Advertisement

Jackson Trial’s Flip Side

Share
Times Staff Writers

The family accusing Michael Jackson of child molestation is as much a target in the pop star’s criminal trial as he himself.

Haunted by money troubles and split by divorce, the family has been roiled by past allegations of wife beatings, child abuse, mental illness and shoplifting, which Jackson’s defense is expected to exploit in coming weeks.

For years, the family crammed into a studio apartment while the mother groomed her daughter and two sons for lives in the entertainment world glittering somewhere beyond their East Los Angeles neighborhood.

Advertisement

But instead of finding Hollywood riches, the family was accused of stealing clothes from J.C. Penney, and their fame has sprung from an accusation of sexual molestation. The Times is withholding their names to protect the identity of the alleged molestation victim.

Lawsuits, restraining orders, police investigations, grand jury testimony and the parents’ divorce have left a trail of damaging and sometimes contradictory testimony by members of the family. But such public records, rooted in conflict, inevitably give an incomplete picture of people.

They are potential weapons, however, in the hands of the defense lawyers, who have been blasting at the family’s credibility. The attorneys are hoping to persuade jurors that the tale of molestation was concocted to extract money from the eccentric entertainer, who faces a possible 20-plus years in prison if convicted of all charges.

The lawyers have aggressively questioned the alleged victim, a 15-year-old cancer survivor. He testified that Jackson, now 46, molested him in 2003 at the singer’s Neverland ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley.

Defense attorneys took the boy to task last week in Santa Barbara County Superior Court for swearing at trial that Jackson had fondled him, after earlier telling a school official that the pop star had never touched him.

Pushing young witnesses too hard can backfire with a jury, but no such concerns are likely to hobble defense lawyers when, as expected, the children’s parents are called to testify.

Advertisement

Only Jackson’s legal team knows how much potentially damaging information it has on the family. Available public records contain allegations regarding the mother’s mental health, the parents’ 1993 bankruptcy and the family’s attempts to profit from the son’s cancer, as well as from the case against Jackson.

Defense attorneys could use the lawsuit against Penney’s, for example, to suggest a pattern of seeking money from wealthy sources. The father, mother and their two sons, then 7 and 8 years old, were stopped by store security Aug. 27, 1998, in the parking lot of the Plaza at West Covina and accused of shoplifting clothes.

The parents contended in a subsequent lawsuit against the store that security guards attacked them without reason and falsely accused the elder boy -- Jackson’s accuser -- of taking the clothes. The mother said one of the guards sexually assaulted her.

Penney’s lawyers contended that the boy was guilty and that he and his father left the store ignoring guards’ orders to stop. Store lawyers said security personnel had to restrain the father and handcuff the mother after she attacked one of the guards, according to court records.

In September 2001, the family received a $152,000 out-of-court settlement.

Last year, in a court petition seeking permission to visit his children, the father said his ex-wife had “coached her children for depositions in a lawsuit against J.C. Penney,” writing out questions and answers “for the children to study and practice with her.”

But when he later testified before the grand jury in the Jackson case, he denied that the mother had coached the children. In her own grand jury testimony, she also said she had not told her children what to say.

Advertisement

In his 2004 petition for visitation rights, the father said that if he’d been present at the court hearing that awarded custody to the mother, he “would have presented evidence regarding [his ex-wife’s] veracity and mental health.” He said she had admitted herself to a Kaiser Permanente health center in 1998 “to be treated for mental health issues.”

At least two court documents refer to the mother’s having been diagnosed as “delusional and schizophrenic” by psychiatrists in the Penney’s case. One of Jackson’s attorneys, in subpoenaing depositions from that case, said the material being sought included “the diagnosis of [the mother] with paranoid schizophrenia with delusions.”

Testifying last April before the Jackson grand jury, the father described his ex-wife as “very emotional.” He said she “goes from one extreme to another.... She’ll be happy, very sad, very nice, very mean.... I’ve been waiting for her to get better all these years, but it’s getting worse and worse.”

In October 2001, the mother filed for a restraining order against him, saying “violence in [the] marriage was a daily” occurrence.

She wrote that a few weeks earlier the father “grabbed me by the arms, shook me, pushed me and started hitting me in the head, pulling my hair. When I fell to the ground, he kicked me.... He said he hated me and hated our kids and that he was disowning us. He said if I ever told anyone about this that he would kill me, and the kids would have no mother.”

A judge granted the restraining order and gave the mother sole custody. Shortly thereafter, she filed for divorce. (The father eventually pleaded guilty to misdemeanor corporal injury to a spouse in connection with the incident and was ordered to attend 52 sessions of a program for domestic abusers.)

Advertisement

On Nov. 11, 2001, according to police reports, the father violated the restraining order by holding his daughter captive in his car more than two hours while threatening to kill her and the rest of the family. The following June, he pleaded no contest to one count of willful cruelty to a child and was sentenced to four years’ probation.

The mother told the Jackson grand jury that her husband had abused her throughout their 18-year marriage, and abused the children as well.

But the father testified before the grand jury that he had never abused his wife and said, “I don’t even spank my kids.”

Public records also deal with the family’s economic troubles.

In 1993, while still married, the parents filed for personal bankruptcy, listing assets of $2,795 and liabilities of nearly $30,000, including almost $11,500 in credit card debt.

Late Friday, the judge in Jackson’s criminal trial unsealed police reports saying the father had tried to exploit his son’s illness to get money from sympathetic celebrities, including comedian George Lopez. Lopez participated in one of four benefits for the boy at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood.

At those events, the father and his children, with permission from Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada, stood at the door to collect the admission charge. At the sick boy’s request, Masada persuaded Jackson to call, and he later invited the family to his ranch.

Advertisement

The newly released documents say Lopez became suspicious after the young cancer patient called to say he’d left a wallet containing $300 at the comedian’s home.

Lopez located the wallet but found just a few dollars in it. Afterward, he broke ties with the family. Masada later accused the father of inducing the boy to lie about the wallet, but the club owner gave him $300.

Comedian and radio producer Louise Palanker gave the father $10,000 so he could take time off work to be with his son during chemotherapy, the documents show. She had met the family in 2000, the year the boy was diagnosed with cancer, while teaching comedy to the children at a Laugh Factory camp.

Three weeks later, Palanker told investigators, the father asked her for an additional $10,000, which she gave him. She also said she arranged for a contractor to create a germ-free room for the boy, whose immune system was weakened by his cancer treatment. She later learned that the family never paid the contractor’s $800 bill but bought a large flat-screen television and DVD player.

Palanker refused subsequent requests for money.

A separate court document says that in November 2002, the family sought to conceal from Jackson the $152,000 Penney’s settlement they’d received the previous year, in order to appear needy.

Jackson’s trial has its roots in a documentary by British journalist Martin Bashir, in which the entertainer said he enjoyed sleeping with boys in a nonsexual manner. Jackson’s accuser, then recuperating from chemotherapy, appeared in the documentary.

Advertisement

The boy’s mother and his siblings then appeared in a so-called rebuttal video, in which they said Jackson was “like a father.”

In the video, the mother said that, during visits to Neverland, she and the children stayed in the main house with Jackson. Occasionally, she said, she slept in separate guest quarters.

She repeated the assertion to state Department of Child and Family Services social workers. According to grand jury testimony by one of the social workers, the mother said her children were never alone with Jackson.

In her own grand jury testimony, however, she asserted that her comments in the rebuttal video were made under duress and “scripted” by one of Jackson’s managers. She testified that she never spent the night in the main house with her children, staying only in the guest quarters.

In her grand jury testimony last year, she denied asking for money from Jackson. “I don’t want the devil’s money,” she said.

The woman’s current husband, however, testified at an August pretrial hearing that he and his wife had demanded payment from a Jackson representative for the appearance in the rebuttal video. “You’re making millions off this,” the man testified that she told Jackson’s representative.

Advertisement

He also said he and his wife were disappointed by media offers, turning down $15,000 for an interview with two British journalists.

The mother told the grand jury that her experience masking her ex-husband’s abuse explained why she could appear happy on the rebuttal video. She said she participated only because of perceived threats against her family by Jackson’s managers.

“You got to understand,” she said, “I had years of being beat up. Years that I knew that if I pretended to smile, people wouldn’t ask questions. I had years of going to a job bruised up and smiling.... So, yes, I got really good at smiling. I got really good at pretending everything was OK.”

*

Times staff writers Stuart Pfeifer and Steve Chawkins contributed to this report.

Advertisement