Michael Jackson

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  According to the report, Gavin’s older sister Daveline was ‘teary-eyed’ during the interview. ‘Michael is so kind and loving,’ she said.

  Gavin’s father, David Arvizo, was interviewed by the DCFS, separately from the others. ‘There’s no reason to suspect any wrongdoing by Michael,’ he said. He added that he, too, attributed his son’s recovery to Michael.

  Some observers have wondered why Michael had his own representatives at the apartment for the inquiry by the DCFS. According to DCFS standards, Janet Ventura-Arvizo and her children should have been interviewed without anyone present, and tape recordings of their interviews should not have been made by her… for Michael Jackson, or even for someone working for him. Of course, the Jackson camp wanted to be there for one simple and obvious reason: they wanted to know what was going to be alleged. If they were able to get away with having someone present to find out what was being said, of course they were going to try to do it. On the tape, Janet insists that Jackson’s representatives were there ‘per my invitation, per my request’.

  Later, after reviewing all evidence available at the time, the Department of Children and Family Services concluded that the case should be closed, that allegations of abuse were ‘unfounded’. There was not enough proof in the face of such denials for anyone to continue looking into the matter.

  At the same time, the Los Angeles Police Department opened and closed its own investigation quickly, and concurred that there was insufficient evidence to move forward with any action against Michael Jackson.

  Then, on 16 April, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department reached its own conclusion. According to records in the Sheriff’s Department, ‘Based on the interviews with the children and their father, it was determined that the elements of criminal activity were not meant. Therefore, this investigation was classified as a suspected sexual abuse incident report, with no further action required. Case Closed.’

  Months later, Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon, in his press conference to announce Michael’s imminent arrest, minimized the significance of the DCFS report and its findings saying, ‘to call that an investigation is a misnomer. It was an interview, plain and simple. And that’s all it was.’ He also claimed, ‘that particular department [DCFS] has a lot of problems.’

  It would seem that the District Attorney’s office has ‘a lot of problems’, too, because Tom Sneddon did not mention that the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department had actually opened – and closed – its investigation, based entirely on the DCFS’s findings. Sneddon didn’t interview the Arvizo family. Rather, someone from his office merely spoke on the phone to the social worker who visited them, and obtained her notes. The fact that Tom Sneddon then minimized the DCFS’s findings in his press conference, though he had relied on them to close an earlier investigation of Michael Jackson, is important information, and it does little to enhance his case that he still hasn’t admitted it.

  Booze, Naked Women… and Michael Jackson?

  After the DCFS and Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s interviews of the Arvizo family, something happened to change their minds. It’s not known yet what transpired, but whatever it was turned them all against Michael Jackson. Suddenly, the family was whispering to others about sexual molestation having occurred, and stories getting back to the Jackson camp were worrisome. However, when Michael heard about them, he didn’t seem concerned.

  ‘This could be a problem,’ noted someone on his team.

  ‘I’m used to problems,’ Michael said, dismissively. ‘My focus now is on my new album. I didn’t do anything, so this will go away.’

  ‘You mean like Jordie Chandler went away?’ he was asked.

  Jordie is rarely brought up in his presence. Michael’s brown eyes slitted. It was as if he was saying, ‘You know better than to mention that name to me.’ He drew a deep breath and then exhaled, loudly. ‘Look, man, just take care of it,’ he said, as he took his leave. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about it.’

  There was nothing to take care of… yet. No one knew the details of what was being alleged… but, there was a sense that something was about to happen, and it would not be good. ‘It was in the air,’ said a source in the Jackson camp.

  In fact, people who have been in the Jackson camp for years were troubled enough to bring in high-powered attorney Mark Geragos, and a team of investigators, to look into the matter. ‘He may want to continue to be naive in the face of danger,’ said a person close to Jackson, ‘but people who care about him smelled big trouble. They did not want have another Jordie Chandler case on their hands. It was determined that this thing would have to be nipped in the bud, whether MJ [Michael] took it seriously, or not. Michael was told to keep his distance from those people, and he did.’

  After Michael’s handlers drew a line in the sand between him and the Arvizo family, Janet Ventura-Arvizo made her move: she and one of her attorneys sought out Larry Feldman for advice on how to proceed; Feldman is the same attorney who represented Jordie Chandler against Michael Jackson. In the same conference room in which Feldman sat with Jordie Chandler and his father, Evan, he sat with Michael’s new accuser and his mother. After he heard their story, he felt there was more to it than the boy had even alleged – and so he arranged for the boy to be interviewed by psychologist Dr Stan Katz.

  After several sessions with the psychologist, the bits and pieces finally came together and the boy started to remember all sorts of things. Dr Katz’s notes are part of the material being used against Michael Jackson by the Santa Barbara District Attorney. What the family told him was exactly opposite to everything they had ever said before about the pop star to Martin Bashir, Christian Anderson, and the DCFS.

  In the records Dr Katz wrote, ‘The accuser says he drank alcohol every night and got buzzed… whiskey, vodka and Bacardi.’ When the youngster – suffering from cancer, don’t forget – got headaches from the drinking, ‘Michael said, “Keep drinking. It will make it feel better.”’ Dr Katz reported that, according to the boy, ‘Michael showed him pictures of naked women on the computer.’ He said that he once ‘saw Michael just standing there, naked for a moment.’ He added that Michael told him, ‘he had to masturbate, or he’d go crazy’.

  Dr Katz further disclosed that Gavin’s brother Star said that on a flight from Miami to Los Angeles, he saw Michael lick Gavin’s head as the boy slept against Michael’s chest. He said that Michael gave them all ‘wine, vodka and tequila on numerous occasions’. He also said, according to the doctor, that one of Michael’s security guards threatened to ‘kill us and our parents if we told about the alcohol’. He said that Michael ‘talked a lot about sex’, and that he and his brother ‘constantly sleep in Michael’s room with Michael and his brother in Michael’s bed’. He then gave graphic details of two sexual encounters he says he witnessed between Gavin and Michael.

  Furthermore, Dr Katz wrote that Gavin’s sister Daveline says that Michael gave her wine, as well, and that she witnessed Michael kissing her brother on the cheek, ‘hugging him and always rubbing him’.

  According to the report, when asked about the DCFS inquiry, the family said that they were ‘made’ to say that Michael had been a father figure and that nothing sexual had ever happened between him and Gavin. Katz, in his report, wrote that he believed the family had not been forthcoming in the past but was now telling him the truth. ‘I don’t get the feeling the mom is lying about anything, though she may distort’, he wrote. ‘I really felt the kids were credible.’

  However, of Michael Jackson, Dr Katz also wrote in his report, ‘He doesn’t really qualify as a pedophile. He’s just a regressed 10-year-old.’

  Exactly as happened in the Chandler case – the mental-health professional, Dr Stan Katz, was compelled by California law to report the details of the recollected sexual abuse to the police. It evolved so quickly, everyone in the Jackson camp was a little stunned by the swiftness of events, even though they suspected there might be trouble ahead. Whe
n told about the report to the police, Michael’s mouth went agape. ‘Huh?’ he asked. ‘Are you kidding me? Really?’ He seemed lost for several heartbeats. ‘But…’ He stammered. ‘But… I thought… huh?‘

  Family Dysfunction

  The earlier (and important) denials of sexual abuse aside to Michael Jackson’s videographer and also to the DCFS, there are elements of the case against Michael that are still questionable: evidence of dysfunction in the Arvizo family, and what such strange and troubled dynamics may have to do with the charges against the singer, are important to review.

  Years ago, in August 1998, the Arvizo family was detained on a shoplifting charge at a J.C. Penney department store in West Covina, California. According to J.C. Penney, the boys – Gavin and Star – were sent out of the store by their father with an armload of clothes, the family was then detained and Janet Ventura-Arvizo started a scuffle with three security officers. The family’s side of the story, however, is that the boys were simply modelling clothes for J.C. Penney – odd in that there was no evidence to support this notion – not stealing them.

  The shoplifting charges were eventually dropped, but Gavin, Star and their mother filed a lawsuit against J.C. Penney’s for $3 million. Janet then charged that, while being detained, she and her sons were ‘viciously’ beaten by the three security officers, one of whom is a woman.

  In more than 200 pages of documents pertaining to the case, a troubling picture of the family matriarch emerges. The psychiatrist hired by J.C. Penney’s to evaluate Janet Ventura-Arvizo found her to be ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘delusional’. According to the doctor, ‘She felt “sad over being a nobody.” With no job… a “sad housewife getting fat.”’ He reports that she was ‘treated with Zoloft’. He wrote, ‘her depression may have lingered or worsened.’ Of course, that doctor was hired by the department store; his report would not have been used by J.C. Penney had it not been favourable to their case. Janet’s own therapist found her to be ‘anxious and depressed’ after the incident, but not delusional.

  Most disturbing about the case, though, is that more than two years after the incident, Janet Ventura-Arvizo added a new charge: she claimed that one of the two male security guards had ‘sexually fondled’ her breasts and pelvic area ‘for up to seven minutes’. It seems odd that so many years passed before she decided to mention the sexual assault. During litigation, the store’s psychiatrist asserted that she had rehearsed her sons to back up her ‘far-fetched story’, and that they had all – mother and sons – suffered ‘broken bones’ in addition to her sexual assault. ‘She just came up with this horror story, and ran with it,’ says Tom Griffin, the attorney who represented J.C. Penney in the case. He insists there was no evidence to back up any of the allegations; David Arvizo did not seem to want to be involved in this aspect of the allegations.

  Ultimately the department store settled with the family, paying them $137,000 days before the scheduled trial in 2001. ‘It was an incident that turned into, in my opinion, a scam to extract money from J.C. Penney,’ says Tom Griffin. ‘They’re going for a home run this time,’ he concluded of the family’s action with Michael Jackson. ‘This is a shake down. Shake down, Part Two.’

  Making matters more complex and disturbing, Gavin’s parents – who were married as teenagers and divorced in their thirties – have had an acrimonious relationship for years. Janet Ventura-Arvizo filed for divorce in late 2001, about a month after the J.C. Penney settlement. By court order, David Arvizo has not seen his children since 2002 when he pleaded ‘no contest’ to spousal abuse. A year later, he pleaded ‘no contest’ to child cruelty. A three-year restraining order was put into place. Since the time of Michael’s arrest, David Arvizo has repeatedly petitioned the courts to allow him to see his offspring. Though he insists that the children have been rehearsed by Janet to make statements against him, he has been denied the chance to see them, every legal step along the way.

  While the family’s troubles are unfortunate, some of their actions do cast a dark shadow over the case against Michael. There seems, at least from appearances, to be a troubling history of exaggeration on Janet Ventura-Arvizo’s part, and maybe confabulation, as well – which will be relevant in the trial, say sources in the Los Angeles legal community. ‘One wonders, is this a pattern?’ asks Karen Russell, a trial attorney in Los Angeles, not involved in the Jackson case. ‘What happened with J.C. Penney’s, really? Does Mrs Ventura-Arvizo have a habit of not getting what she wants, and then coaching her kids into saying what she wants them to say, and then proceeding legally? These are questions that will, no doubt, be posed at trial.’

  Says Dr Robert Butterworth, a New York psychologist, again not associated with the Jackson case, ‘There’s a possibility for a child to be told something so many times, he is not rehearsing it but, rather, actually believes it. It’s possible for a child to become, in a sense, hypnotized by a parent to believe a reality that didn’t occur. They go over and over it again, but the facts have been distorted. It’s a very troubling phenomenon, very disturbing, and it could be the death knell on this case.’

  It could be argued that Michael Jackson, a celebrity with a great deal to lose, should have made a decision to avoid Gavin’s family at all costs, if he had known about their history (and he probably did, since he and Janet and Gavin were, apparently, close enough to share confidences). However, the youngster was, and is, quite ill, and perhaps Michael felt he couldn’t abandon him under those circumstances.

  Also, who knows how many other families in Michael Jackson’s life over the years have had problems even more severe that those of his present accuser’s? We don’t know about them because matters never escalated as they have with the Arvizo family at the centre of the present investigation, but it’s likely there’ve been many similar stories over the years. Without exaggeration, it would be impossible to count the number of disadvantaged families with whom Michael has formed emotional attachments in the last ten, maybe fifteen, years – and equally impossible to fathom the number of boys he has known, befriended and taken into his home and his confidence. There is simply no way to count them, there have been so many. He’s fortunate that only two out of what must surely be hundreds have presented a problem for him.

  Jesus Juice and Jesus Blood

  Jesus Blood. Jesus Juice. Those two descriptions of red and white wine as ascribed to Michael Jackson made headlines in February 2004, as a result of a scathing article about him, by Maureen Orth in Vanity Fair. The allegation made by Orth is that Michael gave Gavin Arvizo and another boy wine – Jesus Juice – in Coke cans on a flight from Florida in February 2003. Jackson, though, prefers Jesus Blood. This is a disturbing accusation, obviously, but even more so because two of the charges against Michael have to do with giving a minor ‘intoxicating agents’ in order to wear him down for sex with him.

  Orth’s primary source for increasingly lurid stories about Jackson in Vanity Fair is his former business adviser Myung-Ho Lee. Lee was Jackson’s financial adviser from 1998 to 2001. He sued him for $14 million in 2002, and hasn’t stopped talking about him since – even though Jackson settled the suit by giving him money. Lee is the person who told Orth, in another Vanity Fair article, that Jackson hired a witch-doctor named Baba to sacrifice dozens of cows in order to put a curse on David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. That’s hard to believe… even for Michael Jackson.

  The wine story, however, is partially true. Michael does refer to white wine as ‘Jesus Juice’ and red wine as ‘Jesus Blood’. It’s an offbeat joke of his, probably not a very good one, but everyone in his camp knows about it. Also, he does drink them both from soda cans. However, Orth reports that the concealment is Michael’s way of drinking alcohol without having anyone know that he’s doing it. The truth is that he drinks wine out of soda pop cans so that children won’t see him doing it. ‘He’s always around kids, and he doesn’t want them to see him drinking,’ says someone in his camp. ‘It’s weird, but not criminal.’ Also, Jackson has alway
s been afraid that he would be photographed with a glass of wine in his hand, and he thinks that would be inappropriate for his image.

  An in-flight passenger profile document that has become part of the public record in litigation between Jackson and XtraJet, the private airline company he once hired, details the pop star’s food and beverage preferences and seems to further confirm the wine anecdote. According to the document, dated Sept. 1, 2003: ‘White wine in a Diet Coke can’ was required ‘on every [the word is underlined in the document for emphasis] flight.’ In addition, according to the passenger profile document, Michael sometimes drank tequila, gin or Crown Royal on flights.

  A strange requirement outlined in the documentation is Michael Jackson’s desire for fried chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken, the American fast-food restaurant, for every meal: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Michael demands the so-called ‘secret recipe’ with ‘original chicken breasts, mashed potatoes, corn and biscuits with spray butter’. On short flights, according to the documents, he requests Big Red gum, mints, cheese and crackers and fruit plates. He will not eat broccoli or ‘strong-scented foods’. Prince Michael I and Paris have a stricter diet and are not permitted to eat peanut butter, sugar or chocolate. KFC is part of their regimen when flying, but it must be stripped of all skin. According to the documents, the children ‘typically will ask for the same thing their Dad is eating for every meal, but he’ll determine what they are allowed to eat, like crackers.’ Also, in bold letters next to their menu, it reads ‘NO SUGAR!’ and ‘NO CHICKEN SKIN!’ The document says that Paris, in particular, ‘is good at cajoling you for sugar’. Moreover, Prince Michael II, a.k.a. Blanket, is always fed by his nanny, Grace Rwamba (who, it is noted, will never eat KFC chicken). The toddler gets the same KFC regimen – ‘cut up into pieces’ – in addition to crackers, grapes and juice or milk. Finally, the in-flight behaviour of Michael Jackson – a ‘non-smoker’ – is described as ‘very timid… but will get out of his seat during takeoff and landing. Be prepared to clean a lot after he deplanes.’