray’s attorneys planned to argue, his addictive personality had driven him to seek out stronger drugs that included the anesthetic propofol, and eventually to self-administer a fatal overdose.

Drugs prescribed by Klein had been recovered from Jackson’s home. Those turned out to be muscle relaxants, though, not narcotics. Klein acknowledged administering Demerol to Michael in his office on a regular basis, but continued to insist this had been simply his way of prepping his “needle phobic” patient prior to Botox and Restylane injections. DEA agents spent weeks comparing the narcotics scripts they removed from Klein’s office with the triplicate copies filed with the California attorney general’s office and the state’s medical board was reportedly preparing to initiate an action to suspend Klein’s license. What really had both the media and the Murray defense team salivating, though, was the counterclaim that Jason Pfeiffer had filed against Klein with the bankruptcy court in August 2011, a month before the criminal trial was scheduled to begin. Pfeiffer’s allegations about both Klein’s medical practice and his personal life achieved a whole new level of lurid.

The most significant of Pfeiffer’s claims in the eyes of the defense lawyers was that Klein regularly sent Michael Jackson out of his office so loaded on Demerol that the star couldn’t walk out the door under his own power. “Several times, Klein told Pfeiffer to help Michael down to the car because Michael was too drugged up and disoriented to stand on his own,” the lawsuit stated. He and the nurses “were worried that Michael was being ‘overmedicated’ by Klein,” according to Pfeiffer, who claimed to have expressed concern for Jackson’s “safety” and been told by Klein to “keep his mouth shut.” The lawsuit also claimed that Klein had attempted to sneak scripts for muscle relaxants to Jackson by writing Pfeiffer’s name on the prescriptions and that the doctor helped Michael try to “get out of a court appearance” (the one scheduled to take place at the Sheikh Abdullah trial in London) by issuing a note based on a fabricated test that his patient was suffering from a staph infection.

What the Internet media most appreciated were Pfeiffer’s relevations about Klein’s debauched lifestyle: “Dr. Klein searched obsessively for sex partners online and otherwise. From home, his medical offices, and elsewhere, Klein usually spent hours per day online searching for sex. Once home from work, Klein typically stayed awake until 2:00 a.m. or later . . . Klein required that Pfeiffer stay awake with him late into the night dictating e-mails Mr. Pfeiffer was required to send for Dr. Klein to potential sex partners . . . Pfeiffer repeatedly told Klein that he did not want to assist . . . that he needed to sleep. Klein responded by bellowing at Pfeiffer that this was his job, that Pfeiffer would do what he told him, and that Pfeiffer would be fired if he refused. On occasions when Pfeiffer dared to doze off in a chair while Klein was searching the Internet, Dr. Klein threw things at him to wake him up . . .

“Throughout Mr. Pfeiffer’s employment, Dr. Klein required that Mr. Pfeiffer prepare him for sexual encounters with masseurs, paid escorts and prostitutes, and others. Mr. Pfeiffer was required to prepare Dr. Klein for sex frequently as Dr. Klein generally had several sex partners each week and on occasions multiple partners daily. Klein required that Mr. Pfeiffer wash Klein’s groin, administer Klein’s Cialis, Viagra, and similar prescription drugs, greet and accompany Dr. Klein’s masseurs and other sex partners when they arrived at the Los Angeles or Laguna Beach homes and, as they were leaving, pay masseurs and others on Klein’s behalf.

“After Dr. Klein had purchased his home in Palm Springs, Klein dispatched Pfeiffer and another employee into the Warm Sands Drive neighborhood to find a man with whom Klein could have sex. [They] returned with a large-bodied homeless man for Klein and a smaller homeless man for the other employee . . .”

His refusal to submit to Klein’s “unwelcome, unwanted, offensive” sexual advances on him, Pfeiffer claimed, had made him into a target for Klein’s cruel and crude jokes: “In Pfeiffer’s presence, Klein told other male employees that they should urinate on Pfeiffer. ‘Let’s throw Jason in a bathtub and piss on him,’ Klein said, laughing at Pfeiffer. ‘He’ll love it.’”

Pfeiffer was being quite public about his intention to ruin Arnold Klein. He provided the Daily Beast with prescriptions from two Beverly Hills pharmacies (Mickey Fine being one) that Klein had allegedly written identifying Pfeiffer as his patient and told reporters that he’d never received any such drugs. On his blog, Pfeiffer was not only excoriating the man he called “FrankenKlein,” but also soliciting complaints about Dr. Klein’s professional practices that could be submitted to the medical board of California. Skip Miller, Dr. Klein’s Los Angeles attorney, replied to the filing against his client with the statement that, “All of Jason Pfeiffer’s allegations are false and will be demonstrated to be baseless in court.”

Reporters assigned to cover the Murray trial imagined that at least a little of this stuff would be admitted into testimony, but such hopes were dashed when Judge Pastor refused to allow even Dr. Klein’s medical records into evidence. Pastor’s ruling meant that what had promised to be a deliciously scandalous trial would now be reduced to “expert testimony,” the outcome hanging on the dry recitations of a pair of physicians whose outlandish egos were their most remarkable qualities.

The judge “essentially gutted our defense strategy,” Ed Chernoff moaned. Some in the media recognized that Pastor and the prosecution had even done their best to eradicate the most intriguing subtext to the trial, the impact of these proceedings on the wrongful death lawsuit Katherine Jackson had filed against AEG. Within moments after the first AEG executive called as a witness, Paul Gongaware, took the stand, it became obvious that the questions and answers had been choreographed, and that Gongaware would not be asked to say anything that might jeopardize his company’s defense against Mrs. Jackson’s civil action.

Gongaware, though, was preceded to the witness stand by Kenny Ortega, and there was no way to prevent the “This Is It” director from providing fodder for Mrs. Jackson’s attorneys. Prior to the criminal trial, Katherine Jackson’s lawyers had removed Ortega’s name from the list of defendants in the wrongful death lawsuit, leaving the director with little incentive to skew his testimony in AEG’s favor. The highlight of Ortega’s appearance on the stand was his reading of the June 20, 2009, e-mail to Randy Phillips in which Ortega expressed his mounting concern about Michael Jackson’s mental condition. When the director read aloud, “Everything in me says he should be psychologically evaluated,” then went on to the parts of his e-mail where he pleaded for the intervention of “a strong therapist” and some “physical nurturing,” AEG’s executives only had to observe the triumphant expressions on the faces of the Jackson family to imagine the impact of Ortega’s words on the civil trial to come. The prosecution attempted to provide immediate relief by swinging the weight of Ortega’s testimony toward Conrad Murray. Deputy District Attorney David Walgren prompted the director to recall the meeting with the doctor at which Murray had told him, essentially, to stand aside and let his physician determine whether or not he was ready to work.

When Gongaware followed Ortega to the stand, the AEG executive was encouraged by the prosecutor to lay the blame for Michael Jackson’s deterioration and death entirely at the feet of Dr. Murray, and at the same time permitted to put the responsibility for Murray’s employment on Jackson himself. He had argued that Jackson should hire a British physician, Gongaware said, but Michael insisted, “I want Dr. Murray.” Gongaware’s description of Murray’s initial demand for a salary of $5 million per year supported the prosecution’s portrait of a physician who was both greedy and reckless. The AEG executive ended his testimony, though, by giving both the prosecution and the defense grist for their mills. His recollection of a meeting with Michael Jackson shortly after rehearsals for the O2 shows began, Gongaware said, was that “Michael had been “a little bit off. His speech was just very slightly slurred and he was a little slower than I’d known him to be.” Jackson said he had just come from seeing his doctor, Gongaware remembered, but the AEG executive couldn’t recall whether the physician in question was Conrad Murray or Arnold Klein.

From the prosecution’s perspective, Gongaware’s recollection folded nicely into its presentation of an audio file recovered from Murray’s iPhone. He was merely giving them “a taste” of the recorded conversation between Michael Jackson and Conrad Murray, Deputy District Attorney David Walgren had told the jurors when he played it for them during his opening statement. What those in the courtroom heard was Jackson speaking in a voice that was considerably more that “just very slightly slurred” as he attempted to explain what the London concerts were all about. Sounding like a man whose mouth was filled with marbles and molasses, Michael told Murray that the young people of the world were in a state of depression that he intended to treat with the biggest pediatric care facility on the planet, the Michael Jackson Children’s Hospital.

“My performances will be up there helping children and always be my dream,” Michael mumbled slowly, his words barely comprehensible. “I love them. I love them because I didn’t have a childhood. I had no childhood. I feel their pain. I feel their hurt. I can deal with it. ‘Heal the World,’ ‘We Are the World,’ ‘Will You Be There,’ ‘The Lost Children’ . . . these are songs I’ve written because I hurt, you know. I hurt.”

Children “don’t have enough hope, no more hope,” he went on, sounding like a record on a turntable that had been unplugged and was slowly coming to a stop. “That’s the next generation that’s going to save our planet, starting with—we’ll talk about it. United States, Europe, Prague, my babies. They walk around with no mother. They drop them off, they leave . . . They reach out to me: ‘Please take me with you.’”

For all the abandoned children, for his own children, for the child he himself had wanted to be, “We have to be phenomenal [in London],” Michael said, then digressed into a grandiosity that was rendered pathetic by his fading voice. “When people leave this show, when people leave my show, I want them to say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Go. Go. I’ve never seen nothing like this. Go. It’s amazing. He’s the greatest entertainer in the world.’”

The audio file would be submitted as evidence that the accused was fully aware of Michael Jackson’s “state” even as he continued supplying the entertainer with more and stronger drugs, Deputy DA Walgren explained.

When Walgren’s examination of Paul Gongaware was finished, the prosecutor summoned AEG lawyer Kathy Jorrie to the witness stand so that she could tell the jury, “Dr. Murray told me repeatedly that Mr. Jackson was in perfect health.”

With the formal introduction of the iPhone evidence, the prosecution revealed that Dr. Murray’s phone had also yielded the voice mail left by Frank Dileo on the morning of June 20, 2009, the one in which Dileo had told the doctor, “I’m sure you are aware he had an episode last night. He’s sick.”

In addition to voice mails and audio files, the iPhone had also provided a record of the e-mails and text messages sent and received by Conrad Murray on the morning of Michael Jackson’s death. At 7:03 a.m., while his sleepless patient was still thrashing about in bed, jurors learned, a pair of e-mails had been delivered to Dr. Murray by lawyers working out the details of his $150,000-per-month contract. Even more jarring was the evidence that, at 9:45 a.m., well before Murray knew Jackson was in any distress, he had been reviewing medical records sent from his Las Vegas practice that referenced the care of a patient named “Omar Arnold,” which the jury already knew was the most commonly used of Michael’s drug aliases. Most startling of all, though, was the e-mail Murray had sent to a London insurance broker at 11:17 a.m., more than half an hour after the doctor, by his own account, had administered the dose of propofol that resulted in Jackson’s death: Press reports about the precarious condition of Michael’s health were, Conrad Murray wrote, “fallacious.”

Before the prosecution moved on from the subject of Murray’s dubious character to the forensic evidence at the heart of its case, David Walgren wanted the jury to hear from the doctor himself, and played the two-and-a-half-hour tape-recorded interview that LAPD Detective Scott Smith and his partner Detective Orlando Martinez had conducted with Murray in a small office off the banquet hall of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey on June 27, 2009.

The Conrad Murray that the jurors heard on the tape bore little resemblance to either the frenzied, sweaty man described by witnesses to the events surrounding Michael Jackson’s death or the wide-eyed, frightened one they now saw at the defense table. The Murray on the tape was measured, suave even, a distinguished physician seemingly convinced he could explain to everyone’s satisfaction what had happened. The doctor’s expression as he listened to himself in court, though, made it clear he understood now that the LAPD interview had trapped him in a corner from which there was little chance of escape. Murray’s story of trying to ease the suffering of a patient who was desperate for sleep with benzodiazepine drugs and then finally caving in to Jackson’s pleas for his “milk” with a dose of propofol that was just half the amount Michael normally took was already familiar to most of the people in the courtroom, as was the doctor’s claim that he had left Jackson’s bedside for no more than two minutes while he went to the bathroom, only to return and find that Michael was no longer breathing. On the tape, Murray’s voice grew louder and more intense only when the detectives began to ask why he hadn’t called 911 sooner. Talking to the operator at a time when his patient needed him to be resuscitated would have been a form of neglect, the doctor insisted. Murray also denied taking the time to gather up medicine bottles and the IV bag before calling 911, something that previous witnesses had described in compelling detail. Murray seemed especially intent during the LAPD interview on making the detectives understand that Michael Jackson had been using propofol for years and was very familiar with the anesthetic. He was quite amazed by Mr. Jackson’s “pharmacological knowledge,” the doctor said, and had attempted to use it to his advantage as he weaned Michael off propofol.

Chernoff made tiny dents in the prosecution case by eliciting an acknowledgment from Detective Smith that the interviews with Michael Amir Williams, Alberto Alvarez, and Faheem Muhammad—all three devastating to Dr. Murray as prosecution witnesses—had taken place days after the coroner’s office made public its finding that Michael Jackson’s death was a homicide. Smith also admitted to Chernoff that he had not said anything to Dr. Murray about propofol found in an IV bag. The defense attorney’s most penetrating questions were about why the LAPD had permitted the Jackson family the run of the Carolwood house for more than twenty-four hours before the coroner’s investigators showed up to retrieve the medical evidence. Smith had no good answers, other than that “given the circumstances” it should hardly come as a surprise that the house had not been locked down.

The defense attorney’s brief moment in the sun was swiftly clouded over by the appearance on the witness stand of Dr. Christopher Rogers, the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on Michael Jackson. Dr. Murray’s own words led him to rule out the possibility that Michael Jackson had given himself a lethal dose of propofol, Rogers explained: The two-minute bathroom break that Murray claimed was his only absence from his patient’s bedside was simply not a long enough time for any propofol Mr. Jackson might have self-administered to take effect. The more likely scenario, the medical examiner testified, was that Dr. Murray had mistakenly administered a much larger dose of propofol than he realized, one that was lethal to his patient. And anyway, even if Michael Jackson had himself taken the fatal dose of propofol, Rogers added, the cause of death would remain, in the judgment of the coroner’s office, an unsatisfactory standard of care by his doctor.

Jurors were shown an autopsy photo of Michael Jackson’s body (a fuzzily gruesome image that somehow made its way to TMZ) as Dr. Rogers reiterated the results of his report: Though Michael Jackson was quite slender, his weight was in the normal range and he was actually in above average health for a man of fifty; he could have lived for decades longer with proper care.

Rogers was followed to the stand by two more physicians, a cardiologist and a critical care specialist, both of whom told the jury that Dr. Murray’s treatment of Michael Jackson violated the standard of care. After them came the prosecution’s final and most important witness, Dr. Steven Shafer, a professor of anesthesiology at Columbia University. Shafer made it clear that he did not believe Conrad Murray had given Michael Jackson only 25 milligrams of propofol on the morning of his death. For one thing, the orders of propofol that Murray had placed with his pharmaceutical supply company in Las Vegas were “an extraordinary amount to purchase to administer to a single individual,” Shafer told the jury. His calculations showed that the more than four gallons of Diprivan shipped to Los Angeles at Dr. Murray’s request averaged out to nearly 2,000 milligrams per day, nearly fifty times the amount that Murray said was the largest daily dose of propofol that he ever gave Michael Jackson. The only plausible scenario of Mr. Jackson’s death, in his expert opinion, Shafer said, was that Dr. Murray had used an entire 1,000-milligram bottle of Diprivan to begin the drip into Michael Jackson’s veins, and had somehow managed to leave the drug running into Mr. Jackson’s bloodstream even after his heart had stopped beating.

Shafer then listed a dozen “egregious” violations of the standard of care by Dr. Murray—actions that posed a foreseeable danger to his patient’s life. “Each one, individually, could be expected to lead to a catastrophic outcome, including death?” David Walgren asked. “Absolutely,” Shafer answered.

Chernoff attempted an aggressive cross-examination, forcing Dr. Shafer to acknowledge that he could not be absolutely certain that Michael Jackson hadn’t awakened and with his own hand removed the clamp on the IV line that had stopped the propofol drip. Such a scenario, however, was “in no way exculpatory,” Shafer added, because it meant that Dr. Murray had set up the IV drip of a dangerous drug and left his patient alone with it. Even if Murray had done what his attorney was suggesting, “it would still be considered abandonment.”

Without Arnold Klein, Tohme Tohme, and the rest of the cast of excluded characters, the defense case amounted to little more than quibbling. A records custodian for the Beverly Hills police department was summoned to testify that the 911 call from Michael Jackson’s home had been delayed by forty-six seconds because it was routed through her agency before reaching the city’s fire department. A pair of LAPD detectives acknowledged that Alberto Alvarez had only mentioned key details about Dr. Murray’s attempted cover-up two months after Michael Jackson’s death, and that Alvarez made two separate drawings of the IV bag in which he said the propofol was stashed, a year and a half apart, which were “significantly different.”

Unable to compel Dr. Klein’s appearance on the witness stand, Murray’s defense lawyers settled for Dr. Allan Metzger, who was called to testify that, during an April 18, 2009, meeting at the Carolwood chateau, Michael Jackson had complained of chronic insomnia and asked for “some form of anesthetic.” Under cross-examination by Walgren, though, Metzger said he advised Michael against using anesthesia to combat insomnia, warning that intravenous administration of such drugs outside a hospital setting was dangerous. Was there “any amount of money” that would have persuaded him to give Jackson propofol at his home? Walgren asked Metzger. “Definitely not!” Metzger answered. Even those who doubted Dr. Metzger on this last point understood that he had been a far better witness for the prosecution than for the defense.

The same was essentially true of Cherilyn Lee. The nurse’s story of Michael’s pleas for Diprivan ended as it had every time she told it—with her at once refusing and warning him that the drug was dangerous. The prosecution had already made the point that Michael Jackson believed his risk was nullified by having a doctor attending to him.

In the end, Murray’s defense team decided that it had little choice but to prosecute Katherine Jackson’s lawsuit against AEG. As the Jackson family looked on in undisguised anticipation, Ed Chernoff proposed to introduce the contract for the O2 shows as evidence of the pressure that Michael Jackson was under to perform. A man already $400 million in debt, Chernoff explained to the judge, would have been required to pay AEG at least $30 million if he was unable to deliver as expected in London; the stress of his situation gradually drove the entertainer to inject himself with a lethal dose of propofol in a desperate attempt to sleep between rehearsals. Judge Pastor had already ruled that the defense would not be permitted to introduce evidence of Jackson’s financial circumstances, and prosecutor Walgren urged a similar ruling on the contract. “At every turn,” Walgren told Pastor, “Conrad Murray, through his attorneys, have (sic) put the blame for his failures on Michael Jackson and this is just another attempt to do the same.”

The judge agreed. “This is not a contractual dispute,” Pastor told Chernoff. “This is a homicide case.”

The defense responded by summoning Randy Phillips to the stand, a decision that accomplished little more than to provide AEG with one more opportunity to defend itself against Mrs. Jackson’s civil suit. “Motivated, energized, and receptive” was how Phillips described the Michael Jackson he had encountered in the autumn of 2008, when they first met to begin planning the O2 shows. And it was absolutely untrue, Phillips said, that Michael had been “forced” by AEG into agreeing to perform at more than ten shows. Thirty-one shows were planned from the start, Phillips testified, and Michael agreed to nineteen more concerts “in twenty minutes.”

The judge rebuffed Chernoff’s attempt to use this testimony to get the contract into evidence, creating a strange moment of theater in which the Jackson family were openly supporting the attorney for the man accused of killing Michael. As Katherin Jackson observed the judge’s ruling with an expression of dismay, Joe snorted his indignation. Janet Jackson rolled her eyes and shook her head.

The Jacksons were whispering among themselves with infuriated expressions as Phillips continued with his testimony, explaining that while he was concerned by his star’s absence from rehearsals for the O2 shows, “no one on our end was ever contemplating pulling the plug.” After Kenny Ortega sent Michael home from the June 19 rehearsal, Phillips said, he was reassured by what Conrad Murray had to say at the meeting the next day, when the doctor “guaranteed us that Michael would get into it.”

The Jacksons were still shaking their heads when Phillips added that after the very last rehearsal on the evening of June 24, Michael had thanked him for the help in getting this far, then added, “Now I’m ready. I can take it from here.”

Chernoff eked out a moment of minor triumph from Phillips’s appearance as a witness: After the AEG Live chief made several references to the contractual obligations of both sides for the O2 shows, Judge Pastor permitted the defense attorney to ask if Michael Jackson was “ultimately responsible” for the production costs of the concerts. “Yes,” Phillips replied. Chernoff seemed to sense an opening when Phillips denied that there was ever any thought of canceling the O2 concerts, but admitted that Michael Jackson’s problems with “focusing” might have resulted in further delays.

“At some point the shows could have been postponed to the point that production would not be possible?” Chernoff asked.

“I can’t speculate on that,” a poker-faced Phillips answered.

By then, Conrad Murray’s hopes for a hung jury were reduced to a series of patients called as character witnesses and two physicians who would try to cancel out the testimony of Dr. Steven Shafer. The former patients at least offered a portrait of Conrad Murray that was very different from the one created by the public record. “That man right there is the best doctor I’ve ever seen,” said an elderly gentleman who had been treated for a heart condition in 2002. “I’m alive today because of that man.” Another patient described appointments with Murray that lasted more than four hours, recalling that after each one the doctor had phoned his wife to explain his condition. An eighty-two-year-old woman named Ruby Mosley told the jury that if Dr. Murray had been greedy, he never would have set up a clinic in Houston’s Acres Homes neighborhood, where three-quarters of the population lived in poverty. David Walgren countered by establishing that when his patients in Houston were sedated prior to a procedure performed by Dr. Murray, this had taken place in hospital settings where there was monitoring equipment and backup personnel.

The first of the defense’s expert witnesses was Dr. Robert Waldman, a specialist in medical addiction who testified that Michael Jackson had “probably” been turned into a Demerol addict by Dr. Arnold Klein. He had consulted with dermatologists who told him that shots of Botox and Restylane were not so painful that a patient needed Demerol, Waldman said, then told the jury that his examination of Dr. Klein’s medical records suggested Michael Jackson was getting as much as 375 milligrams of Demerol in a ninety-minute period, more than seven times the recommended dose. Walgren then asked the defense’s doctor: “If a patient asks you to administer a dangerous drug, a drug that could be harmful . . . would you refuse to administer that drug to the patient?”

“Absolutely,” Waldman answered.

The appearance of the defense’s second expert and final witness, Dr. Paul White, provided the most enlivening moments of the entire trial. White, it turned out, had been one of Steven Shafer’s medical school professors and later a personal friend. He was not speaking highly of his former student these days, however. “I am going to take the high road, not the low road with him,” E! Online had quoted White saying of Shafer, whom he had reportedly called “a scumbag” for ridiculing his calculation of probabilities in the Conrad Murray case.

Judge Pastor insisted upon chiding the witness prior to his testimony, lecturing the doctor at length about why he had “no business making any of those comments.” White then denied calling Shafer a scumbag, but Pastor announced anyway that he was scheduling a hearing after the trial to determine whether the doctor should be held in contempt of court.

Dr. White appeared determined to impress the viewing public. After presenting his credentials as an anesthesiologist who had conducted clinical trials of propofol back in the 1980s that had led to FDA approval of the drug, White took issue with the math models Shafer had used to show that Dr. Murray might have given Michael Jackson more than forty times the dosage of propofol that the doctor claimed. The problem with such models, White sniffed, was that while they might describe the general population, they were not applicable to “a specific or particular individual.” Michael Jackson was obviously an exceptional person who had consumed prodigious amounts of drugs long before Conrad Murray became his physician. His tolerances were most unusual. Furthermore, the amount of propofol found in Jackson’s bloodstream during his autopsy clearly contradicted Dr. Shafer’s theory that Dr. Murray had left the propofol drip running until there were as many as 1,000 milligrams of the drug in Michael Jackson’s bloodstream. Dr. Shafer had called White’s self-injection hypothesis a “crazy scenario.” His former professor returned the favor by describing Shafer’s theory as “underdeveloped.”

His own review of the circumstances of Mr. Jackson’s death, in light of the entertainer’s background and other factors, Dr. White said, suggested to him that the entertainer had probably inadvertently ended his own life by injecting himself with a dose of propofol while his doctor was distracted by phone calls and not keeping a close eye on him.

The most significant moment of White’s testimony might have come when the defense used him to acknowledge that it would not be challenging the claim that Dr. Conrad Murray had violated the standard of care, but rather simply arguing that this violation was not severe enough to warrant a manslaughter conviction. “Let’s deal with the elephant in the room here,” Chernoff’s associate counsel J. Michael Flanagan told Dr. White. “Conrad Murray has been accused of infusing a dose of propofol and leaving his patient. Can you justify that?”

“Absolutely not,” answered White. Nevertheless, other than his failure to remain alert at Michael Jackson’s bedside, nothing else about the way Dr. Murray had dealt with the patient was to his mind improper, White said. He was, for example, not at all certain that adminstering propofol as an insomnia treatment was unreasonable, said White, citing a Chinese study of using the anesthesia to help people with sleep disorders that had produced some flawed but “very interesting” results. And while he agreed with prosecution witnesses that Michael Jackson had swallowed at least several tablets of lorazepam—Ativan—White said, he did not at all agree that combining the sedative with the anesthetic propofol had created the “perfect storm” that killed Mr. Jackson. Would the drugs Dr. Murray admitted administering to Jackson—relatively light injections of sedatives followed by a half-dose of propofol—have created “a dangerous situation?” Flanagan asked. “Not at all,” White told him.

By the time the prosecution took over questioning, White seemed to be enjoying himself on the witness stand. He was amused that both Flanagan and Judge Pastor had repeatedly referred to him as “Dr. Shafer,” and suggested in an aside to the jury, “I should get a name tag.” Pastor and Walgren were each visibly furious with White a few minutes into his cross-examination, but the doctor himself appeared nonchalant. The prosecution had begun by attempting to elicit Dr. White’s admission that propofol was a potentially life-threatening drug. “Without careful bedside monitoring, it could be dangerous,” White allowed.

“Could it result in death?” Walgren asked.

“If the infusion somehow came opened up widely . . . certainly you could achieve a significant effect that could result in cardiopulmonary arrest,” White replied.

Clearly irritated by the answer, Walgren demanded to know if Dr. White had ever administered propofol in someone’s bedroom. “No, I have not,” White answered.

“Had you ever heard of someone doing that prior to this case?” Walgren asked.

“No, I had not,” White said.

Walgren’s satisfied nod turned into head-shaking incredulity only seconds later, though, when Dr. White said he was not inclined to criticize Dr. Murray for letting twenty minutes pass between the time he noticed that Michael Jackson was not breathing and the time of the call to 911. Yes, he personally would have called sooner for an ambulance, White said, but Dr. Murray “reacted as many physicians would.”

By his own admission, Dr. Murray was holding a cell phone in his hand, Walgren noted: “Are you saying he wasn’t capable of pressing 911?” White shrugged at the question and told the prosecutor that Michael Jackson would have died that day no matter what time the ambulance arrived.

The exchange between the prosecutor and the witness became truly testy when White began to make reference to information he had gleaned from “two extensive conversations” with Dr. Murray. Judge Pastor had ruled prior to White’s testimony that he would not be allowed to mention his conversations with Murray. “Please listen carefully to the prosecutor’s questions,” Pastor told White the first time the witness mentioned his conversations with Dr. Murray. When White made another reference to his conversations with Murray just moments later, the judge sent the jurors out of the courtroom.

Walgren was indignant, protesting that the witness was intentionally dropping mentions of his conversations with Conrad Murray in front of the jurors, in direct defiance of the judge’s ruling. Flanagan countered that Dr. White couldn’t be expected to specifically remember what information he had ascertained from Dr. Murray’s police interview and what information had come from his meetings with the doctor. “Nice try,” Pastor told the defense attorney. “This is so obvious . . . He’s trying at every juncture to add in other material. It’s deliberate. I don’t like it. It’s not going to happen again.” Dr. White would face a second charge of contempt at his hearing on November 16, the judge ruled.

White’s self-confidence did not seem seriously shaken. When the jury returned, Walgren asked if Conrad Murray had violated the physician’s oath of “First, do no harm.”

“I think he was providing a service to Mr. Jackson, which Mr. Jackson had requested, in fact insisted upon,” White replied. When Walgren seized upon the word “service,” White amended his answer: “Well, ‘medical care’ is a better word than ‘service.’”

Walgren began to use questions as testimony. Michael Jackson was attached to both an IV stand and a urinary catheter at the time of his death, the prosecutor noted, which obviously made it more plausible that Dr. Murray had injected his patient with propofol and later lied about the amount he gave. “It’s possible, if he wanted to potentially harm Michael Jackson,” White replied.

“If Michael Jackson did it, was he doing it to harm himself?” Walgren demanded.

“I don’t think he realized the potential danger,” White answered.

Walgren was at the end of his patience. “You keep throwing out these kind of rehearsed lines,” he snapped. When the defense objected, the comment was stricken, but the judge refrained from admonishing the prosecutor.

How much was he being paid to testify on Conrad Murray’s behalf? Walgren demanded of White. He had received $11,000 so far, White answered. Did he expect additional compensation for attending court? the prosecutor wanted to know. Well, his normal day rate was $3,500, White replied, but he doubted a further payment would be forthcoming. The defendant, he explained, “has limited financial resources.”

The prosecution replied by bringing back Steven Shafer to tell the jury that his former professor’s analysis had relied on an outdated study, and that more recent research “absolutely” supported his own opinion that Michael Jackson could not have self-administered the fatal dose of propofol.

But even if Michael Jackson had injected himself with the propofol that stopped his heart, David Walgren told the jury in his closing argument, Conrad Murray was still responsible. The jurors had heard Dr. Murray tell detectives that Jackson liked to “push” the drug into his own veins, which meant he had to be aware that his patient might inject himself if left alone. A “foreseeable consequence” was all that was required to arrive at a verdict of guilty, Walgren said, but this case also offered clear evidence of the defendant’s “consciousness of guilt” on multiple fronts. Most damning was Murray’s failure to inform paramedics and emergency room doctors that he had administered propofol to his patient. Equally significant, though, was that Murray had not documented his “pharmaceutical experiment” of using propofol to treat insomnia with a single medical record. The prosecutor reminded the jurors of the converstion recorded on Dr. Murray’s iPhone weeks before Mr. Jackson’s death. They had heard for themselves “the tragic, sad voice of Michael Jackson in some sort of drug-induced, slurred stupor,” Walgren told the panel. “After hearing this voice, after hearing Michael Jackson in this condition, what does Conrad Murray do? He orders the largest shipment of propofol.”

Did anyone in the courtroom believe that Conrad Murray left his patient’s bedside for only two minutes to go to the bathroom, then returned to find his patient no longer breathing? “How long Michael Jackson was there, by himself, abandoned, we’ll never know,” Walgren said. “Did he gasp? Did he choke? Were there sounds? We don’t know, and we’ll never know.”

At this point, Conrad Murray’s attorneys needed someone else to blame. Targeting the victim, though, was looking less and less like a winning tactic. Chernoff pointed first to the media, and to a political establishment that seemed to answer to the media. “Somebody’s got to say it,” Ed Chernoff told the jury. “If it were anybody but Michael Jackson, would this doctor be here today?”

Chernoff decried Walgren’s decision to repeatedly show jurors photographs of Jackson’s children. “It’s heartbreaking to see those kids, you know that and I know that,” the defense attorney said. “That’s why they showed those kids. There’s a tremendous desire to see Dr. Murray as this perfect victim.”

But Conrad Murray was just “a little fish in a big dirty pond,” Chernoff went on, one who had no knowledge of the other doctors his patient was seeing or of the drugs they were giving him. All Dr. Murray saw was a man overwhelmed by stress who desperately needed rest. Chernoff called out the corporate bogeymen of the Anschutz Entertainment Group. “Michael Jackson was under a tremendous, abnormal, impossible amount of pressure from AEG,” the defense attorney said, and Dr. Murray saw no way to relieve that pressure but to help his patient get some much-needed sleep.

Only at the end did Chernoff ask the jury to consider what responsibility for his own death might belong to the so-called victim: “Was Dr. Murray supposed to watch Michael Jackson to save him from himself at all times? At what point do you draw the line for Dr. Murray’s responsibilities for a grown-up?”

During the jury’s deliberations, the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building demonstrated one more time that it could stage a show like none other in the country. The scene was strange but familiar. Michael Jackson fans screamed in the faces of Conrad Murray supporters; one fan was a woman who held a sign reading, “Turn away from addiction.” Some sport drove by in a Mercedes coupe holding a license plate out the window that read, “Love4MJ,” and was wildly applauded. A young woman who had traveled all the way from Copenhagen kept telling everyone she met how much it hurt her to know that Michael was no longer in the world. Easily the most surreal moment came when a group of protesters from the Occupy Los Angeles encampment across the street marched over to the courthouse and began shouting, “We are the ninety-nine percent!” only to be answered by Jackson fans who shouted back, “This Is It!”

The Jackson family had been putting on its own show since day one of the trial, entering and leaving the courthouse like they were walking a red carpet amid an uproar of cheers, questions, camera clicks, and cries of sympathy. Eighty-three-year-old Joe Jackson had stalked into the courtroom on the first day snarling, but by the time Paul Gongaware took the stand the old man had closed his eyes and appeared to be napping. Eighty-one-year-old Katherine Jackson was “harrumphing incredulously,” as the Wall Street Journal’s reporter had it, when Ed Chernoff used his opening statement to present Conrad Murray to the jury as a sympathetic figure who had been pressured and manipulated by his famous patient. As witnesses began to testify, La Toya and Rebbie sat on each side of their mother, repeating into her ears what each person was saying; La Toya made sure she had the better camera angle. Jermaine, who had recently come out with the story that his brother Michael was planning to flee to the Middle East if convicted at his criminal trial in 2005, continued to insist that he was the second-most-famous member of the Jackson family. Jackie, Tito, and Marlon, as usual, preserved a measure of personal dignity by staying away and leaving the spotlight to the others. Also as usual, Katherine’s genuine displays of emotion silenced the snickering of cynics. The tears in her eyes and the pain on her face were entirely convincing as Michael’s mother listened to the full four-minute recording of her son talking to his doctor back in May 2009. “Mmm, mmm,” was all Murray could be heard replying as Michael mumbled on and on and on about how he understood the pain of the world’s children and intended to build them the biggest hospital in the world after reestablishing himself as the greatest entertainer on earth. When Michael suddenly went silent, though, a concerned Murray had asked, “You okay?” There was a long pause, then Michael answered, “I am asleep.” It was Mrs. Jackson, though, who closed her eyes.

After three and a half days of deliberation, the jury informed the judge on the morning of November 7, 2011, that it had reached a decision. “Verdict is FINALLY IN!!!” La Toya had tweeted to her followers. “I’m on my way! I’m shaking uncontrollably!” Joe and Katherine and Jermaine arrived at the courthouse just after noon, pushing through a crowd that was slightly outnumbered by the media horde as they made their way to the courtroom on the building’s ninth floor.

“This is not entertainment, not a circus, not a spectacle,” a young woman from Denmark told the Los Angeles Times. “This is real life.” By LA standards perhaps.

The jury had unanimously found Conrad Murray guilty of involuntary manslaughter. This did not mean he would serve time in a state prison, as Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley readily acknowledged. California’s budget crisis had resulted in, among other things, a “prison realignment bill” called AB 109 that was sending minor felons without criminal records to local jails rather than state prisons, and the jails in turn were permitting more and more of those criminals to serve their sentences at home under house arrest.

District Attorney Cooley sought consolation in the knowledge that, as a convicted felon, fifty-eight-year-old Conrad Murray would be losing his license to practice medicine in California. The truth, though, was that other states were under no legal obligation to honor California’s decision, and some other countries almost certainly would not. It was entirely possible that by the age of sixty Murray would be working as a physician somewhere in the world.

Judge Pastor had done his best to show the public that such an outcome would not be his doing. He was denying the defense request that Dr. Murray remain free until his sentencing, the judge announced after the verdict was delivered. “This is not a crime involving a mistake of judgment,” Pastor told both the courtroom and the camera. “This is a crime where the end result was the death of a human being.

“Public safety demands that he be remanded,” Pastor declared as his bailiffs prepared to handcuff Conrad Murray and place the doctor behind bars.

The judge was talking even tougher when Murray returned to his courtroom on November 29, 2011, to face sentencing. He was outraged, Pastor let it be known, by the paid interview Murray had provided to NBC for a documentary that was to run partially on the Today show and in full on MSNBC. When asked about leaving Michael Jackson alone in his bedroom attached to an IV line filled with propofol, Murray had insisted to his interviewer that he had no reason to think that his patient was in danger. “Had I known what I know today, in retrospect, that Mr. Jackson was an addict, that might have changed things. Addicts may behave in a way that is unreasonable and I would have taken that into consideration,” Murray said. But he had no such knowledge because Michael Jackson had hidden it from him. “I only wish that maybe in our dealings with each other, he was more forthcoming and honest in telling me things about himself,” Murray explained. “Certainly, he was deceptive by not sharing with me his whole medical history, doctors he was seeing, treatment that he might have been receiving.”

Said Murray, “I went there to take care of a healthy man who said he was fine, to just keep surveillance. But once I got in there I was entrapped.”

Making out that he, not Michael Jackson, was the victim in this case had been just one more example of Conrad Murray’s deficient character, in Judge Pastor’s opinion.

At least Murray had provided John Branca with an opportunity to become the indignant defender of Michael’s reputation. Branca and John McClain had signed a letter to MSNBC demanding that the network not “give Conrad Murray a platform to shift the blame, postconviction, to Michael Jackson . . .”

Before passing sentence, Judge Pastor blasted Murray for his part in the “faux documentary” that made him out to be nothing more than a “bystander” in Jackson’s death, one who was “betrayed” by his patient, rather than the other way around.

“Talk about blaming the victim,” Pastor said. “Not only isn’t there any remorse, there’s umbrage and outrage on the part of Dr. Murray against the decedent, without any, any indication of the slightest involvement in the case.”

The judge expressed even greater offense at the audio file of the conversation between Jackson and Murray that had been entered into evidence during the trial. That recording had been “your insurance policy,” Pastor told Murray. “It was designed to record this patient surreptitiously at that patient’s most vulnerable point.” He not only viewed this as a “horrific violation of trust,” the judge told Murray, but wondered if the recording might have been offered for sale some day. After more talk about Murray’s “cycle of horrible medicine” and his “pattern of deceit and lies,” the judge gave him the maximum sentence allowed: four years, in county jail.

Outside the courtroom, Katherine Jackson told a Los Angeles TV station that, “Four years is not enough for someone’s life. It won’t bring him back, but at least he got the maximum.”

In reality, as Judge Pastor knew, AB 109 would automatically cut the four-year sentence by half, and there would be an additional reduction for time served. A spokesman for the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department, which ran the jail, stood by with a statement that Murray’s (now two-year) sentence would be reduced by no more than the forty-seven days he had already served and that the doctor was not eligible for early- release electronic monitoring or house arrest.

Most likely, Conrad Murray would spend at least twenty months behind bars, which was about the worst that California could do to a first offender convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Whether or not this was justice was the sort of question lawyers and cable talk show hosts would enjoy debating for several days, but Conrad Murray was telling friends and family that he had already moved on. Murray said that he had no regrets about cooperating with the producers of the documentary that had run on MSNBC, various sources close to the doctor told the media, because at least it allowed him to put out his side of the story. The same sources described Murray as “surprisingly upbeat.” One friend quoted the doctor as saying, “I’m just relieved it’s finally over,” then adding, “Don’t worry, I’m fine, and I’ll be out soon.”

The long arm of the law was still wrapping itself around various other Michael Jackson advisors and employees.

Dr. Arnold Klein was feeling the squeeze. Well before the Conrad Murray trial had begun, Klein was advising friends that he had been summoned to a hearing before the medical board of California to answer accusations that he overprescribed dangerous drugs to Jackson. With friends fleeing and his Beverly Hills practice dissolving, Klein had hired a $20,000-per-month publicist in the homes of “re-branding,” but the effort was not met with success and patients continued to abandon him in ever-increasing numbers. By the end of 2011, the doctor’s finances had contracted to the point where not only were all three of his homes up for sale, but he was also auctioning off the memorabilia he had collected from friends who included Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor. Bonhams & Butterfields was offering Klein’s invitation to Taylor’s eighth wedding (to Larry Fortensky, at Neverland) at an opening price of $350, while the bidding on the hat Jackson was wearing when he left the hospital after being treated for the burns suffered during the Pepsi commercial in 1984 was to start at $10,000. Also on the block was Princess Leia wig that had been worn to a party by one of Klein’s few remaining friends, Carrie Fisher, who around Christmas time would loan Klein $150,000 to hire a new bankruptcy lawyer.

The medical board, meanwhile, continued to tighten its grip, questioning dozens of witnesses about Klein’s alleged use of aliases on prescriptions, his reported distribution of drug samples to patients and the claim that Klein regularly prescribed narcotics to himself. His attempts at self-defense accomplished little more than to make him an object of derision and animosity. On his Facebook page, in a post titled “The California Medical Board: A Novel by Kafka,” Klein had claimed that the Board’s chief investigator was guilty of “elder abuse” for the ferocity with which he was tracking his prey. The medical board had responded on May 2, 2012 by ordering Klein to “undergo a physical examination, a mental examination, including psychological testing, and to submit to testing to detect the presence of illicit drugs,” warning that the failure to comply might likely result in the revocation of his license to practice medicine. That very same day, the former lover of Liberace had suggested to Entertainment Tonight that he and Michael Jackson had also been lovers, dredging up the defense Klein had made of Jason Pfeiffer’s earlier claims about a relationship with Michael, just when the subject seemed to be fading from tabloid headlines.

It would be one thing after another, though, with Dr. Klein, as the tabloid press by now clearly understood. In mid-May 2012, the real estate company that owned the Beverly Hills mansion he had rented for $60,000 per month went to court once again to get him out of the house. Klein had earlier won a stay of his eviction because he was in bankruptcy proceedings. YHL 26 Holdings, though, was now arguing that the stay should be lifted and Klein forced to move, because he “has taken advantage of the protection of the automatic stay to maintain a lavish personal lifestyle at the expense of his creditors.” In June, Klein went to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office with a request that they file charges of criminal theft against photographer David LaChapelle. Klein alleged he had returned a “painting-like” photograph he owned that depicted Michael Jackson as Jesus Christ to LaChapelle for repairs, after it was damaged in the 2010 fire at his Windsor Square mansion. LaChapelle had repaired the piece, Klein complained, but instead of giving it back LaChapelle arranged to exhibit it in galleries worldwide. After due consideration and no small amount of eye-rolling, the district attorney’s office had declined to file charges. For the time being, the photograph would remain in a police evidence vault. As for the case itself, said LAPD Art Theft Det. Hrycyk, “I’m glad to get rid of it.”

Raymone Bain had spent the summer of 2011 dealing with the IRS, which in June had charged her with failing to file tax returns or to make tax payments during the years from 2006 to 2008, when she was earning $30,000 per month as the president and general manager of the Michael Jackson Company. After Bain pleaded guilty, the feds asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Alan Kay to lock Bain up for eighteen months to show how the government dealt with tax scofflaws. At her sentencing hearing in Washington, D.C., on October 25, 2011 (right around the time Randy Phillips was testifying at the Conrad Murray trial in Los Angeles), Bain had tearfully pleaded for mercy, explaining to the judge that during that three-year period she had been overwhelmed by dealing with the affairs of a mother who was dying of Alzheimer’s and of her erratic and demanding pop star employer. Bain appeared to skate when Kay sentenced her to five years’ probation and payment of $202,422 in federal and local back taxes. Back in LA, though, Tom Mesereau was saying that it was Raymone who had been responsible for Michael Jackson’s failure to pay taxes during those same years, and that the Jackson estate should take a hard look at holding her responsible.

Brian Oxman, of whom Mesereau did not speak highly either, was facing perhaps even more serious consequences. In March 2011, the State Bar of California had recommended that Oxman be suspended from the practice of law for two years, with a third year of suspension stayed if Oxman attended and completed the State Bar’s ethics and client trust accounting schools. This latest action against Oxman had resulted from the attorney’s failure to pay sanctions related to a divorce case he had handled and a finding that Oxman, along with his wife and partner Maureen Jaroscak, had refused to surrender money from the trust account of a client who had died. The bar had also found that Oxman and Jaroscak commingled their personal funds with those of clients, used client trust accounts to hide money from creditors, and “lacked candor” when questioned about these and other matters by investigators. Oxman had won a temporary stay of his suspension by appealing to the State Supreme Court. It was a risky maneuver, but Oxman reasoned that at least he might continue his representation of Joe Jackson and join Joe in riding piggyback upon Katherine Jackson’s wrongful death action against AEG.

What Joe’s lawyer apparently failed to recognize was that the State Bar could not only choose to sustain its recommended punishment, but to impose an even more severe sanction. And that the bar would do, arriving at a decision in the early summer of 2012 that Oxman would be permanently disbarred, effective on July 27.

It was a particularly painful moment to have been jettisoned from the wrongful death case. For months, various people, including attorneys from the estate, had been attempting to convince Katherine Jackson that continuing with the lawsuit against AEG was a futile endeavor. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t think she could prevail in court, those who had Katherine’s ear told her, it was that they didn’t believe she would be collecting much in the way of damages. Joe’s throwaway line about Michael being “worth more dead than alive” had been borne out by earnings that continued to far exceed what he had been making in the last years of his life. The entire “loss of support” aspect of the claim against AEG was, as a result, looking like a weak one. But the appearance at Conrad Murray’s trial of that June 19, 2009, e-mail to Randy Phillips in which Kenny Ortega had described the star’s pitiful condition and urged the company to “get him the help he needs” had changed the minds of a number of people about how strong the claim against AEG might be. In the months after the trial, the discovery of the Ortega e-mail had been followed by other, less public revelations of what Katherine Jackson’s attorneys believed a jury would see as bullying, threats, and callousness on AEG’s part in its dealings with Michael Jackson. Brian Panish and his partner, Kevin Boyle, were looking more and more likely to take the case all the way to trial and to have a shot at a gigantic judgment.

The result was a heightening of tensions between the Jackson camp and the estate. Branca and his cohorts wanted the lawsuit against AEG to go away so that they could join forces with the company in compelling Lloyd’s of London to pay off on the $17.5 million “This Is It” insurance policy. In early 2011, Lloyd’s had asked the court in Los Angeles to declare it null and void, claiming that Michael Jackson had lied about his medical history and drug addiction. The company had insured only “losses resulting from accident,” Lloyd’s’ lawyers argued, and the official cause of Mr. Jackson’s death was “homicide.” The estate’s August cross-complaint argued that the policy remained in effect because Michael Jackson never intended to die; suicide would have nullified the policy, but homicide did not. For good measure, the estate’s attorneys had added a demand for punitive damages, which was certain to send a chill through Lloyd’s’ London offices. An arrangement whereby Katherine Jackson and her grandchildren would receive some sort of significant compensation from the estate for dropping the AEG lawsuit had been in the works, according to Mrs. Jackson’s advisors, but now was rapidly falling apart.

This was in part because several of Katherine’s children had heard from Howard Mann about the tape recording he possessed of a telephone conversation between Joel Katz, Henry Vaccaro, and Vaccaro’s attorney in which Katz and the other attorney at one point could be heard chuckling about the fact that Joe and the rest of the Jacksons would get nothing when Katherine died. In the minds of the Jacksons, this confirmed their suspicion that the estate intended to delay the funding of the Family Trust in the hope that their eighty-two-year-old mother would die before collecting her forty percent of the estate.

Perry Sanders, by then, was hearing regularly from his client and her advisors that Michael’s siblings were unhappy that he wasn’t moving against the estate, and against Branca in particular. Sanders actually was increasingly impatient with Branca and his lawyers, more inclined by the week to suspect that they were in fact stalling, and for exactly the reasons that Katherine’s children claimed.

Just six months earlier, Sanders had been assuring Mrs. Jackson and her advisors that settling with the Internal Revenue Service and dealing with Tohme Tohme’s claims were the only two remaining major obstacles to a final settlement of the estate and a funding of the Family Trust. The largest problem previously had been the Segye Times judgment against Katherine Jackson, but in the late summer of 2011 Sanders himself had negotiated a settlement with the Moonies that involved a payment of $6 million, less than half of what the Segye Times’s attorneys had been demanding. Branca and the estate were persuaded to advance that money in the form of a loan that Mrs. Jackson was obligated to pay within one year. In its negotiations with Sanders, the estate had agreed to charge an absurdly low rate of interest on that loan, .16%, to be exact. It was assumed that Mrs. Jackson would be able to pay back the $6 million from her half-share of the $30 million that the estate described as a “preliminary distribution” to the Family Trust. That money could not be released, however, Branca and Weitzman had told Sanders, until the estate had settled with the IRS.

When the Conrad Murray trial began in September 2011, Katherine Jackson and John Branca had seemed to still be members of the same team. Mrs. Jackson and her grandchildren, Prince and Paris, had flown to Montreal at the estate’s request for the October 2 world premiere of the Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson THE IMMORTAL World Tour, afterward telling television cameras how “fantastic” and “amazing” the show had been. Sanders, meanwhile, was praising Branca at every opportunity. Whatever deal had been cut seemed to be satisfying everyone involved. That deal had been an oral one only, though; nothing had been committed to paper. Like the Jackson children, Sanders had watched with displeasure as Branca and Weitzman appeared to do nothing to discourage the story that they had paid $30 million to his client and her grandchildren, all the while holding the money back until the IRS situation and “other outstanding issues” were resolved. Also, like his client’s children, Sanders had been startled when Branca and Weitzman agreed to be interviewed by Piers Morgan on CNN and told the TV host that Michael’s stake in the Sony/ATV catalog alone was worth more than a billion dollars, an amount that did not even include the MiJac catalog and other music publishing properties. When Morgan observed that Jackson’s “publishing rights alone, by the sound of it, were worth several billion dollars” at the time of his death, Branca did not disagree and neither did Weitzman, who was seated beside him. The clamor among Katherine’s children that Sanders find some way to collect their mother’s share of the estate grew louder and more threatening.

By the spring of 2012, Sanders’s conversations with Weitzman were no longer friendly ones, and he was once again meeting with Paul LiCalsi to outline the case that could be made against Branca and McClain, insisting to Mrs. Jackson’s advisors that it was far stronger than their questions about the will. Nothing alienated affections between the Katherine Jackson side and the estate side, though, like Sanders’s decision in the late spring of 2012 to join Brian Panish and his law firm in prosecuting the wrongful death lawsuit against AEG. Branca and Weitzman were shrewd enough to recognize that Sanders could and would use that position to conduct discovery of their dealings on behalf of the estate without having to file a lawsuit against them. He already had found evidence of what he believed to be a conflict of interest involving AEG, Sanders told his client, and was looking for proof of actual collusion, along with an accounting of just how much Branca and McClain, along with Weitzman and the other lawyers, had collected from the estate since Michael’s death.

Sanders still generally gave Branca credit for taking care of business. Katherine’s lawyer would admit to being most impressed that Branca had negotiated a deal to reduce the interest on Michael’s debt by more than three-fourths, from seventeen percent to less than four. The estate’s special administrator had negotiated a deal with Pepsi that was richer even than the ones he’d made on Michael Jackson’s behalf in the 1980s. The soft drink manufacturer was licensed to use the star’s image on special souvenir cans of Pepsi and in a campaign that would coincide with the re-release of Bad, it was reported, even“resurrecting” him in a TV commercial. The estate’s attorneys, meanwhile, were dealing with everything from settling Ola Ray’s claim against royalties from the “Thriller” video, to the handwritten lawsuit a woman named Kimberly Griggs had filed in San Diego that demanded $1 billion for inspiring Michael to write songs for Thriller, Bad, and Dangerous, in the course of a years-long “romance.”

Neither Sanders nor his client was happy, though, when it was reported that the estate had obtained permission from Judge Beckloff to sell Hayvenhurst. After checking in with Weitzman, Sanders was telling TMZ that “the motion to sell Hayvenhurst was withdrawn and this is merely for permission to buy a different place”—the Calabasas estate—“for the beneficiaries to reside.” The estate in fact had retained the right to sell Hayvenhurst, however, and was in the eyes of the Jackson family once again demonstrating to Michael’s mother who wielded the real power.

Still, there was little obvious basis for arguing with the claim that Branca had, as promised to Judge Beckloff nearly three years earlier, “maximized” the value of the Michael Jackson estate. Documents filed with Judge Beckloff showed that the estate had generated gross earnings in excess of $475 million through May 2012 and that nearly all of Michael’s debts had been paid off. What Michael’s brothers and sisters wanted to know, though, was how much of that money Branca and McClain and their attorneys were putting in their own pockets. Sanders’s associate Sandra Ribera would tell the Jacksons that the first accounting provided to the court back in November 2010 showed that Branca and McClain had paid themselves $9 million apiece in a seven-month period, and that another $13.6 million had gone to attorneys who included Katz, Weitzman, and Branca’s own law firm. Sanders said the accounting statements weren’t entirely as clear as that, but also told his client and her advisors that Branca and McClain might have made even more than Ribera was saying. Without a truly exhaustive audit, Sanders admitted, it would be impossible to say with certainty what Branca, McClain, Weitzman, Katz, and the rest were collecting.

Katherine’s children, Randy and Janet in particular, were insisting that they wanted more than an audit—they wanted Branca taken down. Randy had never ceased scheming and plotting with his father how to seize control of the estate, and Janet was becoming increasingly stressed by her role as the Jacksons’ new Michael. Though her wealth was still in the tens of millions, Janet had grown increasingly frugal—even stingy some of her siblings thought—in the aftermath of her 2000 divorce; ex-husband Rene Elizondo had walked away with $15 million, a five-bedroom beach house in Malibu, and a piece of his ex-wife’s song royalties. The family had gotten a good look at the new Janet in July 2003 when they were preparing to celebrate their patriarch’s eighty-fourth birthday with what they had decided to call “Joe Jackson Day” (an event Michael allowed to take place at Neverland, even though he skipped it). The family had decided to present Joe with a fishing boat and a trailer—“nothing big, maybe a fifty-thousand dollar purchase,” recalled one of Michael’s associates who was involved in planning the event. Janet, though, refused to put up her share of the money to pay for the boat until Michael had coughed up his share. And in the summer of 2009, Katherine Jackson had complained to confidants that Janet’s demands to be repaid the $49,000 deposit that she had paid to secure the burial spot at Forest Lawn, which was reserved in Janet’s name, had caused the initial postponement of Michael’s funeral. Katherine had been so frustrated that she asked Marc Schaffel to help her obtain a credit card with a high enough limit to pay Forest Lawn herself. (Through her attorney, Janet Jackson denied this story.) Almost three years later, Janet was increasingly put out by the carousel of brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews coming to her for handouts. She wanted them to have their own money.

Randy, though, remained the driving force of the campaign to unseat Branca and was loudly complaining that Perry Sanders should be fired if he wasn’t going to take action. The atmosphere enveloping the Calabasas estate that had replaced Hayvenhurst as Jackson Family Central was increasingly murky approaching the third anniversary of the death of its brightest star.

Michael might have found comfort in the knowledge that the inheritors of his estate all seemed to be coming into their own. His mother Katherine, her attorneys and advisors said, was increasingly sure of her own mind and less vulnerable to being swayed by Joe. She wouldn’t hear a bad word about any of her children, even the one she knew was bent on making trouble, Randy, but Mrs. Jackson nevertheless refused to yield to her youngest son’s unceasing demands that she hire new lawyers who would go after Branca. The relationship between Michael’s mother and his children was “a moving thing to see, very deep and loving,” Katherine’s attorney Sandra Ribera said, and the two oldest, the teenagers, actually seemed to enjoy spending time around a grandmother who was almost seventy years their senior.

Prince was still a quiet boy, but he was making the force of his personality felt. On the trip to Montreal for the premiere of the Cirque du Soleil shows, he had confronted Sanders with the complaints he was hearing from some of his aunts and uncles, speaking so forcefully that other people on the trip said the usually unflappable Sanders was struggling to find words “and looked actually intimidated” as one of Mrs. Jackson’s advisors described it. Only a little more than a week before, Prince had traveled to Germany with Katherine’s advisor Lowell Henry and a camera crew dispatched by Mrs. Jackson’s business partner Howard Mann for the “Tribute to Bambi” charity event at The Station in Berlin, where he was to present the handwritten lyrics of “Billie Jean,” “Bad,” and “Smooth Criminal” for an auction to raise money for seriously ill children. Dieter Wiesner had accompanied the traveling party to the event, and even when Henry and the others began to believe that Wiesner had set the whole thing up as a form of self-promotion, Prince had continued to conduct himself with impressive grace. Dressed in a black suit, red shirt, black tie, and red armband—the same ensemble Michael had worn when he collected the Bambi Award in 2002—he told the crowd he intended to “try to build on what my father did. I want to try to help and change things, just like he did.”

Paris was growing up to be a beauty, every bit as self-assured as her older brother, and a good deal more gregarious. Shortly before Christmas in 2011, Paris had appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show to talk about her first acting role in a film, Lundon’s Bridge and the Three Keys, admitting that she had lobbied hard to convince her grandmother to let her be in the movie. When she was asked about wearing a mask as a child, the girl admitted that she had chafed against it: “I’m like, ‘This is stupid. Why am I wearing a mask?’ But I kind of realized the older I got, like, he only tried to protect us. And he’d explain that to us, too.” What she liked best about school was being treated like everyone else, Paris had explained to DeGeneres: “When I came to Buckley, they didn’t know who I was. I was like, ‘Yes! I have a chance to be normal.’”

In the run-up to the third anniversary of Michael’s death, Paris was being asked regularly about the objections of her Aunt Janet to her niece’s insistence on seeking work in movies. “We’ve spoken about the fact that you’re only a child once,” Janet had told the magazine Prevention. “I think there’s a time for everything, and now is not the time [to act in films].” Paris had stood strong in letting Janet know she could think for herself, people at the Calabasas house said, and Janet hadn’t seemed to like it much. Two weeks before the anniversary of her father’s death, Paris had appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s new show to confess that a number of her fellow students at Buckley weren’t too happy about having Michael Jackson’s two oldest children among them, once they realized who the new kids were. Was she picked on by the other kids? Winfrey asked. “They try, but it doesn’t always work at school,” Paris had answered. “And some people try to cyberbully me. They try to get to me with words, but that doesn’t really work.” She remained wary of making new friends, the girl admitted: “If I feel someone is being fake to me, I will just push away.”

While the two older children seemed to embrace the public nature of their lives, the youngest, Blanket, continued to be home-schooled, sheltered by his grandmother from a world of prying eyes he wasn’t prepared to face. No one at the Calabasas house wanted the now ten-year-old boy to know that in April his father’s former bodyguard Matt Fiddes had told tabloid reporters he was Blanket’s father and intended to try to prove it in court in order to obtain visitation rights. “More than anything,” Fiddes said, he wanted the boy to meet his biological mother, who was at the moment battling cancer. This wasn’t about money, Fiddes insisted: “I’m a self-made man. I don’t want or need their cash.” The Jacksons weren’t buying it.

Paris was in the lead paragraph of nearly every article about the June 25 anniversary. Five days before, she had posted online a photograph of Michael Jackson kissing Debbie Rowe on the cheek, above the caption, “Mommy and Daddy!” On the anniversary itself, she had tweeted, “RIP Michael Jackson . . . Dad you will forever be in my heart<3 i love you.”

Conrad Murray was also featured in articles about the anniversary. Murray was now lodged in the Segregation Unit at the Los Angeles County Men’s Jail, where his neighbors included disgraced major league baseball star Lenny Dykstra and the first man Janet Jackson had ever married, James Debarge. Debarge, it was reported, had actually become friendly with Murray. A week before the anniversary, his new attorney quoted the doctor as saying the conditions of his incarceration were destroying his health. He only got fresh air once a month and clean underwear just once a week, Murray had complained to her, and was suffering from a constant headache he feared might be a brain tumor. “I may not make it out of here alive,” the lawyer quoted him as saying. “This is a very dangerous place. I’m in here dying. The system is intent on killing me.”

Murray had chosen June 25 as the day on which he once again protested his innocence, insisting through his lawyer that he was not responsible for Michael Jackson’s death. Her client’s one regret, the lawyer said, was that he hadn’t testified on his own behalf, and Murray remained intent upon resuming his career as a physician when he was released.

June 25, 2012, was also the date that the surviving members of the Jackson 5 had chosen for a major promotion of a “Unity” concert tour performing Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson material, which would stretch from coast to coast and include at least twenty stops. “The brothers don’t know this,” Jermaine told London’s Daily Telegraph on the anniversary date, “but I’ve broken down several times and cried during rehearsals.”

Katherine Jackson was at least as excited about the Unity tour as any of her sons. Mrs. Jackson was planning to “be a sort of groupie,” as one of her advisors put it, going on the road with her faithful caretaker, Joe Jackson’s nephew Trent Jackson, in the Prevost motor home Michael had purchased for her shortly before his death. She and Trent would be seated in the front row at each of the concerts in the southwest region, beginning in Albuquerque on July 17 and including dates in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Southern California, traveling from city to city in the Prevost. She might even follow her sons north to Saratoga, California, Katherine said, and maybe even on to Lincoln City, Oregon. What Mrs. Jackson didn’t know, of course, was that some of her children and grandchildren had a whole different surprise prepared for her.

The opening act of the craziest Jackson family drama since Michael’s death would begin on July 14, 2012, when Dr. Allan Metzger arrived at the Calabasas estate at the behest of Janet Jackson and was introduced as an associate of Katherine Jackson’s longtime Beverly Hills physician, a woman doctor whom she trusted, literally, with her life. Her doctor wanted her to receive a physical before she set out on this road trip, Mrs. Jackson was told. Metzger conducted a brief examination, then told Katherine that her blood pressure was elevated. It really wouldn’t be a good idea, the doctor said, to make this trip in a motor home. To avoid placing strain on her heart, Metzger explained, Mrs. Jackson should fly to Albuquerque.

Though terribly disappointed, Katherine agreed to leave the next morning, Sunday, July 15, on a commercial jet out of LAX, accompanied by her daughter Rebbie, Rebbie’s daughter Stacee Brown (no relation to the ghostwriter), and Mrs. Jackson’s personal assistant, Janice Smith. Not until they were at the airport did Mrs. Jackson realize they weren’t headed to Albuquerque, but rather to Tucson, where she had been booked into a room at the nearby Miraval Spa resort. Janet Jackson was waiting at Miraval. Her doctor had decided she needed bed rest, Janet and the others explained on the way to Miraval, where Katherine was checked into a room in which the telephone had been disconnected and the television was not working. Lots of sleep and no disturbances, Janet and Rebbie explained, were what the doctor had ordered. Rebbie took her mother’s cell phone from her, “so you won’t be bothered by calls.” Confused, but touched by her children’s concern, Katherine settled into her room at Miraval.

Back at the Calabasas house, there was no worry. Katherine had been taking a motor home trip about once a year since Michael’s death. During those trips, and on the rare other occasions she traveled by air without her grandchildren, Prince, Paris, and Blanket were left in the able care of their thirty-four-year-old cousin Tito Joe “TJ” Jackson.

TJ and his brothers, Taryll and Taj, had been Michael Jackson’s favorite nephews. Even more than most in the family, Michael had credited that to the boys’ mother, Delores “Dee Dee” Martes Jackson, a daughter of Dominican immigrants whom Tito had begun dating in 1968, when they were sophomores at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, and married in 1972, when the Jackson 5 was just past the peak of its success. In 1994, a year after her divorce from Tito, Dee Dee had been murdered by the man she was dating, Donald Bohana. Her sons had been unable to persuade the district attorney to prosecute until they filed their own wrongful death lawsuit; Bohana was convicted of first-degree murder three years after Dee Dee’s death.

Michael Jackson had always been supportive of Tito’s sons, putting each of the three through the Buckley School. He became especially close to the young men, though, after their mother’s death, agreeing to produce their first album, Brotherhood, and to release it on his MJJ Music label in 1995. Brotherhood was a considerable success, spinning off five singles and eventually selling more than six million copies. That success was mostly due to the fact that Michael had performed a duet with 3T on the album’s best-selling single, “Why,” and had sung backing vocals on the second best-selling single, “I Need You.” When 3T brought out a second album without Michael’s involvement nine years later, it wasn’t even released in the United States and disappeared quickly overseas.

Relations between Michael and the two older brothers had cooled somewhat when he declined to continue working with them in the late 1990s, but TJ had remained loyal to his uncle, appreciative of the help and support that Michael had offered them all after their mother’s death. He was also the closest to his grandmother of any of Tito’s sons, and had been the first and the most generous about offering to help her with Michael’s children after his death. Though he was heart-stoppingly handsome and still best-known for being the first serious boyfriend of fellow Buckley School student Kim Kardashian, TJ had turned into a solid family man, fathering three sons by his wife, Frances, and by 2010 was the closest thing to a father that Prince, Paris, and Blanket had left in the world. “He’s so good with them, so kind and patient,” Sandy Ribera said. “TJ is like a male version of Mrs. Jackson.” For months it had been TJ who took the kids to the doctor, rode with them to school, helped them with their homework, met with their teachers. They were fine with being left in his care, but more than a little confused by the fact that they hadn’t heard from their grandmother; she had never before gone twenty-four hours without checking in with them.

By midday Tuesday, everyone at the Calabasas house sensed that something was up. The media were reporting on a letter that had been signed by five of Michael Jackson’s siblings—Randy, Janet, Jermaine, Rebbie, and, astonishingly, Tito—then sent to John Branca and John McClain. “We insist that you resign effective immediately,” the letter began, “as executors from the estate of our brother, Michael Joe Jackson.” The letter promised to reveal the reasons why Branca and McClain should resign “in the coming weeks,” but then proceeded to state the main one: the will that had named them as executors was “fake, flawed, and fraudulent.” After describing how Branca had at first presented the will to them without a signature page, the letter cut to what the siblings apparently believed was their strongest argument, at least in the court of public opinion: “Michael was absolutely not in Los Angeles, California, on the date of his signature reflected in the will at-hand.”

The next paragraph detailed what had always been the real and seething contention within the family about why Branca, in particular, but McClain as well, should not be the executors of Michael’s estate: “Our brother told us, in no uncertain terms and without hesitation in the months prior to his death, that he despised both of you and that he did not want either of you to have anything to do with his life or estate for that matter. We know that and you knew that. We believe you relied on the presumption that no one would be so bold as to suggest that you would perpetrate such unconscionable deceit; but you were wrong.”

The argument that followed was a rough—very rough—approximation of what both Sanders and Ribera had also come to believe: the executors were deliberately dragging things out in the hope that Mrs. Jackson would die before they had to pay her money she could leave to her children. “Even worse still,” the letter to Branca and McClain read, “is what you have done and continue to do to our mother since you fraudulently assumed the position as the executors of the estate of her son. You keep lying to her, you manipulate her, and you make promises that you know will never happen . . . She’s an eighty-two-year-old woman.”

It was a legitimate reason to take the executors on, Sanders had tried to explain, but not an effective basis for a filing against them in court. The permitted time period in which to challenge the will had passed long before he became Katherine’s attorney, Sanders had said for what seemed to him the hundredth time, so that was a moot point. Only ego or ignorance, he and Ribera agreed when they read the Jackson siblings’ letter, could explain a course of action by Katherine’s children that was sure to work against their own best interests.

Sanders and Ribera were startled by the next paragraph: “Your actions are affecting [our mother’s] health, and on top of that, we’ve just found out she recently had a mini-stroke,” the letter to Branca and McClain went on. “Please understand, she’s not equipped to handle the stress load you are putting on her. She feels, as she has said, ‘I’m stuck in the middle.’ She too knows and acknowledges that the will was forged. She wants to do the right thing, and move in the direction of justice for her son and family, yet she fears the POWERS THAT BE.”

Like Sanders, the people holding down the fort in Calabasas were shaken when they read the paragraph after that, which laid much of the blame for the failure to go after Branca and McClain at the feet of three of the four people who had become Katherine’s closest advisors: Lowell Henry, Perry Sanders, and Trent Jackson. These three were “telling her to disregard what she knows as fact,” the siblings’ letter accused. “Instead, her so-called advisors are convincing her to let them negotiate ‘deals’ with Branca and McClain on her behalf, or is it on the behalf of all of you?”

AEG was the letter’s next target: “AEG has been very vocal about how they are going to destroy [Katherine] and her family publicly and blame her for Michael’s death. Since then, they’ve wasted no time harassing each and every family member, including Michael’s children in a barrage of depositions, where they are asking personal, inappropriate, and disrespectful questions that, to say the least, have nothing to do with his passing.”

All in all, it was a very sloppy letter, and couldn’t possibly have been written by or even with the help of a competent attorney, thought Sanders, one of the ten people who had been cc’d at the bottom of the last page (along with Randy Phillips, Paul Gongaware, Tim Leiweke, Trent Jackson, Lowell Henry, Howard Weitzman, Martin Bandier, Phil Anschutz, and Tom Barrack). Sanders wasn’t even pleased to see that Michael’s brothers and sisters had made a point he himself had said was of supreme significance: Branca and McClain had written a letter to Judge Palazuelos, who was still presiding over the wrongful death lawsuit, “asking her to keep all documents handed over by AEG under court seal, clearly protecting AEG, but not protecting our mother nor our niece and nephews Paris, Prince, and Blanket. Who are you working for? What is it that you don’t want to be known?”

The letter got truly nutty in the last paragraph, though, in the opinion of Katherine’s attorneys, when it warned that the Jacksons were “considering retaining the law firm, Baker Hostetler, who have advised us on the potential criminal misconduct in your actions. We will hand this over to the proper authorities.” If you plan to bring the authorities in, Sanders would remember thinking, you damn sure don’t tell people about it ahead of time.

Sanders’s associate Ribera was dispatched to the Calabasas estate that afternoon, not long after Trent Jackson had left for Albuquerque, where he was supposed to meet Katherine prior to that night’s concert at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. It was almost dark when Trent phoned to say that Mrs. Jackson had never showed up. “That’s when we started getting really worried,” Ribera recalled.

In her room at Miraval, Katherine Jackson was frustrated mainly that she couldn’t get anyone to come and fix her television. She liked to fall asleep with the TV on, she explained, but the thing was absolutely dead, no picture, no sound. Yet no repairman came, despite her repeated requests for one, so she spent hours playing the word game Scramble with Friends on her iPad. It had become something of an obsession with her in recent weeks; she’d gotten TJ into it and the two of them played daily. But when Rebbie came to check on her, she asked her mother if it was possible to send messages on an iPad. Katherine told her it was and began to show her daughter how. Rebbie immediately took the iPad from her, Mrs. Jackson would recall, saying that she needed rest, not stimulation.

Prince and Paris had been alarmed by the claim in the letter signed by their five aunts and uncles that Mrs. Jackson had suffered a “mini-stroke.” That certainly hadn’t happened before she left on her trip. Ribera suggested calling Mrs. Jackson’s doctor’s office. When they did, the doctor told them she had no association with Dr. Metzger and had never sent him to see Mrs. Jackson. “That’s when we knew for certain that something was going on,” Ribera recalled. “We started to talk about Dr. Metzger and that was like an ‘Oh, my God’ moment.” For the first time, they realized that this was the same Dr. Allan Metzger who had been called as a defense witness at the Conrad Murray trial. The same Dr. Metzger who had been reprimanded by the state medical board for writing prescriptions for Janet Jackson under fraudulent names. The same Dr. Metzger who had accompanied Michael on the HIStory tour in 1996. The same Dr. Metzger who, after Michael’s death, had sent his attorney out to tell the media that in the spring of 2009 Michael had asked him to provide propofol, and to insist that the doctor had refused to prescribe anything more than a mild sleep medication, and whose records had been subpoenaed by investigators from the coroner’s office during the investigation into Michael’s death.

At Miraval, Katherine Jackson was being visited regularly by Rebbie, who was in the room next door, and by Randy, Janet, and Jermaine, who were stopping by every other day or so for visits. She would ask them how the children were doing, Mrs. Jackson said, and they would tell her the kids were fine, everything was good at the house, nothing to worry about, just get some rest.

Shortly after the Dr. Metzger connection was made, Paris took to Twitter, responding to a tweet from her Uncle Randy that read, “We ask that everyone respects that this is a serious matter that will be handled by the proper authorities.” Paris tweeted back, “i am going to clarify right now that what has been said about my grandmother is a rumor and nothing has happened, she is completely fine. i’d like to know who made up the rumor . . . i will defend my beloved family member with all i have, even if it means from other family members.” She also shot a tweet directly to Randy that read, “hello dear FAMILY member I don’t appreciate you telling people things that aren’t true thank you very much.” As word of Paris’s tweet spread on the Internet, the tabloid media swarmed, convinced they were now chasing a big story.

In its initial response to the letter signed by the five Jacksons, the estate had trotted out the familiar contention that any questions about the validity of the will and Michael’s selection of his executors had been “thoroughly and completely debunked two years ago when a challenge was rejected by the Los Angeles Superior Court, the California Court of Appeals, and, finally, the California Supreme Court.” Remarkably, not a single member of the media pointed out that none of the questions about the validity of the will or the selection of Branca and McClain had been settled by those courts. The only thing that had been settled was that Joe Jackson lacked the standing to challenge Branca and McClain. If the executors and their attorneys felt contempt for reporters in general, it certainly seemed justified. Saddened as they were by the “false and defamatory accusations grounded in Internet conspiracy theories [that] are now being made by certain members of Michael’s family, whom he chose to leave out of his will,” the estate executors and their attorneys pledged to continue their efforts to secure the financial futures of Michael’s children. By the next day the estate had produced a more politic pronouncement, one that focused less on the executors’ reputations and more on “the welfare of Mrs. Jackson, and most particularly with Michael’s minor children. We are concerned that we do what we can to protect them from undue influences, bullying, greed, and other unfortunate circumstances.”

At the Calabasas house, people were commenting that, stressful as the situation was, it was nice at least not to have Katherine’s assistant Janice Smith in town. Ribera and Trent Jackson regarded Smith as an especially corrosive force. She continued to work out of an office in the Hayvenhurst mansion, although Katherine no longer resided there, and had been placed on the estate’s payroll. That and her relationships with Joe and Randy Jackson had resulted in widespread suspicion about her loyalties. The previous April, Smith had joined Randy Jackson in filing a complaint of financial elder abuse against Trent Jackson at the Los Angeles County sheriff’s station in Malibu. Katherine Jackson had “emphatically denied” this claim, but sheriff’s investigators had continued to interrogate several people who frequented the Calabasas house, Ribera among them. The attorney had gotten on Smith’s bad side when she attempted to resolve a sexual harassment complaint involving Smith and a security guard, and seemed more sympathetic to the bodyguard than to Katherine’s assistant. sheriff’s deputies said that Smith had complained about her also, Ribera recalled, “and so they started investigating me, too.” Prince and Paris told Ribera and TJ Jackson that their nanny and the chef had been whispering in each other’s ears all day, and when they’d sneaked a look at the cell phones of the chef and the nanny, the two teenagers said, they discovered they were exchanging text messages with Janice Smith about what was going on at the house, and what the kids should be told. Ribera and TJ made the decision on Thursday, July 20, that they would put all of the staff—except for the security detail—on paid leave. “After that, it was just me and Trent and TJ and Prince and Paris and Blanket,” Ribera recalled. “We were the core group hunkered down there at the house.” Prince and Paris were calling their grandmother almost hourly on their cell phones and getting no answer. Ribera and TJ Jackson tried communicating with her through the Scramble with Friends game, but again there was no reply.

By then, Ribera, Trent, and TJ Jackson had become convinced that the five siblings who were behind whatever was going on intended to somehow gain a conservatorship over Katherine Jackson, possibly by demonstrating her incompetence to serve as the guardian of Michael’s children. The money, as everyone knew, would follow those three kids.

That very day the children’s court-appointed attorney, Margaret Lodise, went to Judge Beckloff to recommend that Katherine Jackson be stripped of her guardianship of Prince, Paris, and Blanket, temporarily, until a determination could be made about whether she was able to responsibly care for them.

On Friday, private investigator Tom Grant joined the group at the Calabasas house. A former L.A. sheriff’s Department investigator, Grant “really calmed everyone and got us focused,” Ribera recalled. He also convinced the people at the Calabasas house they should bring in law enforcement. On Saturday, July 21, Trent Jackson went to the Malibu station of the L.A. County sheriff’s office, the same building where Randy Jackson and Janice Smith had filed their complaint against him a year earlier, to report Katherine Jackson as a missing person. When someone at the sheriff’s department leaked that to the media, the story went international.

In the United States, every cable news outfit and all three broadcast networks were chasing the story, mainly by following the tweets of Paris Jackson. “Yes, my grandmother is missing i haven’t spoken with her in a week i want her home now,” Paris told her more than 500,000 Twitter followers on the morning of Sunday, July 22. TJ Jackson made his first public pronouncement on what was taking place in a tweet to Paris that read, “I know it’s completely unfair for them to do this to you and your brothers. We will keep trying. I love you.” Jermaine’s attempt at media management was to send out his own tweet: “I want to reassure everyone (incl all sudden medical experts) that Mother is fine but is resting up in AZ on the orders of a doctor, not us.” Paris answered with a tweet that read, “the same doctor that testified on behalf of dr murray saying my father was a drug addict (a lie) is caring for my grandmother . . . just saying.”

On Sunday afternoon, the sheriff’s investigators called to say that Mrs. Jackson had been located in Arizona but wouldn’t divulge her exact location. Local law enforcement had spoken to her, the Los Angeles sheriff’s investigators said, and Mrs. Jackson had told them she was fine. Ribera, the daughter of a San Francisco police chief, ascertained that the authorities in Arizona had only spoken to Mrs. Jackson while she was surrounded by members of her family. “You have to get her away from them and ask her what’s been going on without them hovering over her,” Ribera said. “That’s the protocol.” The sheriff’s investigators said they would be flying to Arizona aboard a chartered jet early the next morning and would check on Mrs. Jackson’s condition themselves when they arrived. Ribera asked to come along, but the request was refused.

That evening “it became really serene at the house,” Ribera recalled. With the staff gone, and especially with Janice Smith out of the picture, “everyone was calm and peaceful,” Ribera said. “The kids . . . had had their nanny in their ear, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, a lot of people trying to manipulate them, but now they were thinking for themselves. You could see it. . . . And TJ was amazing.”

The most outlandish developments thus far, though, would take place on Monday, July 23. First, the sheriff’s investigator in charge phoned from Arizona to say that Janet Jackson’s security detail had met them at “the location” and had told them they could not see Mrs. Jackson. “And I said, ‘Well, why’d you stop there?’” Ribera recalled. “And they said, ‘We didn’t have jurisdiction because it’s Arizona.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you bring in local law enforcement?’ And they said, ‘Well, we thought she was fine.’ I said, ‘If you thought she was fine, why did you go to Arizona in the first place?’ And they just said, ‘Oh, well, Arizona took care of it. We did all we could.’ They were pathetic.”

“8 days and counting. something is really off, this isn’t like her at all . . . i wanna talk directly to my grandmother!!<|3” Paris Jackson tweeted to her followers. Jermaine answered with a tweet that insisted Prince and Paris were not “being ‘blocked’ from speaking with Mother . . . She is merely an 82-year-old woman following doctor’s orders to rest up and de-stress, away from phones and computers.”

The adults at the Calabasas house gathered to try to figure out where in Arizona Katherine might be. TJ got La Toya on the phone, but “La Toya wanted to be Switzerland, totally neutral,” Ribera remembered, and wouldn’t get involved. Must be the only time in her life that La Toya didn’t want to talk to the media when they wanted to talk to her, someone at the house observed, and they all shared a chuckle. La Toya did tell them, though, that she thought her mother might be at Miraval.

Shortly after 1 p.m., Prince and Paris were in an SUV returning to the Calabasas house through the double gates that defended the driveway when another SUV, loaded with passengers, pulled up right on its bumper. Randy Jackson was at the wheel of the tailing SUV, which got in through the main gate and made it to the inner gate just as the steel barrier was coming down. “He just drove through and broke the arm off,” recalled Ribera, who was watching from the property’s pool house. The SUV braked to a stop in the driveway, and “all of a sudden the doors open and there’s this swarm of people pointing cameras all around,” Ribera remembered. She thought it was paparazzi at first, Ribera said, then recognized that the cameras were cell phones and that the people in the driveway were Randy Jackson, Janet Jackson, Jermaine Jackson, and several of Prince, Paris, and Blanket’s cousins, including Randy’s oldest daughter, Genevieve, and Jermaine’s two youngest sons, Jaafar and Jermajesty. It was friendly at first, hugs and handshakes all around, though of course everyone wondered why Janet, Randy, Jermaine, and the others were aiming their phone cameras at them, even as they said hello.

Rebbie’s son Austin, who had come to “visit” a little earlier, joined the others in the driveway. “They had actually planted cousins in the house to sort of spy and report,” Ribera would marvel later, “to manipulate the kids and try get them to leave the property without security. That hadn’t worked, so they came in themselves.”

Trent and TJ Jackson stood confused for a few moments, until they realized that the other Jacksons were there to take Michael’s children. The timing of this guerilla action, though, was not propitious. Only two security guards at a time were supposed to be on duty at the Calabasas house, but the guards had called a meeting that day and eight of them were in attendance. None of the guards were anxious to get into a physical altercation with Katherine Jackson’s children, though, and so they mostly stood by with their palms raised, waiting for someone to tell them what they should do.

Janet Jackson went for her niece Paris, while Randy approached Prince and Jermaine engaged the guards, all three of them still using their cell phones as video cameras. When Janet and Randy told Paris and Prince they were coming with them, both teenagers flatly refused. Prince turned his back on Randy, but Jermaine pulled the boy aside and told him that this was something that had been in the planning for three years and that it was important for him to join in with the rest of the family. Prince shrugged off Jermaine and continued walking toward the house. Paris, meanwhile, made it clear to Janet that she wouldn’t be leaving the Calabasas estate. When Janet tried to snatch Paris’s cell phone, the same phone the girl had been using to tweet to the world, Paris pulled it away and turned a shoulder to protect it. Janet spoke to her briefly, then reached for the phone again and Paris took another step back. TMZ would initially report, based on anonymous sources, that Janet told Paris she was a “spoiled little bitch” and that Paris answered, “This is our house, not the Jackson family house. Get the fuck out!” TMZ also said the two exchanged slaps. TMZ recanted, though, when Janet threatened legal action. It’s obvious from the video of the confrontation between Janet and Paris that there were no slaps. What was said remains a matter of dispute. CNN would report that Janet “scolded her niece for using her phone to write about family issues on Twitter,” and the network was not threatened with a lawsuit.

Eventually TJ and Trent realized that the other Jacksons had come to the Calabasas house to take Michael’s children off the property (then on to Arizona, they would learn later) and ordered the security guards not to let that happen. When the guards blocked his way, Randy, who had been smiling up until then, began to snarl warnings about not interfering in a family matter. One of the guards suggested that perhaps he should leave the property and Randy became enraged, cursing in the man’s face, which was when Trent Jackson grabbed him. The two grappled for a moment, then the bull-strong Trent put Randy in a headlock and subdued him. Jermaine, cursing at the top of his lungs, came briefly to his brother’s aid and would claim later that Trent grabbed him by the throat and punched him in the face.

Whatever was true about that, the scuffle ended quickly when Trent withdrew with Prince and Paris into the house. Those who were staying at the Calabasas house would say later that the saddest thing about the entire scene was the way Jermaine had used his sons. “I mean, Jermaine is cursing as bad as you can curse in front of these kids and fighting and doing all this stuff, and he’s telling his kids to videotape it,” Ribera recalled. “And Jermajesty . . . is just sobbing. His face is covered in tears. He’s taping, but he’s sobbing.” TJ Jackson approached the boy to tell him, “Go upstairs. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be doing this.” “But my Dad told me I have to,” the weeping boy replied.

While five or six of the security guards faced off against Randy, Janet, Jermaine, and the cousins in the driveway, two other guards and Trent Jackson led Prince and Paris out the backdoor of the house and into a gulley that ran along the rear of the property, trying to get them away before the invading Jacksons came after them.

A sheriff’s car answering a 911 call arrived at the front gate at almost that exact moment and everyone froze in place. After noting various accusations of battery and trespassing, the sheriff’s deputies persuaded Randy, Janet, and Jermaine, and their group to leave the property. “Gotta love fam,” Paris tweeted to her followers shortly after they were gone.

Shortly after Randy, Janet, and Jermaine departed, Ribera phoned the estate’s probate attorney Jeryll Cohen to tell her what had taken place. “I normally would never want to ask for the estate’s help, but it was a situation,” Ribera explained. “For one strange moment in time our interests were aligned.” Since the Calabasas house was being rented by the estate, it was up to the estate to lock the place down. Not long after Ribera spoke to Cohen, Margaret Lodise called to say she would be coming out in the evening to talk to the children.

Perry Sanders had remained at his home in Colorado Springs all during the drama thus far, trying to convince himself—and Ribera—that staying out of this family dispute was the wisest course. Until he had spoken to Katherine Jackson, Sanders was insisting to the reporters who called him, he would make no statements nor form any firm opinions. Privately, he was all but certain that what Ribera, along with Trent and TJ Jackson, believed to be taking place probably was. He phoned Tito’s lawyer to say, “I don’t know what I’ve done to piss your client off, but I’ll be happy to talk to him about it and see if we can clear this up.” Tito was in fact already backtracking, telling his sons that he really hadn’t known what he was signing when he put his signature to that letter, but had just gotten “caught up.” Randy was very persuasive, Tito explained: He had thought he was just closing ranks with the others against Branca. He hadn’t meant to go after Trent or Perry Sanders, didn’t know there was anything about them in the letter, and didn’t know either about this claim that his mother had suffered a “mini-stroke.”

By Sunday, July 22, the day after the missing person’s report was filed, Sanders had realized there was a battle taking place and that it was largely being waged in the tabloid press, the Internet news media, and the Twittersphere. TMZ was the central clearinghouse, but Roger Friedman’s Showbiz 411 column was almost as important. The X17online Web site was also a player, but they seemed to have become, like ABC News, a public relations vehicle for Randy and Janet Jackson. That had been made clear on that Sunday when X17 posted a photo provided by Janet and Randy that showed Katherine Jackson smiling and playing Uno with her family in Arizona, accompanied by text that mocked the idea she was a “missing person.” Sanders warned X17 management that they had better start doing a better job of telling the truth. He continued to provide “deep background” to the TMZ staff, but was mostly talking to Roger Friedman. Friedman was the smartest tabloid reporter he’d ever spoken to, Sanders would explain, and maybe the only one who seemed to have some actual interest in reporting the truth. By the evening of the July 23, Friedman was at the cutting edge of reporters on the story, the first to describe in any detail the process by which Katherine Jackson had gotten to Arizona and the circumstances of the assault on the Calabasas estate.

Ribera and those keeping vigil in Calabasas, TJ especially, were heartened when Tito Jackson issued a statement that read, “I completely retract my signature from the July 17 letter sent to the executors of my brother Michael’s estate and repudiate all the claims made against them,” then added, “I don’t want any part of that letter whatsoever.”

The four siblings whose signatures had not been withdrawn could feel the tide turning. The media was sticking it to them with evident relish after the bungled attempt to remove Prince, Paris, and Blanket from the Calabasas estate. Within a few hours of the debacle, Sandy Ribera issued a statement to reporters that, “Jackson family members ambushed Katherine Jackson’s home after their vehicle tore through security gates on the tails of the SUV containing Michael Jackson’s children,” and then suggested that perhaps the FBI should get involved in this case, since Katherine Jackson had been transported across state lines. That evening Paris tweeted, “days are counting, something is really off, this isn’t like her, all i want to do is talk directly to my grandmother.” That evening, Roger Friedman produced a column about the day’s events with a headline that wondered if Janet Jackson had “Lost Her Mind.” The next day, Friedman’s column ran under a headline that identified Randy Jackson as “Michael’s Delusional Brother.” Paris sent out a tweet that read, “days are counting and help me God, i will make whoever did this pay.” Articles began appearing in newspapers that suggested Katherine Jackson and been “kidnapped” or “abducted” by members of her own family. ABC was reporting that Margaret Lodise was preparing to file court papers that would “demand that Katherine Jackson be allowed contact with the children.”

Janet, Randy, and Jermaine tried to fight back with their own publicity campaign. Jermaine issued a statement that the questions about his mother’s whereabouts were nothing more than “a conspiracy to deflect attention from a letter we wrote asking for the resignation of [the] executors.” Randy proved he was not yet a complete pariah by turning to the one media personality who would still take him seriously, Al Sharpton. Speaking by phone, Randy immediately told Sharpton that his mother was “doing great,” then repeated the story that she was in Arizona only because “her health was ailing and her doctors ordered that she get immediate rest, isolate herself from the outside world and rest.” He parroted Jermaine’s line about deflecting attention from the letter to Sharpton, who, rather than asking probing questions, jumped on the opportunity to explain his own important role in this part of the drama. “Now, just for complete disclosure,” Sharpton told his viewers, “I want to show people the date that is being in question, that weekend that Michael Jackson was to have signed that will in Los Angeles, he was, in fact, in Harlem with me that weekend. And I am showing that video now.” When Sharpton asked him again, “Why all this drama that we are hearing in the media in your opinion?” Randy sounded like he was enjoying himself for the first time in days. “Well, because executives of the estate, John Branca and John McClain, are doing—they are using the children to try and put pressure on my mom to try and come out and get her to say things in their favor, to kind of clean up their image. They know they have been caught, they know that they falsified the document. And they know that there are questions that we want answered.”

Janet, meanwhile, continued to deploy ABC News reporters as her unpaid PR spokespersons. It was through ABC that she and her siblings had first responded to Trent Jackson’s trip to the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department with a statement that read, “This fallacious missing persons report was created by the very person and persons we are trying to protect our mother from. We feel that there is a conspiracy to deflect the attention away from a letter we wrote asking for the resignation of the executors, John Branca and John McClain, as well as some of her ‘advisors’ and ‘caregivers.’” Now Janet’s people were talking to ABC about arranging an interview with Katherine Jackson, so that the “missing” woman could tell the world she was just fine.

At the Calabasas house, the main concern had become the issue of custody. Margaret Lodise had scheduled a hearing before Judge Beckloff on the morning of July 25 to try to temporarily suspend Katherine Jackson’s guardianship of Prince, Paris, and Blanket. On the afternoon and evening of July 24, Ribera was dealing with that all by herself, “because Perry was like MIA,” she recalled.

Unbeknownst to his associate, Sanders had finally made phone contact with Janet and Jermaine Jackson, and after a series of difficult conversations had convinced them, he thought, that letting him speak to Katherine would staunch the flow of bad publicity. He exercised no control over Sandy Ribera, who maintained her own law firm, separate from his, and had, in fact, repeatedly cautioned her about speaking out before she had more information, Sanders said. “All I want is to talk to my client and confirm her condition,” he told Janet and Jermaine, again and again.

Katherine Jackson’s condition by that point was one of advanced confusion. That afternoon, her television’s sound had suddenly come on. There was still no picture, but the first words she heard were people talking about her being missing and possibly having been “abducted.” When she asked what was going on, her children and Janice Smith blamed it all on media sensationalism and an attempt by Trent Jackson to get even with Randy by filing a missing persons report with the police, then joining with Sandy Ribera to spread the rumor that her own children had kidnapped her. They said Trent had actually attacked Randy when he went to the Calabasas house to try to explain to Prince, Paris, and Blanket what was happening, and then had gone after Jermaine when he tried to protect his brother. The security guards seemed to think they were working for Trent and had backed him even after he had physically assaulted two of her sons, Mrs. Jackson was told. Then the police had arrived, called either by TJ or that Sandy Ribera, and not only refused to arrest Trent, but actually threw her own children off the property. Prince and Paris had seen the whole thing; it must have been terrible for them, Katherine was told. And now the media was turning on them like the pack of animals they were.

The media weren’t the only ones turning against Randy, Janet, Rebbie, and Jermaine, however. Their brothers Marlon, Jackie, and Tito appeared on CBS’s The Insider that evening to make it clear they weren’t in league with their siblings in Arizona. “All I know is there’s somebody who made the decision that my mother cannot talk to me, and whoever that person is, they’ve got to answer to me, because I’m going to see my mother and I’m going to bring her home,” Marlon said, and then choked up. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I am.”

While the three brothers were talking to CBS, Perry Sanders was flying to Tucson aboard a chartered jet, having been promised by Janet and Jermaine that he would be permitted to speak with their mother and confirm that she was well.

Janet and Jermaine landed at Tucson Airport aboard a commercial jet at almost the same moment Sanders’s private jet set down. By cell phone, the two instructed him to meet their hired car near baggage claim. When Sanders’s own driver pulled the Lincoln Town Car he was riding in up behind the limousine where Janet and Jermaine were waiting, they told him to get in and have his car follow theirs to Miraval Spa.

What he believed about who was running this operation was confirmed for Sanders when Janet and Jermaine refused to discuss the situation until they had put Randy on speakerphone, and then let the youngest Jackson brother do most of the talking. All three siblings were sticking to the official story that Katherine was under doctor’s order to rest and “de-stress” by staying away from phones and computers, and that they had wanted to remove Michael’s children from the Calabasas property for no other reason than to reassure them that their grandma was being taken care of. Sanders kept nodding and saying he understood, repeating once again that all he wanted was to have a conversation with his client in order to dispel the rumors and gossip that were flying around the Internet. When Sanders asked about what had happened at the Calabasas house earlier that day, Jermaine showed him a scratch on his neck and insisted that Trent Jackson had attacked him for no reason. Janet, speaking in a breathy murmur that was eerily similar to the one her brother Michael had put on in public, said she was deeply wounded by the false report on TMZ that she had cursed at Paris and slapped the girl, and that her lawyers would be taking action. Over the phone, Sanders assured Randy that he was no friend to John Branca and was not in league with the estate. At one point during the drive, Janet, still speaking in that whispery voice, told the driver to pull over to the side of the road, then asked Sanders to step outside so that they could speak privately “as a family.” Sanders was invited back into the car a few minutes later and driven on to Miraval. When they arrived, though, Janet suggested that Sanders must be famished and should get a bite to eat while she and Jermaine checked on their mother. Sanders had just finished his meal when two of Janet’s security team arrived at his table to tell him, “You won’t be needed tonight,” then walked away. “I was dismissed,” he recalled.

His pilot said he was required by FAA regulations not to fly again until the next morning. There was nothing to do but go back to the airport, find a hotel room and get a few hours sleep before he had to fly to Los Angeles for the guardianship hearing that had been scheduled for 8:30 a.m.

It was only a short time later that Katherine Jackson phoned the house in Calabasas to say that she was firing Trent Jackson and every member of the security detail at the house. The people at Calabasas recognized that Mrs. Jackson was on a speakerphone and could hear the murmurs of other people in the room with her, “whispering into her ear and telling her what to say,” Ribera recalled. TJ Jackson said he wasn’t even sure at first that it was his grandmother, because she sounded literally like a different person. She was taking long pauses between sentences and using words he had never heard her use before, TJ would tell Judge Beckloff the next morning: “I’ve never heard my grandmother talk like that. She wasn’t sharp. Some words seemed a little sharp.” He almost wondered if his grandmother was “speaking in code,” TJ added.

Then Mrs. Jackson said she wanted to talk to Sandy. “After she fired Trent and security, the estate immediately hired them back,” Ribera said, “so that they didn’t leave the house.” But if Katherine fired Ribera, “the estate wasn’t going to hire me back, and I knew it.” Instead of handing the phone to Ribera, though, TJ told his grandmother that Jackie and Marlon were there and asked if she didn’t want to speak to them, then waved his two uncles forward and let them finish the conversation with Katherine. Ribera would say later that TJ had saved her job.

Over the telephone during the early morning hours of the July 25, Ribera and Sanders worked out a plan to request that TJ be named the children’s temporary guardian, until Mrs. Jackson was allowed to return home. Margaret Lodise was amenable, and so was Judge Beckloff once he had been informed that TJ Jackson was named in Katherine Jackson’s will as her “successor guardian” to Michael’s children. After Sanders described his thwarted attempt to see Katherine in Arizona, Beckloff agreed to appoint TJ as the children’s temporary guardian, noting he did not believe Katherine Jackson had done anything wrong and was acting solely out of concern about “the actions of third parties.” The law required him to apply for permanent custody, the judge told TJ Jackson, but that process could be delayed if Mrs. Jackson came home. “The children’s primary concern is that they get their grandmother back,” Lodise told the judge.

At Miraval, Janet and her handlers had arranged for ABC’s Nightline to tape a statement from Mrs. Jackson that she read off a teleprompter, seated between Rebbie Jackson and Stacee Brown, with Janet Jackson, Jermaine Jackson, and Janice Smith standing behind her. “Hello, I’m Katherine Jackson, and there are rumors going around about me that I have been kidnapped and held against my will. I am here today to let everybody know that I am fine and I am here with my children, and my children would never do a thing like that, holding me against my will. It’s very stupid for people to think that. But anyway, I am devastated that while I’ve been away, that my children, my grandchildren, have been taken away from me, and I’m coming home to see about that, also.” There was more, but it was obvious that every word Katherine said had been dictated (as Mrs. Jackson would confirm once she was back home). The strangest part of the entire scene was the expression on Janet Jackson’s face, a bizarre combination of shame, regret, and cornered animal calculation that contrasted vividly with the fixed smiles of those who sat and stood with her.

Katherine Jackson’s speech “reminded me not just a little bit of a hostage reading her kidnapper’s message to the press,” Roger Friedman wrote in the column posted online shortly before midnight. Marlon Jackson tweeted, “I’m tired of not knowing where my mom is. I did speak with her last night, but she didn’t sound like herself. I was told by Janet, Randy, and Jermaine that I could not see my mom. Doctor’s order. But see them on television with her. How come they could not call me so I could be with her as well?” Paris Jackson tweeted, “they promised my grandmother would be home YESTERDAY. why isn’t she home?”

Katherine was already on her way by then, riding in a car with Rebbie, Janice Smith, and two of her grandchildren that sped across the desert in the dead of night. Shortly after the car crossed into California, Mrs. Jackson woke Sanders with a phone call and asked if she could meet him at the Calabasas house the next day. The car carrying her back arrived at Calabasas at just before 3:30 a.m. “grandma’s here! #thankyougod<33” Paris tweeted.

The big news the next morning, though, was that Prince Jackson had finally made his entrance into the Twittersphere drama. After thanking his father’s fans, telling them how much his father appreciated their support, and that he did too, Prince explained he had been “waiting a long time to reveal my side,” but at last was ready: “As long as I can remember my dad had repeatedly warned me of certain people and their ways. Although I am happy my grandma was returned, after speaking with her I realized how misguided and how badly she was lied to. I’m really angry and hurt.” He had sent group texts to his relatives demanding to know what was going on, and when Janet replied-all to the group, got a rude awakening about what they were saying to each other, including about him and his sister. Prince then spoke to those people directly: “For this whole time, we were denied contact to our grandmother. ‘If you continue with your lies, I will continue with the truth.’” He signed off as “Michael Jackson Jr.”

When Sanders arrived at the Calabasas house on July 26, he had stepped through the front door expecting to be fired. Instead Katherine greeted him warmly, and it did not take long before Sanders could see that his client understood at least the rough outline of what had taken place. By the time their meeting was done, she had readily agreed to reinstate Trent and the security staff. Katherine was not going to publicly criticize her children, though, Sanders realized, or permit anyone else to criticize them, either. Sanders made it clear he wasn’t there to assign blame. The main thing to get done, he told Katherine, was her reinstatement as the children’s guardian.

Immediately after the meeting with Mrs. Jackson, Sanders issued a statement that, “I am pleased to report that she is fine and laughed at the widely published report that she had suffered a stroke.”

Roger Friedman predicted that Katherine would find a way to avoid facing the unpleasant truth about what had taken place during the previous ten days. “‘Ignorance is bliss’ has been her motto.” Sandy Ribera, though, said Mrs. Jackson understood completely how she had been deceived: “It breaks her heart, I think, but she maintains loyalty to her family.”

Randy Jackson certainly remained in denial, unable to grasp either that it was too late to challenge the July 2002 will or that he had lost not just this battle, but the entire war. Shortly after Sanders told the media that Katherine was laughing at reports she had suffered a stroke, Randy tweeted seven bulletin points to his followers:

1) When TJ asked my mother if he should ask for temporary guardianship, my Mother told TJ NO—twice.

2) The estate denied Rebbie, Janet, and Jermaine access to the house when they returned home to Calabasas with a letter written by Howard Weitzman, who is not a resident of the home.

3) The estate is trying to isolate my mother from her family JUST LIKE THEY DID TO MICHAEL, in order to propagate their lies, financial agendas, and to protect a fraudulent will.

4) The same people that are trying to manipulate my mother are the same people that were involved with my brother when he died.

5) In order to obtain temporary guardianship, TJ lied to the court. Rebbie, Janet, Jermaine, and I would never harm our mother and we are doing our best to protect her and the estate knows that. I want to know why Perry Sanders would consider a negotiation based on lies.

6) It is clear that anyone who stands up against the executors of the estate—John Branca, John McClain and their attorney Howard Weitzman—is denied access to my mother.

7) It is my fear and belief that they are trying to take my mother’s life.

It was with Katherine Jackson’s explicit permission, however, that Sanders, TJ Jackson, TJ’s attorney Charles Schulz, and Margaret Lodise met to work out an agreement under which TJ would be named permanent coguardian of the three children. It was “a good deal all around,” Sanders said when he announced the agreement that afternoon, because TJ already handled duties like household management and security arrangements, and now Mrs. Jackson would be officially free to focus on the emotional lives of Prince, Paris, and Blanket.

That night, Katherine showed up at the Unity tour concert in Saratoga, California, accompanied by all three of Michael’s children. Yes, Jermaine was one of those onstage, Sanders said, but so were Jackie, Marlon, and Tito, and Katherine wanted to be there for them.

Mrs. Jackson wouldn’t be seeing Jermaine—or Randy or Janet or Rebbie—at the Calabasas house any time soon. On July 29, the estate issued an order banning those four siblings, plus their children and Jermaine’s wife from entering the property. Also banned were Janice Smith “or anyone else who was involved in the recent events that led to Mrs. Jackson’s separation from and inability to communicate with Michael’s children.”

The order, written by Weitzman, added that “Joe Jackson is precluded from entering the property.” While Joe had been all but invisible during the previous two weeks, Ribera and others at the Calabasas house heard that he had been “squatting” at Hayvenhurst during that period, and had met with Randy there. Ribera and Sanders each assumed that Joe had been involved in some way.

Weitzman had also written that “Howard Mann, who is in litigation with the estate and is working with the Jackson siblings that wrote the ‘letter’ should also not be allowed on the property.” Mann was flabbergasted that a number of Web sites credited him with drafting the letter, a notion that Weitzman had encouraged. “Randy hates me,” a mournful Mann said. “He’s been trying to convince Katherine to cut me off almost since the day we met.” Randy Jackson’s dislike of Mann paled by comparison to what Branca, McClain, and Weitzman felt toward him, though. The trial over what the executors and their lead attorney described as Mann’s attempt to create “a shadow estate” through his business relationships with Katherine, Prince, Paris, and Blanket Jackson was scheduled to begin in early September and promised to become an especially vicious courtroom battle. Weitzman and Branca were still steaming from a letter Mann had written more than a year earlier in which he demanded they submit their resignations and promised that if they didn’t he would see them put in prison. That letter had been sent not long after Mann described their administration of the estate to TMZ as “a fraudulently obtained dictatorship” and shortly before he helped craft the affidavit in which Katherine Jackson stated that her son Michael had told her more than once that he disliked Branca and believed the attorney “had stolen from him.” Katherine and Joe Jackson were both scheduled to testify on Mann’s behalf at the trial and Mann was making it clear to the other side that he intended to put the claims that the will was a forgery and that Branca had made up the story about being rehired as Michael Jackson’s attorney front and center in court.

Branca had once more been proven lucky in his enemies. Inexplicable mistakes by Mann’s legal team in the documents they had filed to compel Branca’s deposition had enabled the estate’s attorneys to force a refiling. The attorney Mann had assigned the task of filing the new deposition demand had failed to respond in a timely manner, meaning that Branca would again avoid being questioned under oath about the will that had named him as Michael Jackson’s executor and the various questions that still surrounded his assumption of that position. At the end of the first full week of August, the federal judge hearing the case had ruled massively in the estate’s favor on a summary judgment motion, gutting Mann’s claim to intellectual property rights and almost certainly guaranteeing that Branca would not even have to answer questions on the witness stand. For the Jackson side, the only blessing was that Perry Sanders had refused to let Katherine join the case as anything other than a witness. The estate could claim a victory over her business partner, but not over her personally.

At the Calabasas estate Michael’s children were in the happiest environment they had known since their father’s death, according to Ribera. “The combination of TJ and Mrs. Jackson makes the kids really happy. They love their grandmother and don’t want to leave her, but they also love TJ, and he’s so good to have around, because he does the fun things.” The day before, TJ had taken Paris shopping for an electric guitar, and when the two returned they had performed a version of Michael’s song “Black or White” for his mother, Ribera recalled, “and Mrs. Jackson was like, tapping her foot in time with them. It was just so nice.”

By August 1, Jermaine had decided unconditional surrender was the only course left to him. He declared his new position with a tweet that began by describing “a phone call with my son Jaafar that broke my heart. He asked, ‘Is it true that we cannot visit grandmother’s house as a family anymore?’ Enough has become enough . . . After much soul-searching, it is clearly time for us to live by Michael’s words about love not war. In this spirit, I offer this statement by way of extending an olive branch. Accordingly, I rescind my signature from the letter which was sent to the estate, and which should never have gone public.” That last part was pretty amusing to those who knew that it was Randy, Janet, and Jermaine who had sent copies of the letter to various media. Blaming his excesses on “questions of whether we stepped off him too much or whether we did enough to help when the corporate world surrounded him,” Jermaine made a plea for understanding: “When it comes to the well-being of loved ones, and especially our mother, we are perhaps understandably and unapologetically over-protective.”

The next day, August 2, the world learned what had otherwise occupied La Toya during the conflict in the family: She was negotiating with the Oprah Winfrey Network for a reality show that was to be titled, “Life with La Toya.”

Those who imagined that capitulations from Janet, Randy, and Rebbie would soon follow were startled when, on August 4, Janet’s lawyer Blair Brown issued a statement on behalf of all three Jacksons that was essentially a double down on the bad bet they had made almost three weeks earlier. The statement, of course, began with the claim that their only concern had been the well-being of their mother, Katherine, and their brother Michael’s three children, then went on to say, “The negative media campaign generated by the executors and their agents has been relentless. In recent weeks the media has received preposterous reports—all now proven to be false—of a purported kidnapping of Katherine Jackson and of physical and verbal abuse of a child.” All that banning Janet and the others from the Calabasas estate had accomplished was “to damage fundamental family relationships,” the letter asserted, and “also to isolate Katherine Jackson from anyone questioning the validity of Michael’s will.”

It was at the very least a remarkable coincidence that on the very same day an affidavit signed by Katherine Jackson was submitted to Judge Beckloff in which Mrs. Jackson effectively accused her children of doing the very things they were so vehemently denying. The affidavit began by describing how she had been held incommunicado at Miraval, with her room phone and television set shut off, her cell phone and iPad taken from her. She had never been told that Perry Sanders had flown to Tucson to meet with her, the affidavit continued, or that Janet and Jermaine had prevented him from going any further than Miraval’s lobby. She was particularly upset that she had been prevented from speaking to her grandchildren for ten full days, noting that it was not until the night she left Miraval that “I was permitted” to speak to them. “I trusted the people I was with to be honest with me,” the affidavit concluded. “They clearly were not. I never would have gone such a long time without communicating with [my grandchildren].”

Signing the affidavit had been the price Katherine was forced to pay to regain her guardianship of Prince, Paris, and Blanket. “She doesn’t want to hear or say anything bad about any of her kids,” Ribera said, “even Randy. But nothing is more important to her than Michael’s children.”

Perry Sanders followed shortly by granting a brief interview to TMZ in which he stated that Mrs. Jackson had “absolutely” no plans to press charges over the incident: “This chapter of chaos is closed and we are supportive of family unity in spite of recent events and arguably poor decisions.”

A new chapter of chaos would undoubtedly open soon enough, but Sanders, who had already outlasted the tenures of Burt Levitch and Adam Streisand as Katherine Jackson’s attorney, hoped he could survive long enough to show even the likes of Joe and Randy that he was preparing not just a well-made brick but a suit-case sized nuclear bomb for John Branca—and Howard Weitzman as well. Even as the letter sent to Branca and McClain was raising tabloid headlines to banner heights, the estate and its attorneys had been given far greater reason for concern by the request Sanders had made for “all supporting documents” of the “Second Account Current” the estate had filed with Judge Beckloff, covering the period between November 1, 2010, and December 31, 2011, with a particular emphasis on its dealings connected to AEG and on third-party payments. Branca and Weitzman certainly were smart enough to see where this was heading. In its submission to Judge Beckloff, the estate’s accounting was extensive but opaque, divided into broad categories of “disbursements” such as “Payroll,” “Public Relations,” “Attorney Fees,” “Legal Fees” and, of course, “Co-Executive and Creative Director Compensation.” There were some startling figures that indicated the scope of Michael Jackson’s properties; the automobiles he had kept in Las Vegas alone were valued at more than $675,000, while the bills for the moving and storage of his possessions alone had come to more than $1.5 million in a nineteen-month period. The estate also reported that it had employed more than a dozen law firms in London, Tokyo, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Cleveland, and Los Angeles, but that the largest shares of legal fees had gone to the firms of Howard Weitzman ($4.28 million) and Joel Katz ($3.71 million).

Sanders had hired the best forensic accountant he could find to go through the estate’s documents piece by piece, looking for evidence of conflict of interest, self-dealing, and failure of fiduciary responsibility. Katherine’s attorney was clearly targeting anything that might suggest collusion between the estate and AEG. He already possessed perhaps enough ammunition, Sanders believed, to file a claim based on conflict of interest that targeted Branca and Weitzman personally for the estate’s failure to either file its own lawsuit against AEG or to join in the case filed by Katherine Jackson, and was prepared to make this known at the August 10 hearing before Judge Beckloff.

In apparent anticipation of such a move, the estate in early August had requested and received a postponement of the “Second Account Current” hearing before Judge Beckloff, putting it off until September 20. He had no problem with that, Sanders said; it would give him time to complete his audit of the estate’s dealings, once the “supporting documents” were turned over. On August 20, however, the estate had filed nine separate objections to Sanders’s request for documents, characterizing it as “vague and ambiguous” and “unduly burdensome.” The estate’s lawyers also claimed that some of the information sought by Katherine Jackson was “highly confidential” or was protected by attorney-client privilege and as attorney work-product. The demand Sanders had made on Mrs. Jackson’s behalf clearly infringed upon Branca and McClain’s “rights to privacy,” argued the estate’s attorneys, who also objected to the demand for documents in the “control of third parties” and assumed “the existence of certain documents” without proof that they did in fact exist.

In short, the battle had been joined even before war was declared.

The fight was starting undetected by the media, and while Katherine Jackson was off on that motor home trip that had been delayed by her diversion to Arizona. It had been a grueling month for a woman whose next birthday would be her eighty-third. On top of all that her children had put her through, Mrs. Jackson had been greeted on the day of her return home to Calabasas with a public invitation from Conrad Murray to visit him in jail. “I’ve been told that she has a desire to speak with me before she departs this life,” Murray had explained in a statement to CNN. “Seeing that she is up in age and in questionable health, and the fact that she is the mother of a very dear departed friend, it would give me great pleasure to sit with her one on one and answer any questions she might have.” Three days later, the attorneys handling Murray’s appeal of his conviction had gone to court to ask that it order a forensic analysis on the residue in a drug vial that had been a key piece of prosecution evidence at his trial. Murray’s fingerprint had been found on the bottle, which prosecutors maintained was the one that had contained the propofol that killed Michael Jackson. If that argument could be disproven, then the court would have to find that Jackson had, after all, injected himself with the fatal dose of the anesthesia, Murray’s attorneys argued. Infuriated by his persistence, Katherine took a pass on Murray’s offer and hit the road with her most faithful companion, Trent Jackson, seeking relief together from the fractious drama of recent weeks. That series of clumsily plotted scenes had left her brood more divided than it had ever been before, and the matriarch was still suffering the sadness of it all, those closest to her said. She needed a break.

It was a comfort to Mrs. Jackson to know that, in the end, they would all be together again. Katherine’s deal with Forest Lawn to acquire the crypt in the Sanctuary of Ascension had included the purchase of eleven other burial spots on Holly Terrace, ensuring that in death Michael Jackson would be closely surrounded by the members of a family he had tried to keep at a distance for most of his life. Michael may have been one of a kind, but he was sharing with the world one last lesson in the common lot: There is no escape from family.