The Nation in the Mirror

The only remaining intrigue in the trial involves the ongoing list of celebrities called to testify on Jackson's behalf. It's a running joke: It seems like Jackson's accusers, at one time or another, tried to steal the silverware of every famous person in Southern California. If Tom Mesereau were to get up tomorrow and call Queen Elizabeth II to the stand, no one in this room would even look up from his crossword.

"We call Larry King, Your Honor," says Mesereau.

Sure, why not Larry King? Why not Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett, too? Why not call Ellen DeGeneres, dress her in rubber, have her sit on the face of Wayne Brady? In a relationship this long, you have to be creative to keep things interesting.

King's testimony would ultimately be inadmissible, but the celebrity train rolled on straight through to the end of the case. Jackson's slick white-haired lawyer, Mesereau, put on a defense that at the end felt like a dinner for the jury at Spago. You know: Look, there's Chris Tucker, let's go over and I'll introduce you. Sneddon's woeful performance had set up the defense as the good guys, but when the bell rang, Mesereau answered with a string of witnesses who testified that Jackson had spent hundreds, if not thousands, of nights in bed with strange children. Far ahead on points, Jackson's first counterstrike was to boldly announce himself as a compulsive maniac, addicted to children — a musical Saturday-morning-cartoons version of something out of Seven.

This might have been a disastrous move were it not for the utter incompetence of the prosecution. By the third month of the trial, the prosecution's strategy seemed to be to excitedly introduce the words "boy," "suck," "penis" and "jack off" into their cross-examinations as often as possible (Sneddon managed to elicit the trifecta phrase "sucking on the penis of a young boy!") — and they pissed away Jackson's own damaging admissions by continually introducing crazy new theories of molestation, real wacko witch-hunt stuff, that turned what might have been a serious trial into a low comedy of grasping provincial bureaucrats.

Here's Ron Zonen cross-examining Wade Robson, a young man the prosecution contended had been molested by Jackson — but who testified to the contrary.

ZONEN: You're telling us nothing happened, right?

ROBSON: That's right.

ZONEN: All right. What you're really telling us is that nothing happened while you were awake. Isn't that true?

ROBSON: I'm telling you nothing ever happened.

ZONEN: Mr. Robson, when you were asleep, you wouldn't have known what had happened, particularly at age seven, would you have?

ROBSON: I think something like that would wake me up.

One would think it would. In any case, there was never enough evidence at this trial of "something like that" to answer with any satisfaction the question of who Michael Jackson really is. Emboldened, the defense never bothered to offer an affirmative explanation of Jackson's strange behavior.

Instead, the case it put on was mostly grunt work, ho-hum explanations for various unpleasant pieces of anecdotal evidence — along the lines of "Your Honor, we can explain each of those five documented instances of head-licking" — followed by a sunny dismount into a pool of supportive celebrities, people like Jay Leno, Macaulay Culkin and Chris Tucker.

In between, the defense made sure to take plenty of shots at various people on Jackson's shit list: Sneddon, the police, his thieving employees, his scheming advisers, et cetera, all those enemies of peace and love and beautiful things.