Authors: Steve Knopper
On January 16, 2004, the day of his first court appearance, Michael showed up in a black coat with a military insignia, black pants with white stripes, huge sunglasses, and a white armband. The courts had prepared barricades along the courthouse entrance so Michael and his entourage, including his parents and
Jermaine and Janet, could be funneled into the front double doors without being touched. He pleaded not guilty, as expected, but he showed up twenty-one minutes late to the 8:30
A.M.
hearing, earning a rebuke from the judge. After the hearing, when Michael Jackson’s black SUV pulled out of the courthouse parking lot and abruptly stopped in the left-turn lane, and Michael climbed onto the roof, performing to his cheering fans, the Associated Press’s Linda Deutsch called her editor.
“Turn on your TV,” she told him, “you’re not going to believe this.”
This spectacle proved to be a huge public misstep for a defendant accused of a serious crime. The defense attorney who took the fall for it was Mark Geragos, who had represented actress Winona Ryder, after she’d been arrested on shoplifting charges, and accused murderer Scott Peterson—but lost both cases. Michael soon lost confidence in Geragos, who was representing Peterson and other clients while simultaneously building MJ’s defense.
“He’s way over his head,” Michael told confidants. “And he can’t win.” By this point, with the help of Nation of Islam figures such as Leonard Muhammad, Randy Jackson had taken
over his brother’s business and legal affairs. Seeking an alternative to Geragos, Randy called Johnnie Cochran in April 2004, when the famed defense attorney was in the throes of an inoperable brain tumor.
“If it was me, I’d want Tom Mesereau,” Cochran said.
Thomas Mesereau Jr., fifty-three, was slick and charismatic, with silvery-white, shoulder-length hair. He met with Michael in an Orlando mansion where the pop star was temporarily living. His first move didn’t sit well with several of Michael’s advisers: “I don’t want the Nation of Islam. I don’t want Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton up there,” Mesereau told Michael and his people. “This is going to do nothing but alienate white jurors.” As he studied Michael’s career, Mesereau learned about the singer’s message of racial equality in songs like “Black or White” and the way he integrated MTV. He wanted that MJ. “This message of inclusion, rather than exclusion, was something white people resonate with,” says Mesereau, a veteran civil rights attorney who defends a murder case every year in the South using his own funds.
Mesereau’s trial strategy was to target Janet Arvizo. His team felt she was unstable and would weaken under direct attack. And they felt prosecutors were overconfident to the point of being “on cloud nine”—they didn’t think they would lose. The underdog role suited Mesereau.
Ron Zonen denies this accusation of prosecutorial hubris—he said numerous times throughout the trial that MJ’s celebrity and clout put his side at a disadvantage.
“I never felt it was in the bag,” he says. “I understood the person we were going at was quite possibly the most recognizable face in the world, and quite possibly the most popular person in the world.” On the first day of the trial, Zonen walked to the courthouse and noticed three helicopters overhead and two thousand people out front. “Okay,” he thought to himself, “my life is about to change rather dramatically.”
* * *
Santa Maria is eighty-five miles north of Santa Barbara, a college town that looks like a movie backdrop when the sun sets over the
Pacific Ocean. It’s also about half an hour north of Los Olivos, the small town encompassing Neverland. Mesereau spent much of his trial preparation roaming Santa
Barbara County, riding his motorcycle in jeans and a leather jacket, stopping in bars for a glass of wine or a meal. He learned quickly the southern part of the county, which includes the University of California Santa Barbara campus and Los Angeles refugees and retirees, was the wealthiest and most liberal. The northern portion, full of ranches and farms and blue-collar workers, was more conservative, almost libertarian, respectful of quiet, law-abiding residents—including, as Mesereau discovered, Michael Jackson. Fortunately for Mesereau, MJ’s trial would take place in Santa Maria—the north.
Judge Rodney Melville had expected ten thousand fans and three hundred satellite trucks to descend on Santa Maria. The numbers turned out to be one thousand fans on the busiest days, not counting media, and just ten or fifteen trucks. On December 18, 2003, when Sneddon filed his complaint, Melville’s court administrator prepared five hundred copies to give to reporters.
“They fought for copies,” Melville said. “They nearly crushed him. The police literally had to . . . rescue him.” The judge allowed half of the courtroom seats to the media, half to the public, and a front row of family members and guests.
Rolling Stone
’s Matt Taibbi called Jackson’s trial, from the formal charges on December 18, 2003, to its conclusion on June 13, 2005,
“a goddamn zoo, a freak show from sunup to sundown.” An average day drew about thirty fans, including, as Taibbi wrote, “a fat white psychopath from Tennessee who thinks Jackson is Jesus and a rotund Latino in a
FREE MICHAEL
T-shirt who lives in his mother’s basement a few miles from the courthouse.” The media circus drew partisans on both sides.
Sheree Wilkins, an Inglewood, California, preschool teacher in her early thirties, resigned from her job, moved to Santa Maria, and split a $200-something-a-week room at a Best Inn with a fellow MJ fan. She found a night job at a local Jack-in-the-Box and spent her days outside
the courthouse.
“I believe the connection was pain,” says Wilkins, who was crushed when her parents divorced and her brother became involved in drugs and gangs. “[Michael] was in pain, and we were in pain.” On the anti-MJ side was Diane Dimond, a Court TV reporter who had covered the Chandler accusations for TV’s
Hard Copy
. After interviewing twenty children who claim to have been
“possible victims,” she says today: “I think Michael Jackson was one of the most prolific pedophiles, publicly and privately, that we’ve ever seen.”
Dimond wasn’t the only journalist who arrived in Santa Maria with such biases.
“A lot of people came there as Jackson haters,” recalls Linda Deutsch, the veteran
Associated Press reporter who covered the trial, “people who had made their whole careers on going after
Michael Jackson.”
The eight-woman, four-man jury included a disabled man in a wheelchair, a
Simpsons
fan, a country-music aficionado, the grandson of a registered sex offender, and a woman related to one of the doomed pilots on September 11. The youngest was twenty-two, the oldest seventy-nine. Mesereau had no complaints—he and his partner Susan Yu had craved women, whom they perceived as more sympathetic—but prosecutor Zonen was less sure.
“I like people who are businessmen, responsible for other people, who run operations, who hire and fire people,” he says. “I knew we wouldn’t be able to get any of them because they’d have to take six months off the job. That means we were left with jurors [who were] unemployed or underemployed, or often retired, or housewives, or very young. That’s not my ideal jury.”
Those in the media who breezily predicted victory for the prosecution did not count on a few crucial factors. For example, Sneddon, the DA, was not likable.
Rolling Stone
’s Taibbi described him as a
“humorless creep whose public persona recalls the potbellied vice principal perched on the gym bleachers watching you slow-dance.” Sneddon struggled to find the right tone for his indignation—he believed Jackson to be a child molester, but MJ was also an entertainer beloved by
millions, and if Sneddon was too harsh or sarcastic, he risked losing the jury. Earlier, in response to a reporter’s question about the timing of the indictment with Jackson’s new
Number Ones
album, Sneddon had sniffed,
“Like the sheriff and I are really into that kind of music.”
That kind of music—
only the most popular of all time—was a false note. He began his opening statement with a clunky cliché:
“On February the third of 2003, the defendant Michael Jackson’s world was rocked. And it didn’t rock in a musical sense. It rocked in a real-life sense.”
Sneddon
IV
jumped from topic to topic and was often difficult to follow. He detailed an elaborate Neverland travelogue, mapping out bedrooms, stairways, and alarm systems. He named sexually explicit magazines and DVDs, with titles like
Hustler Barely Legal Hardcore
, containing both Michael’s and Gavin’s fingerprints. He emphasized Gavin’s accusation that Michael humped a mannequin and walked around naked, with an erection, in front of his young guests. Reporters noticed the prosecution gradually deemphasizing Sneddon and playing up Zonen.
“Sneddon was much more abrasive. You could see in his style, and hearing in the tone of his voice, he was just more of a blunt character. At the beginning, his microphone wouldn’t work properly and he would get increasingly irritated,” recalls the BBC’s Peter Bowes. “Everyone liked Zonen. Very different personalities.”
The prosecution made tactical errors. The state spent a full day and a half going over phone numbers.
“The way the state structured their case was just awful. It was so confusing and so convoluted,” Diane Dimond says. “The best courtroom performances are the ones that are simple.” The prosecution also played up the sexually explicit websites, briefcases full of nudie magazines, and centerfold cutouts investigators had found or learned about in Michael’s private Neverland stuff.
“He was a drug addict, an alcoholic. He lived in a room filled with pornography
and booze,” Zonen says. But the strategy backfired. It made Michael Jackson seem like a heterosexual American male.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mesereau said, pointedly, after Sneddon’s performance, “I have an
organized
opening statement for you.” He zoomed in on Janet Arvizo and how she tried to exploit rich comedians and actors, from Jay Leno to Jim Carrey to George Lopez to an actress on
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
. Mesereau emphasized Janet’s days on welfare, then the bills she racked up during February 2003, at Michael Jackson’s expense: a $50 leg wax at Bare Skin Salon, $448.04 worth of clothing at Anchor Blue, $454.64 worth of Jockey socks, bras, and underwear.
Mesereau then began to pick apart Gavin Arvizo’s account of what happened in February 2003, shortly after the release of Bashir’s documentary. Reporters, Children’s Services, and the police were descending upon Neverland, and Jackson’s associates were scrambling to assemble a rebuttal film. “And guess what happens, they say, in the middle of all this?” Mesereau asked. “That’s when they say the child molestation begins. . . . Can you imagine a more absurd time?”
The first high-drama day in the courtroom came with the arrival of Davellin Arvizo, an eighteen-year-old college freshman who’d been an eighth-grader when Michael allegedly molested her brother. She mentioned that Gavin’s yearlong battle against cancer involved a major surgery, in which doctors removed his spleen, a kidney, lymph nodes, and the tumor in his abdomen. Gavin was always a high-strung kid, but during his time with Michael, her younger brother was
“very talkative. Running around. Very, very playful. . . . It was just more than usual. Like more talkative, more jumpy and stuff.” She called MJ’s manager, Dieter Wiesner, “real aggressive,” and said he handed them a script of “nice things” to say about Jackson for the rebuttal film. After a few days, the Arvizos perceived the situation as threatening.
Under Mesereau’s cross-examination, Davellin began to wilt. Over two days, she said variations of
“I don’t remember” more than 160
times and “I don’t know” more than 130, leading Mesereau to ask: “Did someone tell you that when the defense lawyer asks you questions in court, if you’ve got a problem, to say, ‘I was very young and I just don’t remember’?”
During Mesereau’s cross-examination of Davellin, Michael stood up to go to the bathroom. This was not allowed without permission. MJ’s unflappable attorney had to chase him down. At the beginning of the trial, Michael had seemed to not understand the gravity of the situation. In February 2005, media helicopters filming his arrival caught his SUV taking an abrupt turn away from the courtroom and toward the hospital. Doctors would later say he had flulike symptoms, for which Judge Melville gave him an excused absence. While listening to these events unfold on the news via car radio, Tony Baxter, Disney’s vice president for creative development at the time, received an unexpected call on his cell phone. It was Michael, his friend.
“I got dressed for this court date and I was really nervous and my stomach got really upset. I couldn’t face getting out of the car in front of all the people I knew would be there, so I told the driver to turn around and take me to the hospital,” he told Baxter. Then he abruptly changed the subject to a theme-park project they’d been discussing.
In March, Gavin’s younger brother Star, a nervous, fidgeting fourteen-year-old who was growing into a beefy freshman football player, detailed a scene in Jackson’s bedroom in which MJ’s associate Frank Cascio was surfing the Internet on his computer. Michael’s kids, Paris and Prince, were asleep. Cascio allegedly called up five or six porn websites, including one with a woman who “had her shirt up,” to which the singer said, crudely,
“Got milk?” Then Jackson leaned over a sleeping Prince and said, in his ear: “You’re missing some pussy.” Michael instructed Gavin and Star not to tell anybody about it. The two brothers slept next to each other that night in Michael’s bed, while the King of Pop slept on the floor at the foot of the bed. On the flight from Miami to LA, Star saw Gavin leaning on Michael’s chest. He saw Michael lick Gavin’s
head. He saw Michael intoxicated on “Jesus Juice.” Finally, he described a bed containing Michael, himself, and Gavin. “My brother was outside of the covers,” Star told the jury. “And I saw Michael’s left hand in my brother’s underwears and I saw his right hand in his underwears.” The King of Pop was, according to Star Arvizo, stroking himself.
In his cross-examination, Mesereau asked Star about the
Barely Legal
porn magazine he’d identified, and noted that the August 2003 date on the cover was long after the Arvizos had stopped visiting Neverland. “I never said it was exactly that one,” Star responded. “That’s not exactly the one he showed us.” Mesereau reminded Star he’d reconstructed the same events three or four different ways, twice to a grand jury, once to psychiatrist Katz. By the time Mesereau was through with Star, the jury didn’t know what to think.