Created: Friday, 22 April 2005
On Day 37 the defense in the Michael Jackson trial on Thursday walked a former Neverland ranch security guard through records detailing activities at Mr. Jackson’s estate during the time the accuser and his family were allegedly held captive there.
The logs showed, among other things, that on Feb. 20, 2003, the boy now accusing Mr. Jackson of molestation was hit by a golf cart driven by a relative of actor Marlon Brando.
An emergency medical worker examined the boy and he did not require any further attention, according to the log reviewed by former guard Brian Barron during cross-examination by defense attorney Robert Sanger.
An entry from Feb. 24, 2003, showed the entire family left and returned a few hours later. Mr. Sanger asked if the family had gone to the dentist that day and Barron said he did not know.
The boy’s mother has testified that she took the family for an unnecessary trip to an orthodontist because she hoped to somehow escape.
Mr. Jackson was greeted by screaming fans on his arrival at court Thursday. Wearing a black coat with a bright aqua armband and vest, he acknowledged the screams with a wave.
The prosecution called Barron on Wednesday to testify that he once had orders not to let the accuser leave Neverland.
Barron, a police officer who moonlighted at Neverland, said that in January or February 2003 he saw a note written on a message board that “simply stated (the boy) is not allowed off-property.”
He said he needed to get permission from a supervisor before letting the boy leave.
While the prosecution sought to show that the directive indicated they boy and his family were held against their will, Mr. Sanger challenged that implication when he began questioning Barron.
Mr. Sanger asked whether the general policy was that children visiting without parents would not be allowed to leave by themselves.
“Yes,” said Barron. “We would not let them go off the ranch without supervision.”
“So it would not be unusual to not let (the boy and his brother) leave the ranch without supervision,” said Mr. Sanger.
“That’s correct,” said Barron.
There were many occasions where the boy and his brother were at the ranch without parental supervision, therefore their whereabouts and safety would have been the responsibility of Mr. Jackson and his staff.
The defense then questioned Barron about the visitor logs and it became clear that the ranch’s timeline of arrivals and departures for the accuser and his family was different than those described by the mother and other prosecution witnesses.
The mother and others have said the family flew to Florida to be with Mr. Jackson just before the TV documentary about Mr. Jackson was broadcast on Feb. 6, 2003. The mother said Mr. Jackson did not allow them to view the program there.
But the gate records of Neverland showed the family present at the estate on Feb. 6 and Feb. 7, 2003.
Barron wasn’t asked if the dates were accurate, but it was clear the records weren’t always perfect. The name of the boy’s sister, for example, was repeatedly misspelled.
The witness, a police officer for the city of Guadalupe, said that he quit his job at Neverland after the estate was raided by Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies in November 2003. He said a supervisor at his police job suggested he give up the part-time job because of the criminal investigation and he took the advice.
“You did not do that because you’d seen anything unlawful at the ranch?” asked Mr. Sanger.
“No,” said the witness, who acknowledged that if he had seen anything amiss he would have been obligated as a police officer to report it.
The witness also said that after the raid - for which he was not present - the Sheriff’s Department asked him to go back to work at Neverland as an informant but that he refused.
The court also heard that the young accuser, who the defense says ran amok at Neverland, crashed a golf cart into the fountain of the ranch’s movie theater.
Security records from June 2002, months before the alleged crimes, showed that the accuser and his siblings had the run of the estate’s lavish facilities, including its pool, spa, water fort, dance studio, all-terrain vehicles, scooters, jet skis, golf carts, horseback riding grounds and two houses on the property.
The mother of the accuser lived in quarters fit for Elizabeth Taylor during her alleged captivity at Neverland Ranch, a defense lawyer said.
The accuser’s mother, who claimed she was held prisoner at the fantasy-style estate by Mr. Jackson and his alleged henchmen for three weeks in 2003, was supposedly housed in the same guest house where movie legend Taylor had stayed.
“Is guest unit number four a unit that Elizabeth Taylor likes to stay in?” defense attorney Robert Sanger asked former Neverland security guard Brian Barron as the two reviewed ranch records showing the woman had stayed in that room.
“I have no idea,” the witness said, before agreeing that it was a very comfortable unit and that ranch guests enjoyed hotel-like services.
Meanwhile, Mr. Jackson’s attorneys asked that prosecutors be barred from presenting decade-old allegations from a former Jackson employee regarding an alleged incident involving a young boy who later received a multimillion-dollar settlement from the singer.
The motion was one of several Judge Rodney S. Melville was expected to hear Thursday.
Abdool was one of several employees who lost a wrongful termination lawsuit to Mr. Jackson in 1997 and were ordered to pay damages to the singer in a countersuit. The defense said his testimony would be “precisely the kind of inflammatory evidence that is more prejudicial than probative,” and asked that it not be allowed.
The boy named in the incident received a multimillion-dollar settlement from Mr. Jackson in 1994 and subsequently declined to cooperate in a criminal investigation. No charges were filed in that case.
Additionally, prosecutors clashed with Michael Jackson’s lawyers over whether the mother of the star’s child sex accuser was a vulnerable battered woman or a professional liar.
But trial Judge Rodney Melville ruled against prosecutors by refusing to allow them to call a domestic abuse expert to explain away key discrepancies in the woman’s explosive testimony, which ended this week.
Mr. Jackson’s lawyers also claimed the woman, who they say is a “professional plaintiff” and gold-digger, lived in quarters fit for screen legend Elizabeth Taylor during her alleged captivity at the star’s Neverland Ranch.
Prosecutors had asked to call a specialist in the effects of spousal abuse to explain to jurors why the teen-age accuser’s mother never called police during the three weeks during which she claims she and her family were kidnapped by the star and his aides.
They said the expert testimony would also help explain why the woman lied under oath, by her own admission, about details of her relationship with her ex-husband, whom she now claims beat her.
The boy’s mother told jurors during five days on the stand she had not called friends in the police department or shouted out to nearby officers for help when she was allegedly escorted through public places by Mr. Jackson aides during her claimed three weeks in captivity.
In often garbled testimony that challenged her credibility, she said she had feared Mr. Jackson henchmen were monitoring her phone calls and warned her boyfriend and parents would be killed if she did not cooperate.
Auchincloss said because the woman had suffered abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, Mr. Jackson was able to take advantage of her.
“Mr. Jackson was in a position where he could exploit the vulnerabilities of a woman who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder,” the prosecutor said in arguments held away from jurors.
But Mr. Jackson lawyer Robert Sanger countered that an expert should not be allowed to explain away inconsistencies in the woman’s actions and statements as that would give witnesses free rein to lie.
The woman had perjured herself on the stand, Mr. Sanger alleged. “That’s not because she’s a battered women, that’s because she lies for gain,” he said.
Melville ruled against prosecutors on the motion.
“I think this type of evidence is valuable in domestic abuse cases, but I’m not going to allow it in this case,” he said. “It may or may not explain her” behavior in this or earlier cases, he added.
Judge Rodney Melville also said he would allow evidence showing that Mr. Jackson’s then-13-year-old accuser and younger brother had masturbated while looking at the pop star’s pornography, potentially bolstering defense claims that the boys had run wild at Neverland.
Both rulings were setbacks for the prosecution, which is in the final stages of presenting its case to the jury of eight women and four men.
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