Boy's family in Jackson abuse case 'are liars', says defence

LOS ANGELES - The defence in the Michael Jackson child molestation case responded yesterday to the prosecution's vivid depiction of sexual weirdness and celebrity dysfunction at the singer's Neverland ranch by ripping into the credibility of the alleged victim's family, saying they had a track record of lying and cheating for their own material gain.

In contrast to the rambling, sometimes confusing presentation of the Santa Barbara district attorney, Tom Sneddon, Mr Jackson's lead lawyer, Tom Mesereau, held the jury's attention as he depicted the alleged victim's mother, in particular, as a celebrity bounty hunter and serial litigator who only turned against the pop singer, in his view, when she realised the financial tap was about to be turned off.

Mr Mesereau, who began his opening statement on Monday afternoon before continuing yesterday, depicted his client, not as a sexual predator with an unhealthy interest in pubescent boys, but rather as a victim of his own kindness and generosity.

When the cancer-stricken boy at the centre of the case first approached Mr Jackson in 2000, his mother also tried to talk other celebrities into giving him money to pay his medical bills and make his precarious hold on life as comfortable as possible.

Mr Mesereau said the approaches amounted to a "shakedown" which the likes of Mike Tyson, the boxer, Adam Sandler, the comedian, and Jay Leno, the television talk-show host, ultimately chose to resist.

Mr Jackson, by contrast, opened his heart to the suffering boy. In so doing he became the "mark" for a fraudulent scheme.

"We will prove," Mr Mesereau promised, "that the best-known celebrity, the most vulnerable celebrity, became their mark: Michael Joe Jackson."

As for the multiple allegations of criminal misconduct at Neverland - plying the cancer victim with alcohol, exposing him to pornography, threatening him, confining him to the ranch against his will and finally molesting him sexually - Mr Mesereau said they simply "never happened".

He said that in the period most closely studied by the prosecution, from February to March 2003, the alleged victim's mother spent US$3,000 on Mr Jackson's credit card, suggesting she was very far from being his captive.

Mr Mesereau characterised the entire family as being "out of control" at the ranch, saying the alcohol consumption was the result of the alleged victim and his brother breaking into the wine cellar and a refrigerator. On one occasion, they were found drunk by ranch employees.

He adopted the same defence about the allegations that boys had been exposed to pornographic magazines. He said the boys had taken the magazines without permission from a briefcase. Mr Jackson's fingerprints were on the magazines, he added, because he had wrested them out of the boys' hands.

On the molestation question, he said no DNA samples of the alleged victim had been found in Mr Jackson's bedroom. He said the very notion that Mr Jackson would start abusing a child at the moment their relationship was falling apart was "absurd".

Already in the first 48 hours, the trial is starting to operate on parallel tracks.

The prosecution is clearly interested in steering attention away from the mother, preferring to build up a solid body of evidence demonstrating a deeply dysfunctional atmosphere at Neverland, especially in the wake of Martin Bashir's television documentary Living With Michael Jackson, which was shown in February 2003.

The defence's best interest, meanwhile, is to make it all about the mother - accusing her of welfare fraud, of deviously extracting money from a department store that accused her of shoplifting, of using her children as bait to trap celebrities.

The outcome of the case will almost certainly hinge on how large she looms over the coming weeks and months.

The prosecution's first witness was Martin Bashir, the British journalist whose cameras captured Mr Jackson and the cancer patient, then 13, at the ranch. The controversial documentary Living with Michael Jackson is at the centre of the case. Mr Jackson admitted in the film that he shared his bed with his boy guests, but said there was nothing wrong with it.

- Independent