Neverland deposition adds to Michael Jackson's woes

11.25am - By ANDREW GUMBEL

There is no let-up for Michael Jackson. After a ratings-busting 27 million Americans on Thursday watched him freely admit to inviting young boys to sleep in his bed, the child abuse investigation that ended in a multimillion-dollar out-of-court settlement 10 years ago is roaring back to life.

Martin Bashir's documentary, shown in Britain by ITV last Monday, drew one of the biggest audiences all season for ABC, which paid a reported NZ$9.1m for the rights. One reviewer described it as like watching a speeding train derail in slow motion - both horrifying and fascinating at the same time.

Now the authorities in Santa Barbara County, where Jackson lives in hermetic splendour on his Neverland Ranch, are coming under increasing pressure to reopen their long-dormant files on him and interview the four minors he has most frequent contact with - his own three children and a 12-year-old cancer sufferer identified in the documentary as Gavin.

To make matters worse, a deposition given by the 13-year-old boy at the centre of the 1993 child abuse allegations has just been made public, and it is not pleasant reading. The boy says Jackson had repeated sexual contact with him over a three-month period and talked about doing similar things to other boys the same age.

"The first step was simply Michael Jackson hugging me," the deposition reads. "The next step was for him to give me a brief kiss on the cheek. He then started kissing me on the lips, first briefly and then for a longer period of time. He would kiss me while we were in bed together."

He says: "Michael Jackson told me that I should not tell anyone what had happened. He said this was a secret."

The suit brought on behalf of Jordan Chandler was settled for an undisclosed sum believed to be somewhere between $23.6m and $32.7m. Prosecutors in Santa Barbara chose to leave their criminal complaint against the singer "open but inactive", and little has been heard in the affair since. Jackson has consistently refused all comment, citing the terms of the court settlement. The latest admissions about bed-sharing, however, have raised red flags with many of the same people who hurled accusations at Jackson last time around.

Gloria Allred, a celebrity feminist lawyer from Los Angeles, wrote to the authorities in Santa Barbara County last week and said: "I am hopeful that child welfare services will initiate a much-needed investigation into Mr Jackson's activities with children at Neverland."

Jackson says in the television programme that there is nothing sexual about his sharing his bed with children, even ones that are not his own. "It's not sexual, we're going to sleep. I tuck them in," he tells Martin Bashir. "It's very charming, it's very sweet."

The county child welfare services have some discretion in deciding whether to take him at face value or to investigate for themselves. The district attorney's office, however, felt obliged to issue a statement saying it had no grounds to proceed based on "the act of an adult sleeping with a child without touching". Certainly, they proved reluctant to intervene last November after the notorious baby-dangling episode in which Jackson brandished his infant son Prince Michael II (also known as "Blanket") from a fourth-floor balcony at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin.

In the programme, Jackson suggests there was nothing wrong with what he did, and that his son enjoyed it: "He was responding. He was singing."

Since the broadcast, Jackson has said that he was "devastated" by the portrayal, calling Bashir a "salacious ratings chaser" who manipulated the footage to give "a wholly distorted picture of his behaviour and conduct as a father".

But US viewers thought otherwise. As Roger Friedman of Fox News said afterwards: "Michael Jackson is over. His career is over. And if he's not careful, he will wind up logging some jail time before his life is over."

- INDEPENDENT

* The documentary will screen in New Zealand tonight at 7pm on TV One.