Jackson Will Take Stand, Jurors Told

Michael Jackson will take the stand himself to deny accusations that he molested a 13-year-old boy and held his alleged victim’s family hostage, his attorney indicated to jurors Tuesday.

As the trial entered its second day of opening remarks, the jurors also viewed the 2003 British TV documentary that helped trigger the current charges against the pop star. In the documentary, Jackson admitted to having nonsexual sleepovers with numerous boys.

Wrapping up his opening statement, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., Jackson’s lead attorney, suggested to jurors at least twice that the 46-year-old singer would testify in his own defense -- a move that carries considerable risk, according to legal experts.

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

Accused of using such erotic magazines as Barely Legal to prepare the boy for sex, Jackson “will freely admit he does read girlie magazines from time to time,” Mesereau said. “But he absolutely denies showing them to children.”

At another point, the attorney described what he said were Jackson’s growing suspicions about his accuser’s mother, who, defense attorneys contend, tried to shake the singer down with phony allegations.

“Michael Jackson will tell you about a time ... that he got a very bad feeling” about the family he had tried to help at his Neverland ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, Mesereau said. The family contends Jackson imprisoned them on the ranch to get their help in a desperate public relations effort.

After watching a movie in the private theater on Jackson’s ranch, the woman had her three children cluster around Jackson and hold hands. “All of a sudden, she said, ‘Let’s all kneel down and pray with our “Daddy Michael,” ’ “ according to Mesereau.

The display discomfited Jackson, his lawyer said. “He thought, ‘Something is wrong. I’ve got to get away.’ He loved helping this kid, but he had to get away.”

If Jackson takes the witness stand, he would face tough questioning from prosecutors. The district attorney’s office, which is eager to present evidence of past, unproven child-molestation accusations against the pop star, would attack him on a number of fronts.

“It’s a classic ‘he said, she said’ case,” said USC law professor Jean Rosenbluth, a former prosecutor. “In a situation like that, the jury is desperately going to want to hear what happened from both the accuser and the defendant.”

“Jackson has given off an aura from Day One that he had a story to tell and he was going to tell it,” said Rosenbluth, adding that if other accusers come forward, the defense could cast them as copycats.

On Tuesday, Mesereau continued hammering away at the credibility of the accuser -- now 15 -- and his family.

At the time of the alleged crimes in 2003, the recovering cancer patient and his younger brother ran wild at Neverland, Mesereau said. The attorney said the boys broke into Jackson’s wine cellar, raided his stash of porn magazines, memorized the electronic codes that started Jackson’s carnival rides and rose to the top of the Ferris wheel and “threw objects at elephants and people.”

Prosecutors contend Jackson and his associates hatched a conspiracy to keep the family captive to secure their cooperation in a video countering the British documentary. In court on Tuesday, Mesereau said the mother could easily have shaken her alleged captors, citing her beauty salon appointments, social contacts with police officers and a chance run-in with a Los Angeles social worker at a restaurant.

Through all that, she never alerted anyone to her family’s alleged plight because she was angling to make money from the rebuttal video, Mesereau argued.

“When she realized she couldn’t make millions one way, she found another way -- and here we are,” he said.

The mother has not filed any legal claim for damages against Jackson, as did the parents of a 13-year-old Los Angeles boy in 1993 in another molestation case. But she told Santa Barbara sheriff’s investigators that “my kids have till age 18 to file civil suits” against him, Mesereau said.

Seated at the defense table, Jackson was raptly following events in the courtroom, occasionally holding a tissue to his eyes during the 90-minute showing of the documentary “Living with Michael Jackson.”

During the showing, some of the jurors leaned forward in their seats, focused on the big screen at the front of the darkened courtroom. They watched as journalist Martin Bashir accompanied Jackson on a five-minute, six-figure spending spree at a Las Vegas antique shop and on a go-cart jaunt at Neverland’s miniature NASCAR-style racetrack.

They also saw the accuser in the current case holding hands with Jackson and resting his head on the entertainer’s shoulder. Explaining Jackson’s rapport with children, the boy said: “He’s really a child at heart.”

Later in the video, Bashir challenged Jackson on the appearance of sharing his bed with young boys, even if it involved “cookies and milk,” as Jackson insisted, instead of sex.

Jackson, however, didn’t back down.

“It’s very right,” he told Bashir. “It’s very loving. That’s what the world needs now.”

As the prosecution’s first witness, Bashir testified, sometimes in a nearly inaudible voice, on Tuesday afternoon. Citing the 1st Amendment and California’s shield law, which protects journalists who refuse to testify about their work, Bashir refused to answer at least two dozen questions from Mesereau during cross-examination.

Nevertheless, by asking them, Mesereau underscored claims he had made to the jury in his opening statement. The attorney wants jurors to see Bashir as an opportunist who was interested in making millions of dollars off the documentary on Jackson, regardless, he said, of the falsehoods it spread.

In his questioning, he argued that Bashir shamelessly flattered Jackson to involve him in the project. Bashir, Mesereau said, also promised he would promote Jackson’s idea for an international children’s day and introduce the singer to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan for a project on AIDS among children in Africa.

With Bashir’s refusal to answer, Mesereau asked Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville to hold the journalist in contempt of court and exclude Bashir’s documentary from evidence. Melville ruled the video would remain in evidence. He allowed Bashir’s attorney, Theodore Boutrous, to submit a brief on the issue before ruling on the contempt issue.

At the end of the day, public relations woman Ann Kite began testifying about an effort she undertook to repair Jackson’s image after the Bashir documentary. Her testimony will continue Wednesday.

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Times staff writer Eric Slater contributed to this report.