Jackson Jurors Must Weigh Testimony of Tabloid Tattlers

Will jurors in the Michael Jackson trial be turned off by the Neverland maid whose paid interview with a tabloid ran under the pulse-pounding headline “Kinky Sex Secrets of Michael and Lisa Marie’s Bedroom?”

Will they smirk at the Neverland chef who admitted seeking $500,000 for his story about alleged sex abuse instead of the paltry $100,000 that a “media broker” thought he could get?

Inquiring minds want to know, especially now, as the Jackson child-molestation testimony, now in its eighth week, showcases a parade of witnesses who were either tabloid tattlers or tabloid wannabes.

There was a time when lawyers in big trials thought twice about presenting witnesses whose paid-for stories had run on the TV tell-all shows or in the supermarket tabloids, beside the latest tales of alien invasions and amazing cancer cures.

Attorneys still think twice -- but that doesn’t keep them from putting on witnesses who have sold their stories, despite predictable outrage from opposing counsel, who insist that their accounts were concocted for a quick buck.

In the recent murder trial of actor Robert Blake, jurors didn’t blink when four witnesses who had sold their stories testified. Two of them helped Blake’s defense team win his acquittal.

“None of the money that was paid to them came up,” said juror Cecilia Maldonado.

In the Jackson trial in Santa Barbara County, no fewer than three witnesses sold their tales of the goings-on at Jackson’s Neverland ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, and at least four others peddled their stories unsuccessfully.

Attorneys such as Jim Hammer, a former San Francisco prosecutor who is covering the trial as a news analyst, said the string of witnesses who have sold their stories to tabloids could hurt the prosecution.

“All this stuff has given a theme to the defense, and it’s a theme that works to a degree,” he said. “Behind all these stories lies money. Ordinary people understand money.”

However, some legal observers think that jurors are no longer as bothered as they once were by such transactions.

“Life experiences have become commodified,” said Jonathan Kirsch, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in publishing and media issues. “Beyond the bounds of the courtroom, the culture has begun to feel that people are entitled to payment.”

Jurors know that celebrities are paid when their images are used in ads, Kirsch said, that ordinary people cash in when their stories are transformed into TV shows or movies. And in court, they are bluntly reminded that expert witnesses are paid for their testimony, Kirsch said.

It wasn’t always so. In 1994, prosecutors in the O. J. Simpson case ditched a potentially valuable witness as soon as they learned that she had accepted $5,000 from the TV tabloid show “Hard Copy.”

As a result, jurors never heard Jill Shively tell of spotting Simpson erratically driving a white Ford Bronco with its lights out near his ex-wife’s condo around the time she and Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death.

At the time, concern over tabloid payments influencing witnesses was so intense that the Legislature made it illegal for witnesses and jurors to sell their stories until a case was over. But Quentin Kopp, a former state senator who was one of the bill’s chief sponsors, said this week that he knew of no prosecutions in the 10 years since the law took effect. Other attorneys contend it is unconstitutional.

In the Jackson case, prosecutors are betting that jurors will be understanding when considering the testimony of witnesses who dealt with the tabloids. Jackson’s lawyers hope the jurors see the witnesses as conniving liars in league with media bottom-feeders, and reject their accounts.

In halting English, one of Jackson’s former maids -- a key prosecution witness --acknowledged receiving $20,000 from “Hard Copy” for comments that ended up in “The Bedroom Maid’s Painful Secret.”

On the stand, she said she was upset that “Hard Copy” reporter Diane Dimond focused on Jackson’s fondness for young boys. Those boys allegedly included her son, who also testified that Jackson, now 46, had fondled him on a number of occasions.

“I find Michael and my son so close,” she told Dimond. “Michael lying on the sleeping bag and my son getting closer to him. And I didn’t like that.”

“I thought it would be about me working at Neverland,” the former maid testified this month about the “Hard Copy” piece. For her part, Dimond said she was candid with the woman about the focus of the interview.

The woman, whose name is being withheld by The Times to shield her son’s identity, said she was troubled by Jackson’s gifts to both her and the boy.

“I took the money and I feel guilty,” she said. “I feel guilty all this time. And I knew that if I bring my son every time, I would get money.”

In a recent interview, Dimond, who is covering the Jackson trial for Court TV and NBC, said it was a “corporate decision” by producers of the now-defunct “Hard Copy” to pay the maid.

“Just because somebody gets money doesn’t mean they’re lying,” said Dimond, who added that her current employers do not pay for information.

Two other former Neverland employees testified that they too had sold their stories.

Ex-security guard Ralph Chacon and former maid Adrian McManus were part of the so-called Neverland Five, a group of ex-employees at the ranch who drew a $32,000 fee for an interview with the Splash tabloid news service. Splash then sold their story about the “kinky sex secrets” of Jackson’s short-lived marriage to Lisa Marie Presley to the Star tabloid.

On the witness stand, Chacon and McManus said they had been seeking money to pay a Santa Barbara lawyer for pressing the group’s wrongful-termination suit against Jackson. Jackson prevailed in the litigation, and a judge ordered the former employees to pay the pop star more than $1.4 million for legal fees.

McManus said she didn’t know any kinky sex secrets.

“A lot of times those tabloids make it look like I said stuff when I didn’t say it,” she testified.

What McManus did say in court was that she had seen Jackson cavorting in a hot tub and lounging in bed with young boys. Chacon said he had seen Jackson performing a sex act on a boy after the two stepped out of a shower.

Another witness, former Neverland chef Philip LeMarque, said he and his wife, Stella, took the high road when it came to tabloid fame.

“We never took a penny from anybody because it was against our principles,” he testified.

But he acknowledged that he had shopped his story around. Under cross-examination, he admitted telling a “media broker,” a former porn star named Paul Barresi, to try and get more than the $100,000 fee that Barresi thought he could draw.

However, LeMarque denied trying to make his story more lurid to gain big money. Jackson’s defense attorney, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., insisted that LeMarque first said he had seen Jackson groping the crotch of child actor Macaulay Culkin, later changing his story to say he had seen Jackson reaching into the boy’s shorts.

Culkin has said that Jackson never touched him inappropriately.

Whether jurors will be swayed by the tabloid tattlers remains to be seen.

Roy Black, a high-profile defense attorney based in Miami, is skeptical.

“Jurors are very leery of people with ulterior motives,” he said. “Anyone who says, ‘Well, they just think that everyone’s cashing in anyway,’ -- well, I don’t buy that for a minute.”

A client of Black’s, William Kennedy Smith, was acquitted on rape charges after an important prosecution witness sold her story “two or three times,” Black said, even showing up in court with a tabloid-show producer and interviewer.

“It certainly didn’t help her credibility,” he said.

Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this report.