Inside the strangest show on Earth
April 7, 2005
It is the first day of witness testimony in the Michael Jackson trial, and I am stuck in the overflow room of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse-a windowless trailer at the edge of the court compound, where fifty journalists are crouched around a closed-circuit broadcast of the trial, poised to catch the word masturbate should it fly out of the TV monitor.
The figures on the screen are tiny and barely recognizable. Jackson attorney Thomas Mesereau is the only one who is easy to spot, his mane of blow-dried white hair flowing back and forth across the screen like a cursor.
"Please to tell, veech von ees Jackson?" whispers a European reporter.
"He's the little dot on the left," snaps an American TV reporter, not averting his eyes from the monitor.
The screen goes dark. District Attorney Tom Sneddon, a humorless creep whose public persona recalls the potbellied vice principal perched on the gym bleachers watching you slow-dance, has chosen to open proceedings with a screening of Living with Michael Jackson, the sensational documentary put out by Hobbit-like self-promoting British tabloid creature Martin Bashir-a smug blob we can just make out sitting with folded hands in the witness dock.
It's fitting that Bashir is the first witness in this case. The whole trial is peopled with the amoeboid life-forms one finds swimming in the sewer of the celebrity industry: publicists, personal assistants, B-list entertainment lawyers. The species Bashir represents is the pompous hack who peers through the bedroom windows of famous people and imagines he is curing cancer.
Bashir is so pretentious, he affects not to understand what Sneddon means when he uses the term "video documentaries" to describe his work. "I call them cultural-affairs programs," Bashir says.
The theory of the prosecution, for those few who can follow it, is that the airing of this documentary in Britain in February 2003 set in motion a sinister conspiracy that ultimately led to Michael Jackson sticking his hands down a boy's underpants. The prosecution presents the film as the dramatic opening chapter of a labyrinthine tale of moral decay; it follows that the darkening of the courtroom is intended to have symbolic import, a sign that we are entering a world of shadows.
But the effect is ruined when the film starts. As the camera pans across the gates of Jackson's Neverland ranch, the audio track booms out the familiar bass groove of "Billie Jean"-and in the overflow room, the sea of aging reporters instantly begins bobbing cheerfully to the beat.
"I love this song," the TV reporter whispers to me.
The Jackson trial is a goddamn zoo, a freak show from sunup to sundown. By six-thirty every morning, when the sheriff's deputies hold their lottery for public seating, a small vaudeville act of pro-Jackson protesters has already assembled in front of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, and every day they fight the press and each other for the cameras, from the opening bell straight through to the end of testimony.
Like snowflakes, no two protesters are alike, or even similar. About the only connection one can imagine them having is that each was the 95,000th caller on the eighties radio station in his hometown. A kindly young black woman who quit her job teaching kindergarten in Los Angeles to support her favorite artist, a fat white psychopath from Tennessee who thinks Jackson is Jesus, and a rotund Latino in a T-shirt who lives in his mother's basement a few miles from the courthouse-they've all joined hands, circling wagons against the press and against the equally weird self-appointed child-abuse victim advocates who occasionally show up to fuck up their action. Police apparently had to intervene one afternoon when the basement-dwelling Latino reportedly scuffled with a middle-aged blonde housewife carrying a sign that read
This small group, generally numbering not more than thirty, represents the sum total of public interest in the trial here. Though forty-five courtroom seats are reserved for the general public every day, on most days, California v. Jackson is outdrawn by the games of lawn bowling held for Santa Maria's retired el-derly on the Astroturf lot at the rear of the court compound.
The utter lack of buzz adds to the sordid, depressing feel of the whole trial. As public attractions go, it ranks somewhere below a bearded-lady tent and one of those mules in Tijuana painted to look like a zebra-pay a dollar to have a Polaroid taken. Only the media still take the trial seriously.
The courtroom routine is established early on. Jackson, usually dressed in an armband and a dazed smile, makes his way in at about 8:15 most days. He comes with his parents and one of his brothers, embracing them as they take their seats, then glides over to the defense table to begin his pretrial rituals. He shakes hands with his lawyers, then drifts to the right-front corner of the courtroom, behind a small partition, and does a brief calisthenics routine, squatting up and down about five times as he faces the wall. By the time he is finished, the defense has laid out a bowl of peppermints for him; he walks up to the mints, slowly unwraps one and then another, sucks on them, then finally sits down in his seat and stares ahead impassively. Most days he sits like that, motionless, all day. He might be engaged in the case, he might be waiting for the spaceship to land. It's impossible to tell.
Beginning with Bashir, the early days of testimony feature a parade of absurd lackeys and celebrity parasites. A typical Sneddon witness is the froglike Ann Gabriel, who had been employed as a Jackson publicist for about a week around the time the alleged crime took place. Sneddon brought her in to testify that one of Jackson's lawyers had told her they could make the mother of Jackson's accuser "look like a crack whore."
During her brief testimony, Gabriel manages to plug her only other "celebrity" client, a Las Vegas magician and "noted self-hypnosis expert" named Marshall Sylver. Sylver, I would later find out, reached the peak of his fame when he gave a woman an orgasm on the Montel Williams Show by touching her knee. But in court, Gabriel speaks about him as though he is a candidate for pope. "That's Marshall Sylver," she repeats into the microphone. "S-y-l-v-e-r…." You half-expect her to direct the jury to his Web site.
Jackson looks disengaged during this succession of clowns, but when the real witnesses start appearing, he begins acting out. On the fourth day of the trial, while Mesereau is cross-examining the accuser's big sister-who, among other things, testified that she saw the pop star repeatedly kiss her brother on the forehead-Jackson suddenly gets up and walks out of the courtroom.
The move momentarily staggers Mesereau, a hired killer of the first order, and he looks uncharacteristically sheepish as he chases after his client. He returns a minute later to inform eternally exhausted Judge Rodney Melville that "Mr. Jackson has to go to the bathroom, Your Honor."
A week later, Jackson simply fails to show up in court on a day when his actual accuser is scheduled to testify, forcing a clearly rattled Mesereau to tell Judge Melville that his client has "severe back pains"; Jackson eventually arrives to court in pajamas. But for all of Jackson's fabled eccentricity, he is, astonishingly, not the dominant personality at the trial. That honor belongs to District Attorney Sneddon, whose convoluted indictment is a Frankenstein's monster of incongruous parts every bit as luridly fascinating as the defendant's surgically altered face.
The prosecution's case, seldom satisfactorily explained in the mainstream media, goes as follows. On February 6, 2003, the Bashir documentary, in which Jackson is seen admitting that he sleeps in his bedroom with young boys, is shown on British TV. Among the children who appear in the video is his accuser in this case, a thirteen-year-old cancer survivor who had been introduced to Jackson during his chemotherapy treatments several years before.
According to the prosecution, Jackson had not molested the boy at the time the Bashir documentary aired, but he was sufficiently concerned that the boy might make such allegations that he and a band of Neverland courtiers entered into an elaborate conspiracy to "falsely imprison" the boy and his family for nearly five weeks (in luxury hotels, at Neverland ranch, and other places), during which time they coerced the family into denying, on camera, that anything untoward had ever happened between Jackson and the boy.
Jackson's five alleged coconspirators-none of whom were indicted-seem to be the sort of people who show up full of ideas at the bedside of fading greatness: junior Nazis who get Hitler to sign off on a new T-shirt design during the last days in the bunker. "Business associate" Dieter Wiesner, for instance, owns sex clubs in Germany and sank gobs of the pop star's money into a doomed Michael Jackson soft drink, to be marketed in Europe, called the MJ Mystery Drink. (Wiesner's former partner, coconspirator Ronald Konitzer, has since been accused by Mesereau of stealing Jackson's money.) Marc Schaffel came to Jackson after September 11 with plans to market an antiterror-theme "We Are the World"–type charity single through the McDonald's corporation; Schaffel later turned out to have been a former gay-porn producer. Rounding out the conspiracy are Vincent Amen and Frank Tyson, a pair of young Neverland gofers, who, until this case, appeared destined to star in a movie called Harold and Kumar Pick Up Michael Jackson's Dry Cleaning.
At any rate, it was only after the filming of this so-called rebuttal video-which, incidentally, Jackson then sold to the Fox Network for $3 million-and after authorities had begun an investigation into Jackson's relationship with the boy, that Jackson allegedly molested the child, in early March.
The prosecution's case therefore boils down to this: In a panic over negative publicity, Jackson conspires to kidnap a boy and force him to deny acts of molestation that in fact never happened, and then he gets over his panic just long enough to actually molest the child at the very moment when the whole world is watching.
It is a fantastic argument, a bilious exercise in circular prosecutorial logic: conspiracy to commit conspiracy, false imprisonment for the sake of it, followed by a sudden act of utter self-destructive madness. And none of it makes sense, until you actually watch Sneddon operate in court.
Day six of the trial. Sneddon, a splotchy-faced doughy man whose body could only look good on an autopsy table, is conducting his direct examination of the alleged victim's younger brother. It is a crucial moment in the trial, with Sneddon drawing out the only eyewitness to the alleged molestation. The pudgy-cheeked boy claims to have twice entered Jackson's bedroom late at night and seen the aging star fondling his brother and masturbating.
In a trial full of roundly unsympathetic characters, it is hard not to feel for this kid. A raspy-voiced fourteen-year-old with the sad eyes of a habitually ignored younger brother, this witness looks like every fat kid who's ever had his milk money stolen or his underwear pulled over his head. Whatever he's doing here, it's sad.
If his story is true, he is recounting an immensely painful personal experience in front of the entire world. If it is false, then his appearance here is a tragedy, an overmatched adolescent mind coached to mutter a litany of sordid implausibilities in the service of an ugly confluence of low-rent adult ambitions: grown-ups pulling his underwear over his head.
Sneddon practically drools when the boy finally says what he saw Jackson doing: "He was, uh, masturbating."
"Can you demonstrate that?" Sneddon says. "Can you show us what you saw?"
"What do you mean?" the boy whispers.
"Can you show us how he was masturbating?" Sneddon -repeats.
The boy balks, but Sneddon presses. Finally the boy moves his hand up and down.
"Can you do it again?" Sneddon asks.
The boy hesitates, then gives another fleeting demonstration. It's still not enough for Sneddon.
"OK," he snaps. "For the record, you're moving your hand up and down, kind of opening and closing your palm."
Such episodes become increasingly common in the next few days of testimony, as the prosecution sinks further and further into a mushy mix of unapologetic crotch-sniffing and rhetorical hysterics. It is hard not to escape the impression that Sneddon hates Jackson. He clearly has not forgotten the debacle of 1993, when Jackson and the family of thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler reached a $15.3 million settlement before Sneddon could bring Jackson to trial on molestation charges.
His key witnesses, meanwhile-the accuser and his family, whom we'll call the Riveras-are an astounding bunch. Any sane prosecutor would drown himself before building a case around witnesses like these, but they were all Sneddon had. A single mom and her three kids, an older daughter and two boys. They're poor but not ghetto poor-just poor like eighty percent of America is poor, making their way through life with a shabby cocktail of nowhere jobs, disability, Zoloft, Jesus, -diets, and, one guesses, a vast collection of self-help books.
This family has been burdened first by an abusive father, then by a horrible cancer that struck the older boy; by the age of ten, he had a sixteen-pound tumor in his stomach. Through a series of charitable foundations and recovery programs, the boy's terrible predicament put the family in touch with a number of celebrities: George Lopez, Chris Tucker, Jay Leno, and Michael Jackson. The Jackson fiasco did not really begin until the boy, hereafter referred to as Freddy, had miraculously recovered and the family returned to its mean pre-crisis existence, armed only with a suddenly impressive Rolodex.
One hates to be uncharitable, but this is the special ugliness of the Jackson case: Even the poor are undignified. Once they enter this world, the Riveras become just another subspecies of the Bashirs, Gabriels, and Wiesners: a Dickensian family adopted as a curiosity by the royals.
The mother-we'll call her Agnes Rivera-seems to be the key figure in the accuser's camp. At this writing, she has only appeared in the trial via the rebuttal video, which Mesereau introduced as evidence during cross-examination. A plump, dewy-eyed woman with heavy makeup who looks like a Latina version of Bernadette Peters (only with a few more miles), she expresses herself almost exclusively in saccharine, retch--inducing platitudes of the sort one might hear on Oprah or at a motivational retreat for recovering glue addicts-using words like God and love and hope the way most normal people use connecting words like and and the.
The video is a low-tech production filmed in some dismal studio in West Hills; it's a single tripod shot of the four family members bunched in front of a gray dropcloth. The prosecution claims that Agnes and the children were dragged to this ugly place by Wiesner and told exactly what to say. But in the outtakes shown in court, the jury sees Agnes clearly making her own enthusiastic directorial contributions.
During the period of "false imprisonment" in which this film was shot, Agnes was put up in the Calabasas Country Inn, where at Jackson's expense she managed to fit in a full body wax and a shopping spree at, among other places, the Topanga Canyon Mall; she spent $454 on Jockey underwear at one stop, $415 at Banana Republic and another $450 at the Jeans Outlet. The family also got in a showing of Old School at a Calabasas movie theater and a $175 dinner at the Black Angus restaurant in Woodland Hills. Agnes also managed to avoid calling the police for the five hours she spent waiting in an orthodontist's office in Solvang while Freddy's braces were removed on Jackson's tab.
If Agnes seemed to handle her false imprisonment with aplomb, it might be because she had plenty of experience with it. Twice in the past she filed lawsuits claiming false imprisonment: once against her ex-husband (whom she also accused of murdering the family's pet ferret) and once against a pair of security guards at a JC Penney, who stopped her after finding Freddy in the store parking lot with unpaid merchandise. In the latter case, Agnes claimed that the guards not only falsely imprisoned her but brazenly fondled her breasts in front of the children; she won $150,000 in damages.
In any event, it is Sneddon's contention that after her latest false imprisonment at the hands of Jackson in Calabasas, Agnes and the children voluntarily returned to Neverland for a two-week stay that would turn into yet another false imprisonment in which Agnes believed she and her children were being held against their will. Even though she supposedly spent this time trying to escape, for some reason she did not even ask where her children were sleeping at night.
Thus she was unaware that Freddy was spending his nights in Michael's bedroom, engaging in mutual masturbation with the pop star not once but on two different occasions, both times in front of Freddy's pudgy little brother-who happened to creep to the bedroom and open the locked door just long enough to witness the hideous act through the darkness without being detected by either Michael or his brother.
Pudge, in his testimony, is very specific about how long he watched both sex acts. The first time, he says, it was four seconds. The second time? "Three seconds-it was shorter," he says.
You can dismiss Sneddon as a monomaniacal, headline-hungry bureaucrat and his witnesses as scheming, lying-ass gold diggers, but there's no avoiding the fact that Michael Jackson is, undeniably, one seriously weird motherfucker. As implausible and suspicious as the prosecution timeline sounds, many details of the boys' testimony about life at Jackson's Neverland lair are just too strange and wildly improbable to be anything but true.
At one point during the trial, the jury is shown a picture of a frighteningly lifelike mannequin of a small black girl with braided hair. Recovered during one of the two searches of Neverland ordered by Sneddon, this mannequin apparently was fashioned in the image of a little cousin of Jackson's. The accuser's brother testifies that on their first night at Neverland, Jackson jumped on the mannequin and simulated sex with it. "He was, uh, having intercourse with it," says Pudge.
Sneddon then leaves the picture of the mannequin onscreen for a few long moments. It looks exactly like a real girl. Nobody in the courtroom can take their eyes off the thing. My own heart skips a beat; I half-expect the picture to start steaming from the ears and speaking in tongues.
In scenes from the Bashir documentary shown to the jury, Jackson is depicted as the father of three utterly Caucasian "real" children who never see their mother. He insists he's had only one small nose job; he says with a straight face that he is Peter Pan and that he will never die. And he thinks everybody understands when he says that sleeping in beds with kids is OK because there should be "more love in the world." And it gets even more disturbing. He talks about the nicknames he gave the kids: "Blow Hole" for Pudge and "Doo Doo" or "Apple Head" for Freddy. Pudge testifies that Jackson called another boy who came to the ranch "Baby Rubber."
If you buy this part of the story, and it's pretty close to impossible not to, it doesn't require a great leap of logic to connect the remaining dots. It is a short step from Doo Doo and Apple Head to a late-night hand down your underpants. This is the kind of thing that is running through the collective mind of the courtroom at the trial's first decisive moment: when Freddy takes the stand.
No longer a frail cancer victim, Jackson's accuser is now a strapping fifteen-year-old with a thick neck and a military-style buzz cut. But in his direct examination, he mumbles and hangs his head quite a lot and seems to grow smaller and more childlike on the stand as he is led through the tale of his terrible ordeal at Neverland.
It is a horrifying story, a tale of long nights of Jesus juice-Jackson's name for the red wine he fed the boy-porn, and late-night groping in the dark room full of mannequins. In the pivotal moment, Jackson and the boy guzzle booze in the Neverland arcade, then retreat to Jackson's bedroom, where the pop star asks the boy about masturbation. Jackson tells him that if he doesn't know how, "he would do it for me." He then masturbates the boy and himself as the two lie side by side.
"About a day later," Freddy says, the scenario repeats itself; only this time, Jackson tries to place the boy's hand on Jackson's genitals. Freddy says he resisted this but that he still ejaculated in both incidents. He felt bad about this, but, he says, Jackson "comforted me."
Through all this, Sneddon can't resist a little of his trademark crotch-sniffing. The prosecutor seems disappointed both legally and libidinously when Freddy fails, after being prompted, to remember seeing Jackson walk into the bedroom with an erection while he and his brother were watching television. A visibly frustrated Sneddon ends up pulling out a transcript of the boy's own grand-jury testimony and showing him the reference to Jackson's erection, effectively shoving Jackson's erection in the boy's face.
When the kid refuses to comply-saying only: "Me and my brother were kind of like 'Eww,' because we had never seen a grown man naked before"-Sneddon frowns, clearly pissed, and moves on.
Still, by the time Sneddon is finished with this witness, Jackson looks fucked. Reporters scramble outside to do "Prosecution Roars Back" stand-ups, and even the most skeptical members of the press corps concede that Sneddon might not have to lift a finger for the rest of the trial.
During this testimony, Jackson scarcely moves. Mesereau, for his part, simply bides his time and waits in a seething posture for his cross examination. His demolition of Sneddon's star witness would prove to be one of the more merciless legal fraggings you'll ever see in an American courtroom. He gets Freddy to admit that something he had testified Michael Jackson told him-that "if a man doesn't masturbate, he can get to the point where he might rape a girl"-had actually been told to him by his grandmother.
He gets the boy to admit that he told the dean of his middle school, a Mr. Alpert, that "nothing had ever happened sexually with Mr. Jackson."
Mesereau asks about the alleged period of false imprisonment at Calabasas and Neverland. Sneddon sinks in his chair when Freddy answers, "I never wanted to leave. I was having too much fun."
Then there is the timeline of the actual abuse: Mesereau gets the boy to admit that he initially told investigators that the abuse had happened before the alleged false imprisonment and the rebuttal video, then later changed his story. "To this day," Freddy says, "I don't remember exactly when everything happened."
Mesereau then does a cunning thing. He leads the boy through a history of all his disciplinary problems in middle school. Freddy, it appears, was a pain in the ass to almost -every teacher in his junior high: talking back and being disruptive and generally disrespecting authority. Mesereau slyly assumes the role of an accusing teacher and manages to coax out on the stand the above-it-all classroom smartass who only a few days before played the part of the mute, helpless child ruthlessly taken advantage of by an adult sexual predator.
Every disagreement he had ever had with a teacher, Freddy contends, was the teacher's fault. Mr. Geralt ran his class like a drill sergeant, which was why the boy had stood up in class and said that Mr. Geralt "had his balls in his mouth." He brags about arguing in Mrs. Slaughter's class ("A lot of the times, I would stand up to the teachers, and the kids would, like, congratulate me").
"Did you have problems in Mr. Finklestein's class?" Mesereau asks.
"Everyone had problems in Mr. Finklestein's class," Freddy snaps.
"Did you have problems in Mr. Finklestein's class?" Mesereau coldly repeats.
"If everyone had a problem," the boy sneers, "then I'd be one of them, right?"
Later, Mesereau plays the entire rebuttal video for Freddy, stopping every few moments. Since it is the prosecution's case that the family was told to lie in the video, Mesereau decides to get the boy to explain to the jury exactly where everyone was lying and where everyone was telling the truth-the obvious point being that it was very difficult to tell.
It's a savage courtroom scene, and the boy withers visibly as it wears on. When the jury sees Freddy claiming on the video that "he used to pray that he would meet Michael Jackson," Mesereau stops the DVD and asks, "Were you lying here?"
"I didn't actually pray to meet Michael Jackson," the boy mutters.
It goes on like this for another forty minutes. Freddy's performance is so atrocious that even Judge Melville wakes up. Until this point, Melville seldom looked anything but pained, apparently mourning the lost dignity of the legal profession. But during Freddy's cross examination, Melville's impatience with the prosecution is suddenly palpable. Usually, he takes ten quiet seconds before ruling on any objection, but after a few hours of this witness, his trigger finger gets very itchy, instantly blasting even the more reasonable of Sneddon's occasional objections. At one point, Mesereau asks the boy about his history teacher: "She complained that you were defiant on a regular basis and disrespectful, is that correct?"
Even I expect an objection to this; Mesereau is asking and answering.
"Your Honor, objection," Sneddon says. "Asked and answ-"
"Overruled," Melville snaps, glaring at the boy. "You may answer."
By the end of the day, Sneddon is slumped so far in his seat that his shoulders are almost below the armrests. His humiliation is total when Mesereau asks the boy if it is true that he once wanted to be an actor. "Yes," he says. "But now that I've seen other careers, I want to be in law enforcement."
By the time Freddy steps down, the trial is only twelve days old. It was impossible to say who was winning or losing; one forgets, after all, that these things are decided by a jury, which in this case looks mostly like a row of immobile elderly white women who might think they're judging the Lindbergh kidnapper.
Or one hopes they think that, for their sake. The elderly should be spared spectacles like the Jackson trial. This case is the ultimate sizzling shit pile of American society: It is what our culture of gross celebrity worship looks like when it comes out the other end. A pop star gone sideways under the lights, maggots nibbling at his fortune, hourly underpants updates on cable, industry insiders trading phone numbers over drinks, and boy orgasms. And people like me writing about it all. We're the worst America has to offer-and we're all here.
