Jackson Accuser’s Mother Testifies

In a day of high drama, the mother of Michael Jackson’s accuser refused to testify about allegations she committed welfare fraud, then broke down several times as she delivered a disjointed account of her family’s entanglement with the pop star.

At one point, she turned to the jury to defend her decision to do nothing after she allegedly saw Jackson licking her young son’s head as the two snuggled together in a darkened airplane cabin.

“Don’t judge me -- please don’t judge me!” she wailed.

Dressed in a peach suit and wearing wire-rimmed glasses, the woman, whose name The Times is withholding to protect her son’s identity, has been vilified by Jackson’s defense team as a money-hungry opportunist who conned her son into making false claims that Jackson molested him in 2003.

Prosecutors, however, have painted her as a battered woman so desperate for love that she allowed herself to be swept into the clutches of Jackson and his ruthless aides.

Jackson, 46, is charged with molesting her son, a recovering cancer patient now 15 years old, and conspiring to keep her family at his Neverland ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley against their will. If convicted of all 10 felony counts, the pop singer faces more than 20 years in prison.

The accuser’s mother has never claimed to have witnessed the alleged molestation, but her testimony is crucial to prosecutors’ complicated conspiracy scenario.

Her credibility, which was a key issue in more than a year of pretrial hearings, was again put under scrutiny when she took the stand Wednesday.

As soon as jurors sat down, they were told by Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville that the lawyers could not ask the woman questions related to “welfare fraud and perjury.” Melville explained that, outside their presence, she had announced her decision to invoke her 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Defense attorneys contend that the woman had received welfare payments, disability payments, food stamps and unemployment compensation despite a secret bank account from a $150,000 lawsuit settlement with a department store. They said she committed perjury by lying on government benefit forms.

Later, jurors watched as the woman sometimes burst into tears during her rambling, stream-of-consciousness answers to questions put gently by prosecutor Ron Zonen.

She cried as she explained her attraction to Jackson and his Neverland crew, saying her ex-husband, whom she has described as a batterer, had convinced her of her worthlessness.

“I wanted friends so bad,” she tearily testified, “because David always told me that nobody loves me.”

She choked up when discussing her son’s bout with leukemia, and again when Zonen asked her to describe the one-room East Los Angeles apartment her family lived in for years.

But even Zonen appeared frustrated at times with the woman’s roundabout, emotive style.

Late in the afternoon, he interrupted one of her lengthy answers, saying: “You don’t remember the question, do you?”

She admitted she didn’t. Zonen confided that he didn’t either.

Defense attorney Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. rarely interrupted the mother during nearly a full day of testimony. His silence contrasted with his aggressive treatment of most of the other prosecution witnesses, who were pelted with objections when they started to answer questions with narratives.

At times, the woman drew laughter when, in her animated way, she responded to Zonen with a brisk “Right on!” or emphasized a negative answer by forming an O with her fingers and saying, “No! Zero! Double zero!”

By day’s end, though, there were no more chuckles and her answers had become more pointed.

The shift came after Zonen played an audiotape of phone conversations between the woman and Frank Tyson, one of Jackson’s top associates.

The woman buried her head in her hands as Tyson’s voice was heard pleading with her to return to the singer’s Neverland ranch. Tyson reminded her of the “evil people” who were supposedly stalking her and her family, waiting to do them harm.

The tape, evidently recorded by Jackson associates, appeared to bolster the prosecution’s claim that Jackson was desperate to isolate the woman and her three children for a time on his secluded, 2,800-acre property.

According to the prosecution’s theory, Jackson and his financial prospects were severely damaged after a 2003 television documentary in which he admitted to a fondness for nonsexual sleepovers with young boys. The program contained footage of the accuser holding hands with Jackson at Neverland.

Soon afterward, prosecutors contend, the singer tried to hold the woman and her children on his ranch until they could be recorded saying glowing things about him in a rebuttal video.

In her testimony Wednesday, the woman told of being flown with her children to a Miami resort for a news conference that never took place.

At the hotel, she testified, Jackson said he would protect the family from shadowy, dangerous people who he said were out to kill them for the son’s participation in the damaging documentary “Living With Michael Jackson.”

In a 45-minute, “lovey-dovey speech,” she said, Jackson “told us that he loves us, he cares about us, that we’re family, that we had been in the back of the line and now we’re up front.”

Seated at the defense table yards away, the singer slowly shook his head.

Later, the mother glared directly at him and said: “I believed you.”

On the return flight from Miami, she said, she saw Jackson licking the boy’s head -- something she never disclosed to anyone until a police interview months later.

“I thought it was me,” she cried. “I thought I was seeing things. I was never going to tell nobody.” Several others on the flight have testified that they saw no licking.

Unexpectedly, the family was whisked by limousine to Neverland instead of being returned to their apartment in Los Angeles, she testified. At the ranch, she said, a pair of Jackson aides -- Dieter Weisner and Ronald Konitzer -- terrified her, saying she and her children couldn’t leave until they had made the rebuttal video.

“They said that would ‘appease the killers,’ ” she said. “That was the phrase. It’s just burned into my brain.”

The woman said she persuaded a ranch employee to drive the family in one of Jackson’s Rolls-Royces back to Los Angeles, but only after she knew that “the Germans” -- the German-speaking Jackson aides she feared -- were asleep.

Defense attorneys have made the point that the trip was one of three alleged “escapes” the family made from Neverland -- only to return twice, apparently voluntarily.

The woman and her children came back to Neverland after numerous, pleading calls from Tyson, she testified.

On the audiotape played in court, Tyson speaks in a high, clear voice surprisingly similar to Jackson’s.

He promised her that the family would soon escape to “a wonderful place,” far from the “evil people,” and he would take her dancing every night. But first, he said, she and her children would have to return to the ranch.

“Let us take care of you,” he urged. “Let us protect you. Now’s not the time to be out there alone.

“Never turn your back on us,” he pleaded on the tape. “Never turn your back on Michael.”

At the time, she said, she still thought of Jackson, whom she had known for three years, as practically a father to her children.

“Absolutely not,” she assured. Tyson. “We’re family, Frank.”

She is to return to the witness stand today.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are opposing defense plans to call 24 current or former Neverland employees to testify that they never saw Jackson molest children or furnish them with alcohol.

In a motion unsealed Wednesday, the prosecution said the testimony would be irrelevant because child molestation is typically not witnessed by others.