Jacko on Trial

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 6th, 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 co-conspirators — 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, co-conspirator Ronald Konitzer, has since been accused by Mesereau of stealing Jackson's money.) Marc Schaffel came to Jackson after September 11th with plans to market an anti-terror-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.