Accuser says he was teased as kid 'raped' by Jackson

SANTA MARIA - Michael Jackson's teen accuser said he had denied to a teacher being molested by the pop star because he was being teased at school as "the kid that got raped by Michael Jackson."

The 15-year-old boy, who told jurors last week that Jackson, 46, masturbated him at least twice at the singer's Neverland ranch in early 2003, also said he had lost respect for the man he once thought of as a father figure.

"I don't really like him anymore. I don't really think he's deserving of the respect I was giving him," he said as his testimony ended.

In a potentially damaging admission under a fierce cross-examination by Jackson's lawyers yesterday, the boy acknowledged that he told a concerned teacher that nothing bad had happened to him during his time at Neverland.

The conversation took place after the February 2003 broadcast of a controversial television documentary in which the boy was seen holding hands with Jackson, and the star defended his practice of sharing his bed with young boys.

Santa Barbara County District Attorney Tom Sneddon on Tuesday asked the boy, who was 13 at the time and a recovering cancer patient, why he told the teacher "no."

"All the kids would laugh at me, try to push me around, say that's the kid that got raped by Michael Jackson," he said. "All of the kids were already making fun of me at school. I didn't want them to think it really happened."

Before stepping down from the witness stand, the boy told Sneddon that some of his underwear, along with some shirts and pants, were missing from a suitcase that was returned to him after he left Neverland for the last time in 2003.

Jackson is charged with committing lewd acts on his young accuser, plying the boy with alcohol in order to abuse him and conspiring to commit extortion, false imprisonment and child abduction.

The entertainer, who faces more than two decades in prison if he is convicted, has pleaded innocent.

The boy mostly stuck to his story during more than two days of testimony, despite a grilling from Jackson's lawyer Tom Mesereau who accused him of drinking, stealing and lying to police about the abuse.

Mesereau chipped away at the accuser's credibility by suggesting specific inconsistencies in his version of events and attacking his character in general.

The boy said that as a 13-year-old, he was unclear on the exact dates of the abuse he alleges and "even to this day I don't remember exactly when this happened."

He also denied suggestions that he invented the molestation because he felt rejected by Jackson as a father figure and that he had broken into Jackson's room and refrigerator at Neverland to steal alcohol.

- REUTERS