Jurors Told of Plot by Jackson, Aides

The mother of Michael Jackson’s teenage accuser testified Thursday that the entertainer was plotting to have her and her three children “disappear” sometime after his top aides moved them to Brazil.

With a bit more focus than she displayed during her frenetic testimony the day before, the woman acknowledged that she did not alert police to the alleged conspiracy.

If she stepped out of line, she explained, Jackson’s assistants threatened to kill her boyfriend and her elderly parents. “And who could possibly believe this?” added the woman, whose son, a recovering cancer patient, has accused Jackson of molesting him at the singer’s Neverland ranch in 2003.

The Times is withholding the woman’s name to protect the alleged victim’s identity.

In addition to four counts of child molestation, Jackson, 46, is charged with conspiring to hold the family captive at his Santa Ynez Valley ranch. If convicted of all charges, he could face more than 20 years in prison.

During her testimony Thursday, the mother sometimes raised her voice, grew agitated and spoke rapidly. When prosecutor Ron Zonen showed her the passports that Jackson’s staff had secured for her and her children so they could head for Brazil, she choked up.

The passports were among several pieces of evidence presented in court Thursday that appeared to support the woman’s claim that Jackson and his associates took extraordinary measures to control her and her children.

Defense attorneys have said in court that Jackson was only going along with the woman’s request for security to fend off a media horde. But the woman said Jackson’s employees convinced her that she and her children had to be protected from roving “killers.”

Zonen presented documents purporting to show that Jackson aides had filled out paperwork withdrawing the woman’s children from their Los Angeles schools. She testified that the withdrawals were made without her knowledge. When she learned of them after the fact, she said, one of the forms indicated that they would be moving to Phoenix -- a red herring, the woman explained, for anyone who might try to follow them.

Her testimony is at the heart of the prosecutors’ contention that Jackson and his aides sought to isolate the family in the wake of allegations that Jackson was a child molester.

Her son was 13 when he appeared in a TV documentary holding hands with Jackson and laying his head on the pop star’s shoulder. In the same production, Jackson admitted enjoying nonsexual sleepovers with boys.

On Thursday, the woman talked about appearing in a rebuttal video in which she and her family were urged to say glowing things about Jackson. The 2003 video, which has never aired publicly but has been viewed by the jury at least twice, was entirely scripted, she said.

After it was shot late one February night, Jackson aides drove the family to the Los Angeles apartment rented by the woman’s boyfriend. Early the next morning, they met there with three Los Angeles social workers.

A Jackson bodyguard, identified in court only as Asef, also was on hand. “He told me if I put Michael in a bad light, they knew where my parents lived,” the woman testified, adding that the bodyguard tried to sit in on the confidential interview between the family and the social workers. When he was forced to leave, the woman testified, Asef left a small tape recorder in the bedroom where he assumed that individual interviews would be taking place. She said she turned it off as soon as he left.

In court, jurors listened to a 19-minute tape that Asef apparently had made before the woman shut his recorder off. As instructed by Jackson’s aides, she said, she played the social workers a video of Jackson and her son strolling the grounds at Neverland. The woman testified that she and her children told the social workers “only happy things” about Jackson.

But their tribute then and in the rebuttal video didn’t satisfy Jackson’s people, who, she said, insisted that the family would have to leave the United States.

The plan was to move the woman and her children to a town in Brazil, where they would not be recognized, she testified.

Despite a rush by Jackson’s aides to equip the family with passports, the Brazilian trip never occurred. The woman said she thwarted it by claiming that her father was desperately ill.