Jacko on Trial

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 programmes," 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 L.A. to support her favorite artist, 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 — 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 blond housewife carrying a sign that read "Hands Off My Private Parts."

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 elderly 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.