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Dance to freedom in fame's shoes

Ellis Henican

June 14, 2005

Alert to parents everywhere: Michael Jackson is free to baby-sit again.

Apparently, we are never going to convict a celebrity of anything.

O.J. walked. Puffy walked. Kobe walked. Robert Blake walked, too. And now the King of Pop-Your-Innocence has moonwalked right out of the courthouse, too.

Jacko's white-maned defense lawyer, Thomas Mesereau, proved himself an astute observer of the stars-are-exempt rule that has overtaken our court system now. He fashioned a defense that fit his world-famous client like a black studded glove. It's the notion that big-name celebrities can never be judged like the rest of us.

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It's not just that the stars are different from you and me -- or richer or luckier or more deserving of fame. It's that their actions don't carry the criminal meanings that ours sometimes do.

Their killings are committed by others. Their rapes are consensual sex. Their child molestations are actually examples of sweet, innocent love.

Michael Jackson is hosting man-boy slumber parties at Neverland? Oh, that's just Michael! He's sharing his bed with barely pubescent boys? Oh, that isn't sexual at all! He has a constantly rotating cast of 13-year-old boys lounging around his Santa Barbara County estate? Oh, those are just Michael's "special friends."

And whatever happens next can't ever be his fault. If someone has to be blamed, it will be the boys' "greedy" or "fame-obsessed" or "brain-dead" parents. What on earth were they thinking, leaving their children at Neverland?

Or, as Mesereau put it yesterday afternoon, quite clearly and simply, after the verdict was read: "Justice is done. The man's innocent. He always was."

In Mesereau's brilliant formulation, his 46-year-old client is a real-life Peter Pan, this mental boy trapped in a grown man's body, perfectly clueless how inappropriate his behavior is. So, of course, he can't be held to grown-up rules.

There's an avalanche of evidence, some of which was presented in court, that cast serious doubt on this convenient portrait.

The multimillion-dollar payoffs to the families of two previous accusers. The evidence of Michael lubricating prospective victims with pornography and alcohol. The whole cult of the "rubba," his secret nickname for the ever-present favorite boys.

Did anyone ever wonder: How come little girls never get to be this weirdo's "special friends?"

Every day in America, we send men off to prison on child-molestation charges on evidence far less compelling than this. But he is a world-famous singing star, and they are not.

Just try: Name a first-string celebrity who's heard the word "guilty" on serious charges without first hearing the word "not." Could it really be that all these famous defendants are truly innocent?

And when someone well known is convicted, it's almost always for a relatively minor offense. Think Martha Stewart and the feather-bedded rigors of her "mansion arrest."

Tom Sneddon, the downcast Santa Barbara district attorney who believed otherwise, was asked yesterday whether "the celebrity factor" contributed to his loss.

"It seems to us," he said with a shrug. "But maybe we're just looking for explanations in the wrong place. ... We don't select our victims, and we don't select the family they come from."

As for the jurors, they did what jurors always do when celebrity cases end -- in acquittals, inevitably. They insist the verdict had nothing to do with the celebrity.

"We looked at all the evidence," said Juror No. 2, speaking for the whole Jackson panel. "We had to look at him just like any other individual, not like a celebrity."

Then, he and others promptly began trashing the alleged victim and his mother, giving the famous defendant a pass on everything.

Juror No. 5: "I disliked it intensely when she snapped her fingers at us. I thought, 'Don't snap your fingers at me, lady.'"

Juror No. 4: "I was very uncomfortable with that. A lot of the witnesses looked over at us and looked back. She didn't take her eyes off of us. That was very uncomfortable."

It was Juror No. 10, however, who blasted the mom most directly for letting her young son attend this grown man's cross-generational snuggling parties -- but not Michael for hosting them.

"What mother in her right mind would allow that to happen?" she asked, explaining that she wasn't only a juror, she was also a mom.

A star-struck juror and mom.