Mesereau, Accuser’s Mom Spar

In a string of prickly confrontations, Michael Jackson’s lead attorney and the mother of his young accuser sparred for hours Friday over claims that she repeatedly lied about domestic abuse, a fracas with security guards at a JCPenney and a leg wax.

In question after question, defense attorney Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. pounded away at a theme he has been developing for more than a year: The woman cannot be trusted to tell the simplest truth.

The issue is pivotal to defense attempts to exonerate Jackson of molestation charges. Mesereau contends the woman is a deceptive shakedown artist who has her eye on a huge settlement from the singer in the future.

If the jury believes Mesereau, it will seriously damage the prosecution’s case, legal experts have said.

Prosecutors have cast the accuser’s mother as an unsophisticated woman who, blinded by Jackson’s celebrity, happily yielded to his many entreaties for access to her son. The Times is withholding her name to shield her son’s identity.

Mesereau and the 37-year-old woman sniped at each other for most of the day.

At one point, the woman said her performance in a video tribute to Jackson displeased the singer’s associates.

“I’m a poor actress,” she told the jury.

“I think you’re a good one,” Mesereau shot back, earning a rebuke from Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville.

The judge also admonished the woman, telling her that no matter what she thought of her interrogator, she had to quit making exasperated remarks such as: “I have a lot of thoughts in my heart about you.”

She also glared at Jackson, saying she had been too scared to call authorities and challenge “this Goliath.”

Jackson, 46, is charged with child molestation and conspiring to hold the family captive. He faces at least 20 years in prison if convicted on all charges. The mother returns to the stand Monday.

While she never claimed to have seen the alleged 2003 molestation of her son, a cancer survivor who was 13 at the time, the woman elaborated on Jackson’s alleged imprisonment scheme.

Mesereau attacked her claim, noting the mother had left Neverland ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley three times during her purported captivity.

“You didn’t escape from Neverland at all, did you?” Mesereau demanded.

“Oh yes, I did!” she said.

Hours before the first of her three purported escapes, Mesereau said, she was taken to nearby Los Olivos by a Jackson bodyguard and treated to a body waxing at a local salon.

“He is inaccurate!” the woman told jurors. “It was a leg wax.”

She said that Jackson’s video crew was chronicling the event as evidence of his generosity to the mother of an underprivileged cancer patient.

The tab at the salon for the leg waxing and a facial was $140 -- money the woman said Jackson owed her because his assistants had lost some of her luggage.

The purpose of the lockup, prosecutors say, was to secure the family’s appearance in a video countering a damaging British documentary in which Jackson admitted to sharing his bed, nonsexually, with boys.

For the fourth time in the trial, jurors viewed the rebuttal video, in which the woman lauded Jackson as “the ideal family man” and “an answered prayer for my children and me.” On the tape, she said their weeks as guests at Neverland helped to heal her son.

On the witness stand on Friday, she expressed a dramatically different view.

“Now I know different,” she said, turning to face the jurors.

“Neverland was all about booze, pornography and sex with boys,” she said, earning another admonishment from the judge.

Her videotaped comments and those of her children, she said were, “scripted, down to the word” by Jackson aides Dieter Weisner and Ronald Konitzer.

She said that veering from the script even a little would invite retaliation from Jackson’s associates and could even end in the murder of her elderly parents.

Weisner and Konitzer, whom she repeatedly referred to as “the Germans,” rehearsed her lines with her in a Neverland guest cottage about 10 times a day, she said. The woman’s two sons and daughter, who already testified about their involvement in the video tribute, did not mention the rehearsals.

She testified that she was “sad and confused” when she expressed high praise for Jackson on the video, but deflected Mesereau’s questions about whether she had been lying.

“It was acting,” she said repeatedly. “You’re not going to call Halle Berry and say, ‘Are you Catwoman?’ She’s not lying -- she’s acting. And that’s it!”

Mesereau also turned the jury’s attention to a $152,000 settlement the family obtained from J.C. Penney Co., trying to demonstrate the suit was an example of the mother’s penchant for scams.

She and her family filed the suit after alleging that store security guards who had accused them of shoplifting had beaten them.

In a deposition, the woman alleged that guards knocked her down in the parking lot of a Los Angeles shopping center and did bellyflops on her body. Her breasts fell out of her bra, she said, and a guard squeezed one of her nipples 10 to 25 times.

“He wanted to humiliate me, just like he’s trying to do at this moment,” she told jurors, referring to Mesereau.

In her deposition, she said her injuries were not the result of her husband beating her. However, in her divorce filing and several criminal actions, she alleged that her husband had abused the family almost daily for 17 years.

“You lied under oath to increase the money you could get!” Mesereau accused.

She admitted lying about her husband’s abuse, but denied it was to boost her payout.

In response to questions from both Mesereau and prosecutor Ron Zonen, she forcefully asserted that she had no plans to sue Jackson, a contention the defense disputes.

She also said there were no plans for her son, now 15, to sue the pop star. Under the law, he can file a claim any time before he turns 20.

However, the woman acknowledged conferring a number of times over the last few months with Los Angeles attorney Larry Feldman, who negotiated a reported $20-million settlement from Jackson for another alleged molestation victim. She said their discussions were about subpoenas she had received, not about plans to sue.

“I want justice here,” she told the jury.