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Witness twists her fate on stand

Whether jury views accuser's mother as shrewd schemer or naive victim is key to Jackson trial

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

April 18, 2005

SANTA MARIA, Calif. - She's a trial lawyer's nightmare, a whiny-voiced drama queen who gives evasive and sometimes nonsensical responses, and who was in tears within minutes of taking the witness stand in Michael Jackson's child molestation trial.

Despite her grating style and checkered past, though, the mother of Jackson's alleged victim, who began giving testimony Wednesday and started what is likely to be a lengthy cross-examination Friday, is key to this case. The prosecution needs her to back up its claims of a conspiracy to silence her family about alleged misbehavior at Jackson's Neverland ranch. The defense needs her to back up its claims that the accusations were invented at her behest, to extort money from Jackson.

"Therein lies the twist in this trial," said Michael Cardoza, a lawyer monitoring the case, outlining the dilemma facing jurors as they weigh the bizarre witness against the equally bizarre defendant. "Remember, the burden of proof here is beyond a reasonable doubt," he said, echoing other legal experts who seemed to agree that the woman's first days on the stand did the prosecution more harm than good.

"She's unstable, incredible, exactly the type of witness you don't want to have," said Laurie Levenson, a former prosecutor and a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "She's so unbelievable that not only does it blow out the conspiracy counts, it makes you rethink all the other charges."

An obvious puzzle is why Santa Barbara County District Attorney Thomas Sneddon Jr. did not skip the conspiracy and false imprisonment allegations, which rest on the 37-year-old woman's testimony, and go after Jackson on just molestation accusations, which do not. They account for the bulk of the 10-count indictment, and a conviction on even one such charge would be devastating to Jackson, 46. But prosecutors often "load up" indictments in hopes that jurors with an array of charges will find something worthy of conviction, said Levenson. They also may hope that the woman's stories of captivity behind the gates of Neverland, which she described Friday as "all about booze, pornography, and sex with boys," will sully Jackson's image, and that her shaky demeanor will show that Jackson preyed upon unstable, vulnerable people.

She certainly has come across as just that, presenting herself as a devoted mother beaten down by an abusive husband, "spit on" by society for being neither rich nor sophisticated, and shattered by rejection. She has also portrayed herself as naive, sentimental, and almost pious.

"I had never missed Ash Wednesday, never!" she blurted at jurors, until, she says, she was held against her will at Neverland in February and March 2003. When asked in her first minutes of testimony to describe the cramped Los Angeles apartment in which she lived at the time, her voice shook and tears fell from her eyes. "It was my home," she replied plaintively.

It was during her lowest days, in the summer of 2000 as her son battled cancer, that the witness says Jackson entered the lives of her and her three children to lend moral support and be a "father figure." Jackson's interest in her son's welfare escalated into a deep friendship, and she quickly came to see him and his coterie of minders, guards and aides as the "family" she craved. "I was just like a sponge believing him, trusting him," she said of Jackson, at whom she has often pointed her finger accusingly. Asked why she did not seek help from a police officer friend when she and her children were allegedly menaced by Jackson's associates, she said she was trying to protect her elderly parents. Asked why she didn't seek help from her then-boyfriend, a strapping U.S. Army major, or from any of his friends, she began weeping and said she "wasn't smart enough" to mingle with them.

Her presumably harmless image has been backed by her courtroom look. Clad in bland pantsuits, her dark hair hanging straight and her round face bare of makeup, she bears virtually no resemblance to the glowing woman with ruby-red lipstick, hip clothes and tinted ringlets who praised Jackson in a 2003 video. Defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. showed it to jurors Friday as he began trying to discredit her allegations and poke holes in her sad-sack image.

Under cross-examination, she admitted that she had lied under oath during a 1998 lawsuit against J.C. Penney, which netted her family $152,000, and that she had left Neverland at least three times and had countless phone conversations with family and friends in the weeks she claims to have been held captive.

Mesereau had hoped to focus on allegations of welfare fraud pending against the witness but was denied the chance when she invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination and said she would not answer questions about it. The defense then tried to have her excluded as a witness, arguing that the welfare issue was a key to its case against her credibility, but the judge rejected the motion.

Even without such ammunition, lawyers say her credibility has been severely and perhaps irrevocably damaged, and that the obstinacy, condescension and indignation with which she has responded to Mesereau could turn off jurors. "What she gives to the prosecution may not be enough for what she takes away," said defense attorney and legal analyst Anne Bremner. "And what she takes away could be the whole case."

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Whether jury views accuser's mother as shrewd schemer or naive victim is key to Jackson trial

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