Spectacle Supplants Law as Focus of Jackson Trial

The public relations experts have been tsk-ing for months now. Put it this way: Martha Stewart’s people didn’t let her dance on an SUV.

The historians say the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial was more compelling. The media restrictions have been Watergate-esque, journalists say.

Legally, well, it’s no O.J.; one lawyer compared it to “those paintings of dogs playing poker.” Still, the experts at the TV show “Celebrity Justice” say the logistics were “even more thought-out than Scott Peterson.”

The jury may still be out in the child-molestation case against Michael Jackson, but the verdicts on “Jacko: The Celebrity Trial” are in.

Ten years after the O.J. Simpson double-murder case was declared the trial of the century, trials of the century are turning out to be nearly as plentiful as musicals on Broadway -- and almost as thoroughly critiqued.

“Domestic diva” Stewart, actor Robert Blake, Laker star Kobe Bryant, the upcoming trial of record producer Phil Spector on a murder charge, actor Russell Crowe’s recent arrest after hurling a phone at a hotel employee -- so much publicity has accrued in so few years to so many well-known defendants that celebrity proceedings have come to resemble a genre unto themselves.

The stakes may be life-or-death, the legal issues may be far-reaching. But “people don’t just talk about the trial anymore; they talk about the impact of the trial, the partisans, the crowd, the ancillary issues, the paraphernalia of fame,” said USC professor Leo Braudy, author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.”

Conventions have evolved: The celebrity mug shot. The celebrity heart-to-heart with the celebrity network reporter (or late-night hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman, for lesser offenses). The revolving-door legal “dream teams,” the sign-toting mobs at the courthouse, the ready-for-prime-time jurors, the legal analysts. The jury consultants and publicists with their celebrity-damage-control voodoo. The good guys. The bad guys.

Trial-watching is an age-old entertainment, particularly with big-name cases, but the focus on the spectacle rather than the case is a function of the media age, historians and legal scholars say. Celebrity trials and their hoopla are national, even global, events that come and go far more quickly than they used to.

“What’s changed is the magnitude,” says Neal Gabler, senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society at USC. “And the change in magnitude is because of the change in technology.”

In the 1920s, attention focused on silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle, charged with murdering an aspiring actress, and the Chicago White Sox, accused of throwing the World Series. The trial after the 1932 kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby was covered by radio and five newsreel companies and drew a mob of 10,000, who waited into the night for the verdict.

“If you look at the history of celebrity trials, they’ve always been the trial of the decade. But what’s really relevant are the stories,” Gabler said. “The fact that they’re trials is almost incidental. They’re stories of sex and violence and mystery and famous and beautiful people, and we love that stuff. That’s why we read novels and watch ‘Law & Order’ and go to the movies. These are narratives.”

By this measure, Gabler said, the Jackson trial has been less compelling than its predecessors, and not just because there are no cameras in the courtroom.

Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy at his Santa Ynez Valley ranch in 2003. He has been charged with 10 felony counts and, if convicted, could face more than 20 years in prison.

“The sex [is] ... icky rather than exciting, and there’s no one with whom to identify,” Gabler said. “There’s no definite good or evil. People think he’s a freak, but the boy isn’t sympathetic either.”

Rather, it’s the sideshow that has captured the spotlight with this trial: the SUV dance, the media, Jackson’s umbrella bearers and Sgt. Pepper regalia, the blue pajama bottoms, Leno’s being required, as a potential witness, to outsource the Jackson jokes in his “Tonight Show” monologue.

Also front and center in this trial has been the cutthroat competition for celebrity headlines.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University School of Law professor, said a study he did of the most famous trials of the 20th century found that the invention of television didn’t increase the number of high-profile trials; it just heightened their coverage and shortened their half-lives.

“It’s just easier now to inject these cases directly into the veins of the body politic,” he said.

Demand, however, has increased exponentially for news of famous people in legal trouble as cable and the Internet have exploded, because court proceedings and celebrities are surefire audience magnets.

Associated Press correspondent Linda Deutsch, who has been covering high-profile trials since the Charles Manson case and who has been camped for nearly four months at the Jackson trial in Santa Maria, Calif., marveled last week at her competition: 2,000-plus credentialed reporters from 34 nations.

“During O.J., the only real players [besides the print media] were Court TV and CNN,” she said. “Now we often have a much larger visible press at these cases: Fox and MSNBC and E! Entertainment. Shows I’ve never heard of. MTV.”

A recent newspaper column and a magazine, along with sources involved in the program, have said that “Celebrity Justice,” a syndicated television show launched to capitalize on the shortage of celebrity news in mainstream outlets, is slated for cancellation this fall. Though the big reason is lack of advertising -- its ratings have suffered from its obscure time slots -- part of the problem is also said to be that other media have begun to co-opt its franchise.

“Celebrity Justice” executive producer Harvey Levin declined to comment on the cancellation rumors, but he did acknowledge the effect of increased competition. “It used to be that there was nothing like us on TV,” he said. “Now if you want them, you can get Jackson updates every quarter-hour.”

Saturation, however, has engendered backlash from both celebrity defendants and judges. Since the Simpson case, for example, most judges won’t allow cameras in the courtroom in high-profile cases. And repeated appeals have been filed by news organizations covering the Jackson case regarding Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville’s decisions to withhold records that typically are open to the public and to close legal proceedings that, by precedent, are matters for open court.

“This case has been a nightmare from a 1st Amendment standpoint,” Deutsch said. “All the search warrants have been sealed, all the pleadings, everything that would normally be open. There was even something called a decorum order; the media can only speak to each other, we can’t interview spectators, we’re not allowed to talk to the Jackson family. It’s as if in this trial, there is a celebrity exception to freedom of the press.”

In other realms, though, the case has dished up plenty of the usual conventions, and these cases “do have things in common,” Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said.

Including Levenson. A former federal prosecutor, she has become a go-to voice for the media on high-profile cases, though initially she was just the only unbiased observer a CBS producer was able to find in a pinch one day during the federal trial of the L.A. police officers accused in the 1991 beating of Rodney King.

Now opining lawyers, including novices, populate the airwaves and trawl the courthouse plaza in Santa Maria like cabbies at an international airport. Last week’s lineup included a former San Francisco prosecutor who’s entertaining the idea of running for district attorney, a former sheriff friend of the prosecution and a lawyer friend of Jackson’s defense team, a Washington prosecutor who flies from her Seattle office to opine in the makeshift courthouse “green room,” and a Connecticut prosecutor who quit when her boss wouldn’t grant her a Jackson trial leave of absence. She recently got a contract with MSNBC.

Nor has the Jackson case skimped on other fixtures of celebrity justice:

* The dream team merry-go-round: One lawyer isn’t enough. Celebrities must have teams of lawyers. Jackson has had a couple. “You have the media lawyers, the motions lawyers, the courtroom lawyers,” Levenson explained. “But then after a while, you have to have the New Dream Team, because celebrities tend not to be easy clients.”

Spector, the record producer charged with killing an actress in his Alhambra mansion, has gone through Robert L. Shapiro (who helped defend Simpson), Marcia Morrissey and Leslie Abramson (the Menendez brothers) and now is being represented by Bruce Cutler, who defended John Gotti, a mob boss.

Blake hired criminal defense lawyer Harland Braun, who quit when the actor insisted on being interviewed by Barbara Walters. Blake then settled on M. Gerald Schwartzbach after hiring and then splitting from Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., who took Jackson’s case after the pop star parted ways with Mark Geragos, who was, at the time, also representing Peterson.

* The wattage: Leno, Macaulay Culkin, George Lopez: The Jackson trial hasn’t lacked for ancillary celebrities. But not all of them offered testimony wholly pleasing to the defense. And generally, says legal scholar Turley, they’re not the greatest idea for a defendant.

“Martha Stewart brought in a parade of celebrities who sat in the courtroom and showed their support,” he said, “and it made her look like some detached prima donna who lived in her own upper world.”

* The fans: Simpson had his demonstrators outside the courthouse. Former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss had the occasional Heidi girls in their “Heidi Ho” hats. Bryant had a guy who came out of the woodwork offering to kill the young woman who accused him of rape.

Jackson has blown them all out of the water. Fans have come from all parts of the globe, some for weeks, some for months. A Los Angeles kindergarten teacher quit her job so she could demonstrate her support for him full time. On the day of his arraignment in January, about 1,500 cheered as he danced on the roof of his SUV.

His fans have heckled reporters whom they view as tools of the prosecution, an act of loyalty matched by few other celebrity supporters. Court TV’s Diane Dimond was besieged to the point that she got a restraining order and hired security.

* The spin: Gabler believes Jackson has intentionally sought to turn the trial into a circus so the jury will see it as he does: a kangaroo court set up by a district attorney with a vendetta.

But Judy Leon, senior vice president of DecisionQuest, a Los Angeles-based litigation research and strategic communications firm, says it’s “a mess” compared with, say, Stewart’s public relations, which was so forward-thinking that she’s making house arrest seem like “a good thing.”

* The deeper meaning: Simpson’s trial spoke to race and sex and class and police corruption. Fleiss’ spoke to selective enforcement in prostitution cases and to baby boomers’ fears about what had become of the children they’d raised. After the Lindbergh trial, kidnapping was made a federal offense carrying the death penalty and cameras were banned from courtrooms for decades.

The Jackson case?

“Pure celebrity.”

That’s from Charles Lindner, a past president of the Los Angeles Criminal Bar Assn. who co-wrote the closing arguments for the defense in the Simpson trial and who compared the trial to those paintings of dogs playing poker.

“As much as I like Michael’s music,” he said, “this trial doesn’t captivate me.”