Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  What’s known for certain is that in June 1993, Michael flew Jordie and June to Monaco with him to attend the World Music Awards. Photographs of the lovely woman and the beautiful boy seated with Jackson at the ceremony were published worldwide amid much speculation that June might be Michael’s new girlfriend and Jordie his future stepson. “Michael’s New Adopted Family” read the headline in the National Enquirer. “Evan began to get jealous of the involvement and felt left out,” June’s former attorney Michael Freeman would tell Fischer.

  Evan invited Michael to spend five days at his house and allowed him to sleep in the same room with Jordie and his five-year-old half-brother Nikki. It was during this stay, Evan would say later, that he began to develop suspicions about Jackson’s possible sexual misconduct. He never saw either Jordie or Michael without their clothes on, Chandler would admit, but he walked into the room one day and saw the two spooning on the bed with Michael’s hand near Jordie’s crotch. Evan called to tell his brother what he had seen, and in the same conversation told Ray that June intended to take Jordie with her on Michael’s Dangerous tour.

  By the end of June 1993, Evan Chandler was increasingly vocal and volatile about his “concerns.” According to Evan, he finally confronted Michael, saying, “You and Jordie are having sex, aren’t you? Just be a man and fucking admit it.” Evan admitted that he was impressed by how well Michael maintained his composure, calmly replying, “That’s preposterous. It never happened.” Michael immediately cut off all contact with the man.

  By early July, Evan was making it clear that he intended to challenge June’s custody of Jordie. He discussed “the situation” in a phone call to Dave Schwartz that his ex-wife’s new husband tape-recorded. The only publicly available transcript of that conversation is the one Anthony Pellicano provided to Mary A. Fischer, and it casts Evan Chandler in a very dim light.

  The Pellicano/Fischer transcript had Jordie’s father beginning the conversation with seemingly sincere expressions of concern for his son and of fury at both Jackson and June, whom he described (to her current husband) as “cold and heartless.” He had tried to talk to June about his worries, Evan complained, but she replied by telling him, “Go fuck yourself.” Chandler’s tone changed, though, becoming almost whiny, as he shifted the conversation to his estrangement from Michael Jackson. “I had a good communication with Michael,” Chandler told Schwartz. “We were friends. I liked him and I respected him and everything else, for what he is. There was no reason why he had to stop calling me. I sat in the room one day and talked to Michael and told him exactly what I want out of this whole relationship.”

  He had “been rehearsed” about what to say and not to say when he spoke to Jackson, Chandler told Schwartz, which was why he never mentioned the subject of money. Schwartz asked what Michael had done that so upset him. “He broke up the family,” Chandler replied. “Jordie has been seduced by this guy’s power and money.” Each of the men confessed their failure to properly father Jordie, then suddenly Chandler confided that he was preparing to take action against Jackson. “It’s already set,” he said. “There are other people involved that are waiting for my phone call that are in certain positions. I’ve paid them to do it. Everything’s going according to a certain plan that isn’t just mine. Once I make that phone call, this guy is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it.”

  Ray Chandler said that Pellicano, through Fischer, had selectively sampled the tape recording of the conversation to falsely create the impression that Evan was talking about a “win” that would put some enormous sum in his pocket. Anyone who listened closely to the entire tape, Ray said, would recognize that Evan was talking about getting custody of his son, not money from Michael Jackson.

  What most made people doubt Ray Chandler’s explanation was that the “guy” who had “rehearsed” Evan was Barry K. Rothman, a Century City attorney whom his client described to Dave Schwartz as “the nastiest son of a bitch I could find.”

  Many people in Los Angeles would have said that description was too generous. Rothman had once been a music lawyer of some note who negotiated contracts for the Rolling Stones, Little Richard, and the Who. Gold and platinum records decorated his office walls. He had a general practice these days and, Rothman’s ex-wife once told her own attorney that Rothman made so many enemies over the years that she was amazed somebody hadn’t killed him by now. Rothman was canny, though, and had layered his life with protections against the long line of people who despised him and the even longer line of people who claimed he owed them money. Many of the latter were former employees. Rothman had lots of those, because he went through office workers at an astounding rate, notorious both for verbally abusing the women he hired and for failing to pay their salaries. He’d taken to hiring temps as receptionists who usually lasted a couple of weeks before he ran them out of the office, cursing them as idiots as they fled from his presence in tears. The woman who was working as his legal secretary that summer, Geraldine Hughes, would characterize him as “a real life demon straight out of the pits of hell.”

  An investigator involved in one of the many lawsuits filed against Rothman called him “a professional deadbeat.” When he fell behind on alimony and child support payments to his ex-wife, she threatened to attach his assets. When her attorney tried to put a lien on Rothman’s home in Sherman Oaks after a year of nonpayment, it was discovered that the deed had been transferred to a Panamanian shell corporation called Tinoa Operations. He’d had $200,000 of Tinoa’s cash robbed from a safe in his house, Rothman would claim, and had to make good on the loss by signing over the deed on his home. Only when the most prized of his possessions, a Rolls-Royce Corniche (with the license plate “BKR 1”), was towed away did Rothman pay his ex-wife what he owed her.

  Documents from other cases filed at the Los Angeles Superior Court demonstrated that Rothman was operating behind a complex network of foreign bank accounts and shell companies (Tinoa Operations among them), several with the same address as a Chinese restaurant on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. Twenty lawsuits, multiple complaints to the state Labor Commission, and at least three disciplinary actions by the State Bar of California had been initiated against Rothman, but he managed time after time to avoid serious consequences. A year before Evan Chandler came to him, Rothman had been suspended for a year by the bar association for blatantly ignoring conflict-of-interest rules in a case involving a woman he had been representing in child support and custody proceedings. Rothman managed to have the suspension reduced to probation, then promptly had his law firm file for bankruptcy. When creditors demanded to know how a man who drove a Rolls-Royce could claim no assets, Rothman produced papers showing that the title to the car had been transferred to a subsidiary of Tinoa Operations.

  So, as Pellicano explained to Fischer, Evan Chandler recognized Rothman at once as the perfect partner in his scheme to take down Michael Jackson. The truth, Ray Chandler countered, was that Rothman had been one of Evan’s dental patients, and had offered to help him out—for free—when he expressed concern about June’s plan to take Jordie on a world tour with Michael Jackson.

  What Evan said about Rothman during his tape-recorded conversation with Dave Schwartz , though, was, “All he wants to do is get this out in the public as fast as he can, as big as he can, and humiliate as many people as he can. He’s nasty, he’s mean, he’s very smart, and he’s hungry for the publicity.” Chandler spoke as if he hadn’t yet decided to unleash Rothman, but was leaning in that direction: “If I go through with this, I win big time. There’s no way I lose. I’ve checked that inside out. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of Jordie] and Michael’s career will be over.”

  “Does that help Jordie?” Schwartz asked.

  “That’s irrelevant to me,” Chandler replied. “It’s going to be bigger than all of us put together. The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody
in sight. It will be a massacre if I don’t get what I want.”

  Tensions between Chandler and his ex-wife came to a head at a middle school graduation ceremony where June dismissed Evan’s allegations against Jackson, then informed him that she still intended to take Jordie out of school in the fall so that the two of them could join Michael on his Dangerous tour. “Michael was very good at sizing people up,” a member of the Chandler family would observe later. “He looked for a family where some level of disconnect between the parents created a vulnerability that he could exploit. In this case, he saw that June was not in a marriage that she enjoyed. Dave held the purse strings. She wanted independence from that. She was not a woman who wanted to get up in the morning and go to work. A life of luxury and travel was what she dreamed of, and Michael offered her that.”

  When Evan began to spew threats, June told Michael, who then went to Bert Fields for help. Fields, who had completed the negotiations of Jackson’s epic Sony contract that were begun by John Branca, brought in Pellicano, who listened to the tape of the conversation between Evan Chandler and Dave Schwartz and “knew it was about extortion,” as he told Fischer. That same day, Pellicano went to the Hideout in Westwood, where Jordie and Lily were visiting. He asked the boy a series of “pointed questions,” Pellicano would say, that included “Has Michael ever touched you?” and “Have you ever seen Michael naked in bed?” Jordie looked him in the eye and answered no to each such query, according to Pellicano.

  Two days later, though, on July 11, Chandler moved forward with his “plan” by persuading June that Jordie needed some major dental work, then convincing her to let him have his son for an afternoon to get it done. The next day, according to Pellicano, Evan Chandler refused to return Jordie to his mother unless she put her signature on a document prepared by Rothman promising that she would not take Jordie out of Los Angeles County. Evan kept Jordie with him even after June signed the document, though, and on July 14, Rothman placed a phone call to a Beverly Hills psychiatrist named Mathis Abrams and presented what he called “a hypothetical situation” involving a thirteen-year-old boy and an adult celebrity. The next day, Dr. Abrams sent Rothman a two-page letter stating that “reasonable suspicion would exist that sexual abuse may have occurred” and that if this were not a hypothetical situation he would be compelled to report the matter to the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services. On July 27, Rothman instructed Geraldine Hughes to type up a set of instructions for Evan Chandler explaining how to report child abuse to the authorities without exposing himself to liability.

  A deeply religious young black woman who happened to be a Michael Jackson fan, Hughes was at once alarmed and suspicious about the “the incredible level of secrecy” her employer was imposing on his contacts with Evan Chandler and began to keep a written record of what she saw and heard. Chandler phoned the office as many as five times a day, Hughes observed, and each time Rothman retreated to his “Fort Knox of an office” to make sure that no one could listen in on the conversation. Even meetings with his associate attorneys were suspended so that Rothman could take calls from Chandler in private. It seemed “odd” to her, Hughes noted, that afterward there were never any memos to file. When Chandler came into the office, Hughes said, he always met with Rothman behind locked doors and no notes were made of their conversations. Curiosity overcame her one afternoon when Chandler showed up late at the office in an emotional state and was immediately pulled by Rothman into the conference room. She stepped to the door of the conference room to try to hear what was being said, Hughes would admit, but the two men inside kept their voices low except for a single loud outburst by Rothman in which he shouted, “We have to stick to the plan . . . we cannot deviate from the plan!”

  Rothman did not accompany Chandler when Evan showed up with Jordie for a meeting with Jackson and Pellicano at the Westwood Marquis Hotel. According to Pellicano, Evan Chandler first gave Michael a hug, then pulled the letter from Dr. Abrams out of his pocket and began to read it aloud. At the point where his father began to quote the references to child molestation, Pellicano said, Jordie hung his head, then looked up at Michael with an expression of surprise. The meeting ended with Evan pointing his finger at Michael and telling him, “I’m going to ruin you.” Pellicano came to Rothman’s office that evening for a second meeting, at which (according to the private investigator) the attorney presented his client’s demand for $20 million. Pellicano said that after he walked out in disgust, the demand was reduced to a payment of $5 million for four screenplay deals. According to Ray Chandler, the idea that Michael Jackson should pay off with a screenplay deal was Pellicano’s, not Evan’s, and his brother had been so incensed by the suggestion that he nearly came to blows with the private investigator.

  By Pellicano’s account, he returned to Rothman’s office on August 13, to make an offer—$350,000 for a single screenplay deal if this whole thing went away. Rothman answered that it was three screenplays or nothing, according to Pellicano, who claimed he had phoned back later to say one screenplay deal for $350,000, take it or leave it. Geraldine Hughes recalled that Chandler’s disappointment was apparent. “I almost had a $20 million deal,” the secretary heard him tell Rothman.

  Sometime between the August 13 meeting and a custody hearing scheduled for August 17 (at which the judge would almost certainly order Jordie returned to his mother), Evan Chandler took his son to see Mark Torbiner, the dental anesthesiologist who had introduced him to Barry Rothman in 1991. In Chandler’s presence, Torbiner administered a dose of the so-called “truth serum” sodium Amytal to the boy, who, under questioning by his father, said Michael had touched his penis. At that point, it may not have mattered that most psychiatrists would agree that sodium Amytal is no truth serum (studies going back to 1952 show that it can be used to implant false memories), because all Dr. Mathis Abrams had to hear was that Jordie had made an accusation. Abrams heard that and plenty more from the boy in a three-hour session the next day, including descriptions of masturbation, kissing, nipple tweaking, and oral sex. As required by law, the psychiatrist immediately reported the accusations to a social worker at the Department of Children’s Services, who then phoned the police. Learning that a criminal investigation had been initiated, the judge hearing the custody case between Evan and June delayed his ruling. Though she didn’t yet know it, June had lost her son.

  Five days after Abrams phoned the social worker and the social worker phoned the police, a freelance reporter in Burbank was tipped off that warrants had been issued allowing officers from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit and deputies from the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s office to enter both Neverland Ranch and the condo in Westwood to search for evidence that would support child sex abuse charges against Michael Jackson. The freelancer sold the story to the local NBC affiliate, which broke the news at four the next afternoon and set off a global media frenzy. Most papers redacted the boy’s name but they all printed Michael’s.

  The pressure of it all—perhaps supplemented by simple greed—persuaded June and her husband Dave to change stories and switch sides. On August 18, when LAPD officers first interviewed her, June said she did not believe Michael had done anything inappropriate with her son. She began to waver, though, a few days later, when two LAPD officers told her that Michael Jackson was a perfect fit for “the classic profile of a pedophile.” By September the Schwartzes were running scared, fearful that Evan Chandler and Barry Rothman would try to take custody of Jordie by claiming that June had been a neglectful parent. In October, the couple threw in with Evan Chandler and his impending lawsuit. June’s attorney, Michael Freeman, told Mary Fischer that he resigned immediately in disgust. “The whole thing was such a mess,” he would explain. “I felt uncomfortable with Evan. He isn’t a genuine person, and I sensed he wasn’t playing things straight.”

  On the advice of Bert Fields, supported by the strong opinion of Anthony Pellicano, Michael Jackson agreed in late August to
the filing of extortion charges against Chandler and Rothman. Both men promptly hired high-priced criminal defense attorneys (Rothman’s was future O. J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro) and began to sweat their exposure. According to Geraldine Hughes, Evan Chandler and his son spent one night sleeping in the conference room at Rothman’s law firm to hide from the media and the next day she heard Chandler shout at the attorney, “It’s my ass that’s on the line and in danger of going to prison.” Evan Chandler became completely paranoid after being punched in the face by a man (apparently a Jackson fan) who ambushed him outside his dental office. Chandler occasionally brought his son to the office with him, Hughes would recall, and “I understood why Michael Jackson was fond of the boy. He was very fun-loving, warm-spirited, and cute.” Jordie was much more relaxed than Evan, Hughes noted, and actually “was the one who kept calming and consoling his father, who was a nervous wreck. It appeared as if the boy was protecting his father instead of vice versa.”

  Although the extortion charges were never seriously investigated (police in Los Angeles had already committed themselves to proving Jackson guilty), they did force Rothman to resign as Chandler’s attorney. Gloria Allred was briefly retained and did what she does best—hold a news conference. “I’m ready and willing to go forward with the trial,” she told the media, but then withdrew from the case without explanation just a couple of days later. Soon after, Larry Feldman agreed to become the Chandlers’ attorney.

  Feldman was, arguably, the most successful civil attorney in Southern California, a former head of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association who was said to have won more multimillion-dollar cases than any lawyer in the county. Since graduating number one in his class from Loyola Law School in the late sixties, he’d risen to senior partner in a firm that employed more than six hundred attorneys in offices spread out from New York to Shanghai. The man was a stone-cold killer in the courtroom and perhaps the worst person in LA to have against you. On September 14, 1993, Feldman filed a $30 million lawsuit against Michael Jackson that accused the star of “1.) sexual battery; 2.) battery; 3.) seduction; 4.) willful misconduct; 5.) intentional infliction of emotional distress; 6.) fraud; and 7.) negligence.”