Wacko Jacko’s Mooch Accusers

Private jets, white limousines, spa treatments, posh resorts, cosmetic surgery -- we heard quite a lot in Michael Jackson’s child-molestation trial last week about the lifestyles of the allegedly abused and victimized. As the mother and siblings of Jackson’s Accuser have explained in their video interviews and courtroom testimony, they went from living cramped in a one-bedroom apartment in East L.A. to living large on the proceeds of celebrity charity and compassion.

“We were broken and Michael fixed us,” Accuser Mom said in a video made by Jackson’s team and shown to jurors.

She could also say that they were broke and Jackson funded, clothed, fed and housed them. The long list of celebrities (including Jay Leno, Mike Tyson and Adam Sandler) the Accuser Family allegedly solicited for funds suggests that being broken, as well as broke, was their full-time source of support.

There’s a controversial psychological disorder called Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, in which a parent, almost always a mother, seeks repeated medical attention and surgical treatment for a child with mysterious ailments that turn out to be fabricated or even inflicted by the mother. Psychologists who have studied Munchausen’s observe that financial gain is rarely the motive; instead, the mother is seeking a sense of importance and distinction.

In what I call Moochausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, however, the motives are purely economic -- a parental figure makes money from a child’s genuine illness or star potential.

In literature, Fagin and his gang of child pickpockets are thrilled to come upon the orphaned Oliver Twist and to profit from his possible inheritance.

“When the boy’s worth hundreds of pounds to me,” Fagin tells a compatriot about finding Oliver, “am I to lose what chance threw me

In the wacko world of Moochausen’s, a child’s disease, a charge of shoplifting or proximity to a rich celebrity with a reputation as a weirdo and a history of settling accusations with huge cash payments can be a lucky break, an opportunity for the deprived to cash in. And these days there are enough examples of successful parents exploiting and overworking children with acting, athletic or musical ability to make those who do not cash in seem almost un-American.

Michael Jackson himself has said that he was literally beaten and figuratively robbed of his childhood by his father, who mooched off his talented children.

Maybe we shouldn’t blame Accuser Parents for trying to grab what chance throws them, even if it is cancer. Perhaps from their point of view, they are needy rather than greedy, like Oliver Twist when he plaintively asks, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

When Moochausen’s becomes a way of life, it has to be sustained, so after disease and remission come charges of sexual abuse, lawsuits and claims of damage. But in the first week of this trial, it is far from clear exactly who has been damaged and how.