Jackson Trial Shifts Focus to Earlier Alleged Victims

Michael Jackson’s child-molestation trial is expected to shift today from allegations that he molested a 13-year-old boy in 2003 to testimony that he molested or inappropriately touched five other boys in the 1990s.

Santa Barbara County Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon said the evidence of previous acts would help prove that Jackson’s current accuser is telling the truth.

Only one alleged victim was expected to testify for the prosecution. The son of a former Jackson maid will say that Jackson fondled him sexually on three occasions, Sneddon said. Jackson reportedly paid $2 million to avoid a lawsuit with that family.

Now 25, Jackson’s accuser in a 1993 lawsuit over alleged molestation is not expected to take the stand. But his mother will probably tell jurors that Jackson had spent 30 consecutive nights with her son, then 13, in the boy’s bedroom in Los Angeles, said the boy’s uncle, Santa Barbara attorney Raymond Chandler. He said 30 other sleepovers occurred at Jackson’s Century City condominium, his Neverland ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, and at hotels in Las Vegas, New York, Florida and Monaco.

“What will be powerful is the length of the relationship and the number of times they slept together,” Chandler said. “The important thing for the prosecution is simply to place the two of them in bedrooms together all of those nights.”

Even if that happens, prosecutors will be venturing into some tricky territory for several reasons, according to legal experts.

Testimony about four of the five alleged victims will come not from them, but from observers who claim they saw Jackson, 46, molesting, hugging, kissing or fondling the boys.

And three of the five alleged victims -- including actor Macaulay Culkin -- will testify that the pop star never touched them inappropriately, a source close to Jackson said. That could put prosecutors in the unusual position of trying to prove acts that the alleged victims deny.

Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville said last week that he would admit the testimony under a 1995 state law that allows juries in sex crimes cases to hear about a defendant’s prior sexual misconduct, even alleged offenses that are decades old and were never reported.

Some of the evidence that Sneddon said he intended to introduce would attempt to show a pattern that mirrored alleged behavior in the current case.

A witness was expected to testify that Jackson licked the head of a boy sitting on his lap in a limousine, just as he allegedly licked the current victim’s head while they sat side by side on a flight from Miami to Santa Barbara. Witnesses will say that Jackson shared his bed with the boys and encouraged them to call him “daddy,” as his current accuser contends, Sneddon said.

Prosecutors may even point to horror movies as proof of a “grooming” pattern, which is common to many pedophiles. The aim, experts say, is to accustom boys to the idea of sexual encounters by bringing up subjects such as masturbation, by dipping into porn and by generally acting like young teenagers.

In the current case, the accuser told investigators that he and Jackson cuddled after viewing a frightening video. In the 1993 case, the boy told investigators that he and Jackson cuddled after watching “The Exorcist.”

Chandler, who said he has not been in touch with his nephew since 2000, tried to explain why the young man would refuse to testify.

“He’s tired of being ‘the Jackson kid,’ said Chandler, who added that his nephew lives under an assumed name and has moved several times in the last 10 years to elude the press.

The mother of the boy in the 1993 case is not likely to say she witnessed any overt sexual acts, said Chandler, whose 2004 book, “All That Glitters,” details the case and its effect on his family.

Defense attorneys were expected to cast her as a money-hungry opportunist who sought to make a quick buck in a lawsuit against Jackson. But if they play that card too aggressively, it may suggest to jurors that the woman was “selling her son” to Jackson in return for expensive jewelry, luxury trips and the attention of a superstar, Chandler said. That could be what prosecutors would like jurors to believe.

The number of alleged victims could have a cumulative effect on the jury, some legal experts said.

“What it does is it bleeds Jackson [from] a bunch of cuts. Rather than having to worry about one wound, he now has five or six he’s hemorrhaging from,” said Peter Keane, former chief assistant public defender for San Francisco County and a professor at Golden Gate University School of Law.

“There are going to be some jurors who think, ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and we wouldn’t be hearing about all this stuff if there weren’t something funny going on,’ ” said USC law professor Jean Rosenbluth.

But hearing the evidence about past acts from third-party witnesses, not the alleged victims themselves, will not be as persuasive as hearing it directly from the alleged victims, legal experts said.

“I get the impression the prosecution is throwing in as much as they can to the jury because the individual pieces are not that strong,” said Rosenbluth, a former federal prosecutor. “I do think it’s obviously a huge break for the prosecution to be able to get this stuff in, but I don’t think it means there’s going to be an automatic conviction.”

Jurors were also expected to be told that Jackson has paid two settlements involving allegations of molestation.

The alleged victims scheduled to testify for the defense include Culkin and two Australian-born men who met Jackson as boys and became his traveling companions. Both of the Australian boys appeared on local television news broadcasts in 1993 and said that although they had each shared a bed with Jackson, the pop star had never touched them inappropriately.

Culkin has also repeatedly denied that Jackson had ever been inappropriate with him, most recently during an interview on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

A spokeswoman for Culkin said last week that the actor “is not involved in the proceedings at this time, and we do not expect that to change.”

At a hearing last week, defense attorney Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. said three of the witnesses to the prior alleged acts whom the prosecution intends to call are “disgruntled” employees who were found by a jury to have stolen from Jackson.

He also said the former maid and her son had given inconsistent accounts about what happened during a deposition for a civil lawsuit. “She began by saying she saw something and ended by saying she saw nothing,” Mesereau said.

The former maid, who was expected to testify about incidents allegedly involving other boys as well as her son, further damaged her credibility when she sold her story to “tabloids,” Mesereau said.

Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer Harland Braun, who has worked with Mesereau in the past, said he has seen cases in which prosecutors hurt themselves by bringing in weak corroborating testimony. How the testimony about these past incidents plays out will be a pivotal part of the trial, he said.

“That evidence will either make or break the prosecution’s case,” Braun said. “If the prosecution tries to bring stuff in and it falls short, it makes the prosecution look like they’re stretching.”