Created: Tuesday, 19 April 2005
Day 35:
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
On Day 35 Michael Jackson’s defense attorney, Tuesday, challenged the authenticity of photographs that appeared to show the mother of the his accuser with severe bruises from an alleged beating by store security guards that led to her family receiving more than $150,000 in a lawsuit settlement.
The incident occurred in 1998 and is unrelated to the molestation case facing Mr. Jackson but has arisen as a test of the mother’s credibility. Mr. Jackson’s defense claims his accuser’s family has a history of false claims.
Defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. attacked the photos, introduced by the prosecution late Monday, by eliciting the woman’s acknowledgment that in a deposition for the lawsuit she talked about the fact that bruises do not show up immediately but turn dark over time.
When Mr. Mesereau asked her when the purported injury photos were taken, she said they were done immediately. She said her then-husband took her to have pictures made to document her injuries.
“But didn’t you testify that you didn’t have these bruises immediately?” asked Mr. Mesereau.
She fumbled for words and responded with the statement: “When the defense attorney told us. that’s the time.” The woman said she had been doing everything at the instruction of a defense attorney after she was arrested for investigation of assault and battery, burglary and petty theft - charges that were eventually dropped.
Mr. Mesereau asked if she had not told a woman at a law office that the bruises that were photographed were actually from a beating by her former husband.
“That’s incorrect,” she said.
The woman acknowledged that although she claimed to have been brutally beaten and sexually touched during the altercation with the store guards, she did not decide to file a lawsuit until a year later. Mr. Mesereau then suggested that was the pattern she was following in the Mr. Jackson case.
Mr. Mesereau had previously confronted the woman with her statements from the store lawsuit in which she denied that her former husband ever abused her. She acknowledged those sworn statements were lies and that her former husband had frequently beaten her and her children.
Mesereau also asked the mother about her family’s encounters with other celebrities. She said she was never informed that fund-raisers were held for her son at a Hollywood comedy club. And she said that she had no idea why money was being put in a bank account she opened for her son’s benefit.
“You had no idea why anyone put money in it. You just withdrew it?” asked Mesereau.
“I did what (my husband) told me,” the woman said.
Contrary to previous testimony and evidence, the woman also maintained that she never asked comedian George Lopez for money, nor did she approach Jay Leno.
Under repeated attack by Mr. Mesereau, the mother repeatedly avoided direct responses to his questions. When asked, for instance, if she kept papers on an SUV that Mr. Jackson gave to her family, the woman said no. And in the next breath, she said she had the vehicle identification number.
One subject the woman sidestepped entirely. When asked why she never told the lawyer who represented her in early 2003 that she was being held prisoner by Mr. Jackson and his team of henchman, the mother said she didn’t want to answer on the grounds of what she called “attorney-client privilege.”
Earlier, the woman invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in order to short-circuit questions about her acts of welfare fraud.
Additonally, Mr. Mesereau grilled the mother on money, head-licking-and a family snapshot in which she appeared to be holding a knife over the head of one of her children.
The woman said the knife picture, taken by her then-husband in the family kitchen, was done “jokingly.”
On the subject of money, meanwhile, the woman claimed to have little knowledge of her family’s finances. She said she didn’t know about comedy-club fund-raisers for her ill son. And she said she didn’t know about $2,000 wired to her bank account by Chris Tucker. (Tucker, who befriended the woman’s eldest son during his cancer treatment, is on the defense’s witness list.)
When asked why, if she was clueless of the comedy-club fund-raisers, she told a newspaper in 2000 that celebrities were helping her family, the mother said she meant that they were helping her family by visiting her son’s hospital room and feeding the boy cantaloupe.
Trying to bolster the defense’s contention that the accuser’s mother used her son’s bout with cancer to solicit money for her personal benefit, Mr. Mesereau asked her if she had paid for plastic surgery out of money raised for the boy.
“I used a credit card (for the surgery) … which is still outstanding,” she said.
She also said she never had a discussion with comedian Louise Palanker about $20,000 she had given the family, which she said was arranged by her then husband. But she admitted that at his request, she endorsed one of Palanker’s checks.
On the stand Monday, the mother had said she did not know how the money from Palanker had been used. But Tuesday, after an overnight conversation with prosecutor Ron Zonen, she said she remembered that the money was used to construct a special sterile room at her parents’ home, where her son stayed while recovering from chemotherapy. Prosecution attorney Zonen “refreshed my memory,” she said.
The mother, who was on the stand over a period of five days, finally concluded her testimony at midmorning. After brief testimony by a detective, the accuser’s grandmother was called to testify.
The grandmother testified on Tuesday that she was bombarded by phone calls and had rocks thrown at her home after her grandson finally left the singer’s Neverland Valley Ranch in 2003.
Speaking in Spanish through an interpreter, the grandmother also said she had to pretend to be sick in order to get the boy, then 13, and his brother released from Neverland.
And when the brothers finally returned “these children that came were not my grandkids … They didn’t talk to me the same way. They were different kids and even up to now (the elder boy) is not the same child,” she said.
The grandmother took the stand after the mother of the boy at the center of the child sex abuse case against Mr. Jackson stepped down on Tuesday after more than four days of emotional, bizarre and rambling testimony.
The mother never witnessed any molestation of her son by Mr. Jackson. She is crucial to the defense argument that Mr. Jackson was an unwitting victim of a liar and a grifter who latched onto celebrities and who had a history of making false allegations.
The grandmother’s testimony focused on the days and weeks after the family returned from Neverland in March 2003 following what the mother had described as a period of intimidation at the hands of some of Mr. Jackson’s aides.
“I had to lie and say I was ill so they could come, because those children, they loved me very much because I raised them,” the grandmother said. This is the same grandmother that the accuser testified told him that if he didn’t masturbate he would be compelled to do something worse such as rape a girl.
The prosecution plans to rest next week, District Attorney Tom Sneddon told the judge Tuesday. The announcement came in the eighth week since opening statements.
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