Jackson’s Ex-Wife to Take Stand

In a day otherwise filled with setbacks for prosecutors, a judge ruled Monday that Michael Jackson’s ex-wife can testify against the singer in his child-molestation trial.

Deborah Rowe is expected to testify this week that Jackson and his aides pressured her into making favorable statements about the pop star in a video responding to a British documentary that questioned his relationships with boys.

Rowe was told that if she followed a script and said positive things about Jackson during the 2003 taping, she would be allowed to have visitation rights with the couple’s two children, Prince Michael, now 8, and Paris, now 7, said Santa Barbara County Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Ronald Zonen. Jackson also has another son, Prince Michael II.

Rowe’s testimony would help corroborate testimony from the mother of Jackson’s teenage accuser, Zonen said. The mother testified that she was bullied into following a script for the rebuttal video.

Jackson lawyer Robert Sanger argued unsuccessfully that Rowe’s testimony was a “reach” by the prosecution and irrelevant to the trial. He said that Rowe did not follow a script in praising Jackson as a father.

Rowe gave up her parental rights following the couple’s 1999 divorce, but had them restored after Jackson’s 2003 arrest, Sanger said. The couple is still litigating her visitation rights with the children, Sanger said.

Although they won the debate about Rowe’s testimony, Jackson’s prosecutors lost two potential witnesses Monday. Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon disclosed that he has decided not to call former Jackson security guard Chris Carter to testify. Carter, who was expected to tell jurors he saw Jackson sharing wine with his teenage accuser, is facing charges in a series of armed robberies in Las Vegas. In addition to molestation and conspiracy, Jackson is charged with giving liquor to a minor. If convicted on all counts, the 46-year-old singer could face more than 20 years in prison.

Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville also rejected the prosecution’s request to call a father to testify about Jackson’s unusual behavior in the late 1990s. The man contends that he lost track of his son during a visit to Jackson’s home and eventually found him with the pop star in his bedroom, Zonen said.

Sanger noted that the boy said Jackson did not touch him, and Melville declined to permit the testimony.

Also Monday, former Jackson security guard Kassim Abdool testified that he saw Jackson and a young boy, wearing only towels, leave a bathroom at the singer’s Neverland ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley in 1993. Abdool said he later inspected the bathroom and found two pairs of swimming trunks near the shower.

The testimony seemed to corroborate statements from a different security guard who said he saw Jackson and the boy engaging in a sex act in the shower. But on cross-examination, defense attorney Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. mentioned that Abdool had lost a lawsuit to Jackson and had been ordered, along with four other employees, to pay the pop star more than $1.4 million. The judgment is still outstanding.

Further, Abdool conceded that he had signed a declaration in 1994 saying that he had never observed Jackson or any children without clothing at the ranch. He also said he never saw Jackson behave inappropriately with children.

At the end of the day, the court disclosed that one of Jackson’s four lawyers had left his defense team. Santa Fe Springs attorney Brian Oxman was off the team as of Thursday, according to a court filing made public Monday.

The court filing did not indicate why Oxman left the case. Oxman sat in the front row of the court for most of Monday’s testimony and engaged in an animated conversation with Mesereau in the parking lot after testimony recessed.

During an August pretrial hearing, Melville had fined Oxman $1,000 for violating an order to stop questioning a psychiatrist on the stand about his relationship with an investigator for the defense.