Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Mesereau’s position remained tenuous, however. Big-name attorneys were arriving at Neverland by helicopter on a regular basis to make a pitch for the job. When Mesereau announced that he intended to try the case in Santa Maria, his media critics across the board began to scourge him. The attorney’s refusal to do as suggested by the “experts” on Court TV and bus in jurors from the ostensibly more liberal city of Santa Barbara was offered up as evidence that he wasn’t ready for prime time.

  “I had discovered that the people in Santa Maria were conservative and very law and order, yes, but they were also quite libertarian,” Mesereau explained. “I knew all those college professors and wealthy art patrons in the south were supposed to be more liberal than the people up north, but I wasn’t sure they would be when it came to Michael Jackson. And I learned from talking to them that the people up north were very sensitive about being compared to the people in the southern part of the county. They lived up north because they couldn’t afford the real estate in the south, and felt a deep sense of separation.” The Santa Ynez Mountains created a natural geographical division in Santa Barbara County that had been embraced as a point of pride by the people up north. As the judge assigned to the Michael Jackson criminal trial, Rodney Melville, would put it, “The attitude is, what happens north of the mountains stays north of the mountains.” For Mesereau, “What sealed it was when I found out that there had been two bills submitted to the state legislature where the north part of the county had tried to secede from the south. I had realized by then that a lot of people in the north identified Tom Sneddon with the south, because that was where he kept his offices, and where he lived. I had a feeling that if I played it right, Santa Maria was a perfect place to try Michael.”

  Mesereau was alarmed when he learned that Michael and Louis Farrakhan were talking about staging a second Million Man March through the streets of Santa Maria. “I told Randy, ‘Look, this is crazy. The worst thing you can do in this community is make the Nation of Islam your most visible identifier.’ Randy listened, and he went to Leonard Muhammad and explained the situation to him.” The Nation of Islam acceded almost immediately and vanished from Michael Jackson’s entourage. “It was Louis Farrakhan’s call,” Mesereau said. “He could have swayed Michael, I think. But I believe he really did care for Michael and wanted to see him acquitted even if it meant getting less publicity for himself. As opposed to some others. And yes, I mean Jesse Jackson.”

  While Michael himself accepted the departure of the black Muslims without protest, he remained vulnerable to the imprecations of Raymone Bain, who never stopped trying to sell him on the idea that bringing in prominent black leaders to raise the cry of racial injustice was a useful strategy. Mesereau identified Bain early on as an opportunist “who cared a lot less about what was best for Michael than about how she could promote herself as some sort of spokesperson for black America.” One of the most difficult moments for the attorney during pretrial preparations came when Bain placed a phone call to Mesereau with Michael on the line. “Raymone did almost all the talking,” Mesereau recalled, “and she began to tell me that ‘Michael isn’t just concerned about the outcome of this trial, he’s also concerned about his legacy,’ and that he thought it was important to bring in a series of important African-American leaders like her friends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to remind America what Michael Jackson meant to the black community.” He had to resort to deep breathing to keep control of his temper, Mesereau recalled, before explaining, for his client’s benefit more than Bain’s, “If Michael loses this trial, his legacy will be to die in a California state penitentiary. My only concern—which should be your only concern, Raymone—is to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  Bain backed away, but not for long. And she still had Michael’s ear, Mesereau knew, which left open the clear possibility that he could be removed as Jackson’s attorney at any time. “I never blamed Michael,” he said. “When people are under that kind of stress—the worst stress imaginable—they turn to what they know and where they came from.”

  Jackson’s mounting paranoia had surged just days after his arrest, when it was revealed that the owner of XtraJet, the private air transport company that flew him from Las Vegas to Santa Barbara to be arrested, had conspired with one of his maintenance workers to install microphones and a pair of hidden digital cameras that recorded a video they were marketing to television news shows.

  The people out to get him had become, in Michael’s mind, a lynch mob led by Tom Sneddon. Jackson and Sneddon had been obsessed with one another since 1993, and the contrasts between the two men could not have been more marked. Sneddon was a ruddy-faced Republican in his sixties who had graduated from Notre Dame, the father of nine children whose wife wrote abstinence manuals for Christian youth groups. The DA’s determination to corroborate Jordan Chandler’s accusations had carried him as far afield from Santa Barbara as Australia and England, where he made personal appeals to the families of boys he believed Jackson had molested, and Sneddon did little to hide his disappointment when they rebuffed him. Michael certainly hadn’t eased any strain when he added a cut titled “D.S.” to the HIStory album, which was released two years after the Chandler trial. The song was a barely disguised attack on Sneddon in which Jackson’s only concession to Sony’s attorneys had been to change his target’s name to “Dom Sheldon.” The lyrics were among the sloppiest and certainly the most infantile ever written by Michael Jackson, who had accented his attack on the “BS DA” by repeatedly chanting, “Dom Sheldon is a cold man.”

  In the ten years since the end of the Chandler case, the district attorney had granted interviews to newspapers on three continents, detailing his frustration with the failure to make a molestation case against Michael Jackson. He continued to describe his investigation as “open but inactive,” and told one reporter after another that all he needed to initiate new grand jury proceedings was a single “cooperating witness.” Sneddon and former Los Angeles County district attorney Gil Garcetti had persuaded the California Legislature to pass what became known as the “Michael Jackson Law,” allowing district attorneys statewide to compel the testimony of a child they believed had been sexually abused. The Santa Barbara County DA made little secret of the fact that he was now prepared to pounce on the first viable victim he could find, cooperative or not, to make a case against Jackson.

  After the first installment of Martin Bashir’s Living with Michael Jackson documentary aired in the UK in early 2003, Sneddon issued a statement to the press saying that he and the county’s sheriff, Jim Anderson, had agreed that “the BBC broadcast would be taped by the sheriff’s department” and “anticipated that it will be reviewed.” Michael Jackson’s remarks about sharing his bed with children were “unusual at best,” Sneddon said, and “for this reason, all local departments having responsibility in this are taking the matter seriously.” The DA then urged any child who believed he had been sexually abused by Jackson to come forward. Just a few days later, someone in Sneddon’s office leaked onto the Internet Jordie Chandler’s 1993 affidavit that described in detail the alleged molestations by Jackson.

  District Attorney Sneddon was but one of the faces who floated through Jackson’s sense of déjà vu as a squadron of familiar foes lined up against him. Larry Feldman, the attorney who had extracted the huge settlement for the Chandlers, had been the first stop for Gavin Arvizo’s family, in early March 2003, well before they ever contacted the police. Feldman had sent the Arvizos to Dr. Stan Katz, the very psychologist who had interviewed Jordan Chandler and his family at length during the preparation of the 1994 civil case against Jackson. It was Katz, after hearing from five-year-old Nikki Chandler that he had seen Michael “touch” his half-brother Jordie, who had reported the suspected abuse to law enforcement, setting off the grand jury investigations in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties.

  What Michael couldn’t know in the summer of 2004 was that Katz’s interview with Gavin Arvizo had actually prod
uced plenty that was to the advantage of his defense. The boy had told the psychologist he knew all about the Jordan Chandler allegations, for example, and Mesereau would later use this to support his claim that the entire case was an extortion plot. The fact that Gavin’s mother Janet Arvizo consulted with Feldman and Katz before talking to police would provide even stronger evidence for that argument. By the time Mesereau learned of all this, Janet Arvizo had already claimed that she first discovered her son’s molestation on September 30, 2003, when Tom Sneddon and a team of investigators broke the news to her during a meeting at a Los Angeles hotel. The question of why, then, she took her son to Feldman and Katz months before that date was one the defense attorney particularly looked forward to asking in court.

  In Michael’s mind, the gallery of tormentors targeting him also included two woman journalists who had made exposing him as a pedophile their principal occupation during the past decade. Diane Dimond, formerly of Hard Copy, where she broke the Jordan Chandler story, was now at Court TV and willing to look at any sort of “evidence” she could use to prove Jackson guilty in the eyes of the American public. Dimond had managed to once again lower the bar of tabloid TV standards when she contacted a man who had a collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia, persuaded him to let her display a pair of soiled, twenty-year-old underpants on camera, then phoned Tom Sneddon to urge the prosecutor to take DNA samples from the item. It was believed by many in the media and out that someone in the DA’s office had leaked the confidential settlement agreement in the Jordan Chandler case to Dimond shortly before the document was posted on the Internet in 2003.

  The coziness of Dimond’s relationship with Sneddon became an open secret when other reporters realized that she had known about the raid on Neverland Ranch well before they learned of it. The Associated Press would later report that Dimond had told her bosses at Court TV that Sneddon was working on a criminal filing against Michael Jackson months before a warrant was issued for the entertainer’s arrest. During the press conference at which Sneddon announced the raid and the arrest warrant, the DA had responded to a question about the number of civil cases (involving allegations of sexual misconduct with children) that had been settled by Jackson since 1993 by saying, “Ask Diane. She knows everything about Michael Jackson.” When Sneddon gave his first sit-down interview after the press conference, it was with Dimond.

  Dimond commanded even more media attention a short time later when she told Larry King that prosecutors were in possession of a “stack of love letters” written by Michael Jackson to Gavin Arvizo. “Does anyone . . . know of the existence of these letters?” King asked her. “Absolutely,” Dimond answered. “I do. I absolutely know of their existence.” Had she read them? King wondered. “No, I have not read them,” Dimond admitted. In fact, she had not even seen them. But she was certain there were such letters, having heard it from “high law enforcement sources.” No such letters ever surfaced because no such letters existed.

  Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth, meanwhile, was filing a series of lengthy articles that drew largely on anonymous or pseudonymous sources to portray Jackson in a light as lurid as anything the tabloids had ever cast upon him. The capstone of Orth’s Michael Jackson oeuvre was the March 2003 article she wrote in collaboration with Myung Ho Lee shortly after the “financial advisor” filed his lawsuit against Jackson. Among the few bits of fresh information in Orth’s piece was an allegation that Michael had used Coke cans filled with the white wine he called “Jesus juice” to aid in his seductions of a Japanese boy named Richard Matsuura. Matsuura’s response was to tell an NBC reporter that those claims were “completely false” and that Michael had never behaved improperly around him. It was impossible, of course, to rebut or verify claims by Orth that Michael had bathed in sheep’s blood or paid a voodoo chief from Mali named Baba to ritually sacrifice forty-two cows, but the outpouring of “information” on the Jackson case—true, false, and indeterminate—made clarity about any of it near to impossible.

  Orth was just one among scores of journalists who had attempted to scrape together enough information about Jordan Chandler to paint a plausible portrait of a young man who was now nearing his mid-twenties and had done virtually everything possible to make himself invisible. While he believed that Jordie had grown up to be “normal,” Evan Chandler’s brother Ray said, the young man’s life was anything but. “My big worry is that, you know, even when he is sixty he is still going to be ‘that Jackson kid,’” Ray told Orth. “I don’t think it will ever go away.” He was urging his nephew to come to Santa Barbara and testify against Jackson at the criminal trial on the new charges, Ray Chandler said, “because it would be the final nail in Michael’s coffin and Jordie would be a hero.”

  20

  On January 31, 2005, jury selection began for Michael Jackson’s criminal trial in Santa Maria. Judge Rodney Melville granted an exception to the gag order he had imposed on the case to allow Jackson to provide reporters with a video of a brief public statement that Mesereau had written. The attorney was incensed that his client had consented to an interview with Geraldo Rivera arranged by Raymone Bain, but broke his own ban on contact with the media when the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings in the Arvizo case were leaked just before Jackson’s criminal trial was to begin. He would never be sure who the source of that leak had been, Mesereau said. “It could have been someone who had worked for me,” he admitted, “someone who was upset about being fired and retaliated in this way. Whoever did it, I felt we had to reply, so I approved Michael’s appearance in that video. It made him feel better, if nothing else.”

  Mesereau decided to ignore the advice of his jury consultant to exclude as many women as possible, the idea being that women—mothers in particular—would be especially hostile to a defendant in a sexual molestation case. “Susan and I wanted women,” the attorney explained. “We thought they would be more open-minded about an eccentric artist like Michael Jackson, less prone to judge.” Michael smiled just once during jury selection, when a prospective juror admitted, “I’m not so much into his music, but I sure like his moves.” Before the end of February, Mesereau and Yu had collaborated with the prosecution to empanel a jury of eight women and four men. There were eight Caucasians, three Hispanics, and one Asian. They included a middle-aged man who believed Deepak Chopra was a rapper, an elderly lady whose grandson had been forced to register as a sex offender, and a younger woman who was divorced from a Santa Maria police officer.

  Sneddon’s opening statement on March 1 likened Neverland Ranch to a pedophile’s lair, a virtual “Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island”: “The private world of Michael Jackson reveals that, instead of reading them Peter Pan, [he] is showing them sexually explicit magazines. Instead of cookies and milk, you can substitute wine, vodka, and bourbon. It’s not children’s books but visits to Internet porn sites.” Sneddon offered explicit descriptions of masturbation scenes, Jackson’s erect penis, and simulated sex with a mannequin.

  Mesereau had focused his own opening statement on the young accuser’s mother, Janet Arvizo, describing her as a serial con artist who had tried and failed to extract money from Jim Carrey, Mike Tyson, and Adam Sandler before finding her way to Michael Jackson: “The mother, with her children as tools, was trying to find a celebrity to latch onto. Unfortunately for Michael Jackson, he fell for it.” Mesereau also hammered on the criminal indictment’s bizarre timeline, something everyone involved in the trial recognized as the greatest vulnerability of the prosecution case. Shortly after Michael Jackson’s arrest in November 2003, Tom Sneddon’s office had produced criminal information alleging that the sexual assaults on Gavin Arvizo had occurred in early February 2003, right around the time the Martin Bashir documentary aired. In January 2004, Mark Geragos had appeared on NBC’s Dateline to assert that his client had a “concrete, iron-clad alibi” for the dates on the prosecution’s charge sheet. Soon after, Sneddon arranged for Michael Jackson to be rearraigned on a conspiracy charge, and moved the all
eged molestation dates two weeks forward into mid-February 2003. In order to discredit the defendant’s supposedly “iron-clad alibi,” the district attorney was now attempting to make the case that Michael Jackson, in a panic after the airing of the Bashir documentary, had conspired to kidnap Gavin Arvizo and force him to deny acts of molestation that had not yet taken place, then somehow managed to recover his bearings long enough to commit those terrible acts at the very moment when the whole world was watching him. “Can you imagine a more absurd time for it to happen?” Mesereau asked, and at least a couple of jurors were seen shaking their heads.

  Martin Bashir was called as the trial’s first witness. Sneddon’s brief direct examination, intended solely to authenticate Living with Michael Jackson, was sufficient to reveal Bashir’s farcical pomposity. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi would observe, Bashir was the sort of media creature “who peers through the bedroom windows of famous people and imagines he is curing cancer.” When a question described his productions as documentaries, Bashir sniffed that, “I call them cultural-affairs programs.” On cross-examination, Bashir refused to answer nearly thirty questions about the footage he had left out of his documentary, based on the claim that he was protected by both California’s journalist shield law and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.