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Jackson testimony: damning or weird?

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

April 11, 2005

SANTA MARIA, Calif. - The call came at about 3 a.m. "Silver Fox wants some French fries," said the voice on the line.

In Neverland-speak, that meant Michael Jackson was hungry for French fries and that the cook had better get out of bed and produce them.

The cook was Phillip LeMarque, and his description of the 1991 call was one of the many odd revelations to emerge about Jackson's ranch last week as witnesses in his child molestation trial portrayed Neverland as anything but an innocent fantasyland. They described monkey droppings scraped off the walls, paranoid employees, spoiled little boys who bossed around the staff and sinister security guards who threatened anybody deemed disloyal to the pop star.

The question is whether such accounts, separate from allegations of sexual misconduct, hurt Jackson or simply told jurors what most people already knew: that Jackson is one weird guy.

Jeff Modisett, the former Indiana attorney general who successfully prosecuted Mike Tyson for rape, said bizarre details aren't unusual in celebrity trials and that most juries "use common sense to see through all the flash and star power."

Clearly helping Jackson was his attorney's ability to undercut the witnesses by portraying them as vengeful, greedy and eager to invent stories to sell to the highest bidders.

"What we saw as explosive testimony ... may have been completely eroded," Jim Moret, a lawyer providing analysis to "Inside Edition," said after a withering attack on a prosecution witness Thursday. Analyst Anne Bremner agreed. "I think this witness' credibility in a lot of ways was destroyed," she said after former Neverland security guard Ralph Chacon left the stand.

Chacon produced the most explosive testimony yet when he said he had seen Jackson, 46, performing oral sex on a little boy. Chacon also said that after he had testified before a grand jury investigating molestation claims against Jackson, he began receiving threats from people he believes were Jackson bodyguards. "Someone called and said 'I'm going to kill you,' and hung up," Chacon said.

Chacon's statements were part of a parade of unseemly descriptions that have pointed to Jackson as an uncaring employer who rarely paid overtime for the endless hours of servitude he demanded. The descriptions are likely to continue this week as prosecutors try to prove a pattern of abuse against youthful Neverland visitors.

It will be difficult for any to top what already has been heard. After Chacon, Jackson's former maid, Adrian Marie McManus, told jurors that Jackson made no attempt to control his young visitors as they engaged in food fights and squirt-gun battles, and hurled water balloons.

McManus singled out Macaulay Culkin, then a fledgling child actor, recalling him as "very, very wild" and "destructive," and describing an incident in which she brought popcorn and soda to Culkin on the balcony of Neverland's theater. He dumped it over a ledge onto Jackson's head below, said McManus, who was left to clean up the mess.

Asked whether her duties included changing diapers of Jackson's pet monkeys or cleaning their droppings off the floor, she said matter-of-factly: "Not on the floor. On the walls."

LeMarque said it was common for Jackson and his visitors to stay up all night and demand food at any time. Their orders would be relayed through Jackson's security guards, who used code names for residents. Jackson's was "Silver Fox," he said, recalling the night he was commanded to bring French fries at 3 a.m. as Jackson played video games with Culkin.

Under cross-examination, LeMarque was accused of plotting with other Neverland workers to try to sell stories of the ranch to the media, something LeMarque said was impossible because of the lack of cooperation among workers. "It was forbidden to be friends ... because everyone was spying on each other," he said, not attempting to hide his disdain for his former workplace.