Opening Remarks Paint Jackson as Predator, Prey

The dueling visions of Michael Jackson couldn’t have been more different.

In his opening statement at the pop icon’s child-molestation trial Monday, Santa Barbara County Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon described Jackson as a man who surfed Internet porn sites with a 13-year-old cancer patient, treated him to wine and vodka, and then seduced him. Later, Sneddon said, Jackson or his employees made death threats against the boy and his family, held them at the singer’s ranch against their will, locked them out of their apartment and schemed to fly them to Brazil.

“Why would any adult give alcohol to a cancer survivor with just one kidney?” Sneddon asked. “The answer is rather apparent.”

But Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., Jackson’s lead attorney, described the entertainer as more prey than predator. In his opening statement, he denied that any sexual contact had occurred. Mesereau painted Jackson as generous to a fault, while casting the boy and his mother as con artists cruising Hollywood for celebrities to bilk, even keeping a ratty East Los Angeles studio apartment just to display their professed poverty.

“These charges are fictitious, bogus, and they never happened,” Mesereau told the jury.

If convicted on 10 felony counts, Jackson could face 20 years in prison.

In 2000, Jay Leno fielded a phone call from the boy in which the comedian could hear the boy’s mother clearly in the background, Mesereau said. Leno felt something was so fishy that he later told Santa Barbara police about the call. Boy and mother were “looking for a mark,” the attorney said.

At the beginning of Monday’s session, Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville read the sealed indictment against Jackson. It lists 28 “overt acts” in February and March 2003 that, according to prosecutors, constitute a conspiracy to silence Jackson’s alleged victim and his family.

Addressing the jury for two hours and 42 minutes, Sneddon completed his opening statement. Mesereau spoke for 90 minutes and will probably finish this morning, before the prosecution calls its first witness, expected to be British TV journalist Martin Bashir.

Jackson peered at the attorneys and the jurors through wire-rim glasses. Unlike previous sessions he has attended, only two relatives, his brother Jermaine and his mother, Katherine, were on hand. Two dozen fans chanted outside when Jackson arrived and left.

Sneddon cast Jackson as a man who wished to be an adolescent, who entertained the boy and his younger brother at his Neverland ranch with such antics as a “cussing contest” and simulating sex with a mannequin.

But he also portrayed Jackson as a predator who surfed Internet porn sites with the boys and tried to “teach” them to masturbate.

One night at Neverland, Jackson paraded before the boys “absolutely stark naked and with an erection” as they were watching TV, Sneddon said.

“It’s natural,” the singer explained, according to Sneddon. “It’s OK. Why don’t you boys do the same thing?”

Disgusted, the boys left the room, Sneddon said.

Eventually, Jackson had sexual contact with the older boy a number of times, Sneddon said. The two didn’t know it, but the boy’s younger brother witnessed the acts twice, Sneddon told the jury, adding that the younger brother is expected to testify.

The brother was walking up the stairway to the second floor of Jackson’s two-story bedroom suite when “he was frozen by what he saw,” Sneddon said.

The district attorney, a father of nine, graphically described a scene of Jackson allegedly masturbating as he kept his hand inside the underwear of the teenager, who was curled up and apparently sleeping or passed out. Wine and vodka bottles as well as empty glasses were on a night table, Sneddon said.

The brother told no one what he saw until months later, when a family lawyer steered the two boys to a psychologist, the prosecutor said. It was the psychologist who alerted authorities to the possible molestation.

Jackson met the young cancer patient in 2000, as the boy was in remission from an illness believed by his doctors to be terminal. A veteran of “comedy camp” at the Laugh Factory club in Hollywood, the boy had asked as a last wish to meet a number of stars, including Jackson.

After several telephone conversations between the boy in his hospital bed and Jackson at Neverland, the big day arrived. Days after leaving the hospital where his spleen, a number of lymph nodes, a kidney and a 16-pound abdominal tumor were removed, the boy, his brother and his father were whisked by limousine to Jackson’s ranch.

On that first visit, Sneddon said, Jackson and his aide Frank Tyson treated the boys to a half-hour exploration of Internet porn sites on a computer in the star’s bedroom.

Two of Jackson’s children, Prince Michael, then 5 years old, and Paris, then 2, were sleeping on his bed at the time, the prosecutor said. According to Sneddon, Jackson leaned over and told his sleeping son that he was missing the show, using a vulgar word for female genitalia.

After the brothers had numerous overnight visits to Neverland, Sneddon said, Jackson stopped calling. Still extremely ill, the young cancer patient didn’t see the star much in 2001. But he was happy to return to the Disneyland-like getaway in September 2002 to be interviewed by Bashir, the British broadcaster.

It was Bashir’s subsequent documentary, “Living With Michael Jackson,” that triggered a worldwide uproar when the star admitted a fondness for sleepovers with boys. In the piece, Jackson is seen holding hands with the boy, who also rested his head on the star’s shoulder.

Although nothing sexual had yet occurred between the two, Sneddon said, Jackson and his advisors realized in the wake of the program that it was crucial that the boy’s family publicly lavish praise on Jackson.

That marked the start of an alleged conspiracy to secure the family’s help, Sneddon said. Jackson’s aides shuttled the family to Miami to tape a news conference -- eventually aborted -- brought them back to Neverland and essentially held them captive. While the boy and his brother were sleeping in Jackson’s bedroom and getting drunk with him in his wine cellar, Sneddon said, the mother and an older sister were kept in their Neverland cottages and could leave only when heavily guarded.

Fearful of retaliation if they didn’t cooperate, the mother had her children say glowing things about Jackson on a so-called rebuttal video, which ultimately was broadcast on the Fox network. She also gave Jackson high grades as a caring, nonthreatening friend when Los Angeles social workers came calling. But even with those concessions, Jackson’s aides insisted on keeping the boys at Neverland, Sneddon said.

They closed the family apartment and withdrew the children from school, he said. To keep the older brother’s alcohol consumption secret, a Jackson employee dumped a urine sample the boy needed for a kidney checkup.

It was also at that time -- February 2003 -- that Jackson had his first alleged sexual encounter with the boy.

Sneddon portrayed the mother as protective of her children but also as someone who had “made some mistakes,” such as lying in a lawsuit deposition.

But Mesereau said the woman was adept at concocting sob stories about her poverty and her son’s illness. He said she got Los Angeles police to donate to her family and hit up a comedian for $20,000.

Others, such as Leno, were put off by the woman, he said: “They smelled the ruse.” But, he said, Jackson, who is known for contributing to children’s charities and opening up Neverland to groups of underprivileged children, did not.

Jackson sincerely wanted to help the boy, Mesereau said. He even tried teaching him a visualization technique he had read about for shrinking tumors.

Jackson -- and other prospective donors to the boy’s family -- didn’t know about the $152,000 settlement the mother had won in a lawsuit against the J.C. Penney Co. chain, Mesereau said. Claiming she had been “falsely imprisoned” by security guards after an accusation of shoplifting, she amended her complaint a year later to include allegations that guards in the parking lot had “squeezed her nipples 10 to 20 times, molested her in the vaginal area and called her racial slurs,” Mesereau said.

She later admitted lying in that case, he said.

The attorney said the case against Jackson is “her third claim of false imprisonment and her fourth of sexual assault.”

Her son’s alleged molestation “never, ever happened,” Mesereau insisted.

The star knew that the Santa Barbara County district attorney’s office had opened an investigation, that Los Angeles child welfare officials were concerned, and that interest by media worldwide was increasing with his televised admission about sleepovers with boys.

Mesereau said the alleged incidents were fabricated by the mother after she realized that her family’s participation in the Bashir documentary and the rebuttal video would not yield the money she had anticipated.

“Did they go to the police?” Mesereau asked. “No! They went to a lawyer and then to another lawyer.”

Times staff writer Fred Alvarez contributed to this report.