Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Larry Feldman took the stand as a witness for the prosecution on April Fools’ Day, less than forty-eight hours after the judge had ruled that the jury could hear evidence of alleged prior acts of sexual molestation by Michael Jackson. Sneddon left it to Mesereau to connect the Jordan Chandler case to Feldman, asking the attorney only about his 2003 meeting with the Arvizos. The family had come to him initially to discuss pursuing a case against Martin Bashir and ABC for taping the Arvizo children without their consent, Feldman said. Unable to make “heads or tails” of what he was hearing, Feldman said, he sent Gavin and Star to see Dr. Stan Katz. After the boys’ second meeting with the psychiatrist, Katz had sent him a report stating that Gavin and Star were alleging that Michael Jackson had molested Gavin.

  Feldman said he personally contacted the head of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, who suggested he report the suspected abuse to someone in law enforcement. It was then that he phoned District Attorney Sneddon and initiated the process that ultimately led to Michael Jackson’s arrest and the raid on Neverland Ranch. He was not involved in any civil lawsuit against Michael Jackson, Feldman said, and had no plans to become involved in such a lawsuit. In fact, he had formally resigned as the Arvizos’ attorney in October 2003, shortly before the warrant for Michael Jackson’s arrest was issued by the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department.

  Mesereau immediately picked up where Sneddon had left off, compelling Feldman to agree that there was nothing to prevent him from representing Gavin and Star Arvizo in some future civil case, and that, irrespective of the outcome of the criminal case, Gavin and Star had until the age of eighteen to file a lawsuit against Michael Jackson claiming millions of dollars in damages. And if there was a conviction in the case now before the jury, “the only issue remaining would be how much money you get, correct?” Mesereau asked. “Probably. I think that’s close enough,” Feldman answered, and permitted himself a slight smile. A criminal conviction in this case would be crucial in offsetting the cost of the trial for the attorney, wouldn’t it, suggested Mesereau, who got Feldman to admit that financing the investigation of the Jordan Chandler allegations back in 1993 had cost him a substantial part of the eventual settlement. When Feldman attempted to quibble over details, Mesereau used the opportunity to let the jury know that Michael Jackson had sued the Chandlers for extortion back in 1993 and that the eventual settlement had included language in which “neither side admits wrongdoing to the other.” Mesereau left it to the jury to decide whether the fact that two attorneys and their associate psychiatrists who had been key players in the Jordan Chandler case in 1993 had also driven the prosecution of Michael Jackson for the abuse of Gavin Arvizo in 2003 was merely, as Feldman had it, “a coincidence.”

  Mesereau then began to flatter Feldman, who seemed pleased to agree that he was “one of the most successful plaintiffs’ lawyers” in the country, an attorney who had won “numerous multimillion-dollar awards” for his clients. “Say it again for the press,” Feldman replied, smiling. Mesereau then noted that while Feldman claimed not to be representing the Arvizo family, he had in fact appeared in court as the attorney for Janet Arvizo’s mother “in an attempt to prevent us from seeing if [Janet] deposited money into her parents’ account.”

  The prosecution case continued to be undermined by their own parade of witnesses who witnessed nothing, contradicted the Arvizos’ claims of exhibiting good behavior at Neverland (former Neverland maid Kiki Fournier claimed Star had pulled a knife on her in the kitchen), and admitted peddling false stories to the media for money. Former Neverland house manager Dwayne Swingler almost came across as refreshingly honest by comparison to other witnesses when he replied to Mesereau’s question about trying to sell stories to the tabloids by saying, “Look, I was going to cash in like everyone else.” Even Sneddon seemed to realize he had lost momentum by the time he summoned the woman whom he anticipated—correctly in this instance—would be his most powerful witness.

  Now nearly fifty, June Chandler was still an exotic beauty packaged in elegance, from the designer suit fitted to her slim but shapely figure to her graceful carriage and crisp enunciation. As June began to tell the sad and slightly sordid story of her life, however, the glow around her dimmed. Failed marriages to an abusive dentist and a man who rented used cars for a living had left her coarsened in some regretful way, and disillusioned.

  When she described being swept up into the enchanted centrifuge of Michael Jackson’s private world back in 1993, there was a distinct if unspoken sense that this lovely lady had at last been living the life she was meant for, and enjoying it so thoroughly that she was blinded to the costs and the consequences. A genuine fondness for the Michael Jackson she came to know in those first weeks and months still sounded in June’s voice as she admitted being surprised and impressed by what “a regular guy” he was, so generous and polite and unassuming. There was still the faint echo of a thrill in her voice as June recalled the gifts Michael had lavished upon her and the trips aboard private jets to Monaco and Florida that she and Jordie and Lily made with their famous new friend. Both June’s story and her tone grew colder and grimmer, though, as she described the next trip she and her children took with Michael, the one they made to Las Vegas later in 1993. She was shocked and alarmed, as June told it, by her discovery that Jordie had apparently spent the night sleeping in the same bed with Jackson.

  Speaking through an emotional strain that was quite convincing, June delivered the most devastating moments of testimony against Michael Jackson that were heard during the entire trial. Shortly after telling her son that he would not be allowed to stay in the same suite with Michael unless they slept in separate bedrooms, June recalled, she heard a knock at the door of her own hotel room. It was Michael Jackson, June told the jury. He stood before her sobbing, she remembered, his cheeks bathed in tears, wanting to know if what Jordie had told him was true: “He was crying, shaking, trembling. ‘You don’t trust me?’” Michael asked her, according to June. “‘We’re a family! Why are you doing this? Why are you not allowing Jordie to be with me?’ And I said, ‘He is with you,’” June remembered. “He said, ‘But my bedroom. Why not in my bedroom?’” Michael’s “histrionic tantrum” had gone on for another half-hour, said June, before she finally caved in and agreed that Jordie could sleep in Michael’s bedroom, and, as she told it, lost her son.

  The icy ferocity with which Mesereau attacked the woman on the witness stand was an abrupt and startling transition from the adoration in which an obviously smitten Sneddon had bathed June Chandler. Michael’s attorney immediately hammered June with a series of questions that suggested she and Dave Schwartz had been in dire financial circumstances back in 1993, deeply in debt and desperate for a way out. June’s denials were shaky from the first and grew more uncertain as Mesereau bombarded her with dates and numbers. “I don’t recall,” became her answer to most of the attorney’s questions, though she occasionally managed an “I don’t think so.” She could scarcely recall a single detail of the lawsuit that she and her two ex-husbands had filed against Michael Jackson back in 1994 and professed not to even be aware that Jackson had answered with a lawsuit that accused the three of them of extortion.

  June appeared almost relieved when Mesereau changed the subject to her son Jordie’s relationship with Michael Jackson, recalling with palpable pleasure and pride how, years before the two met, her son had taken to dressing up like Michael and would entertain her by imitating his dance moves. It was like a dream come true for Jordie when he actually got to meet Michael and become close to him, June agreed, and she had been particularly appreciative of the paternal interest Michael seemed to take in Jordie, especially since the boy’s natural father, Evan Chandler, was barely involved in his life at that point. Yes, it was true that Michael had spent at least thirty nights at their little house in Santa Monica and that she had encouraged the entertainer’s relationship with her son. Each of the jurors and everyone else in the
courtroom were leaning forward in their seats, utterly silent, as June described Michael’s joining the family at the dinner table, helping Jordie with his homework and playing video games with the boy for hours on end. She looked at Michael Jackson as being “like a child,” June told Mesereau. Yes, it was Jordie who had insisted on staying in Michael’s room whenever they visited Neverland, June said, complaining to her that other kids, including Macaulay Culkin, were allowed to sleep in “the big boys’ room.” Yes, Culkin’s father was with him at Neverland, June agreed; most of the children who visited the ranch were accompanied by a parent. June’s demeanor became increasingly flat and remote as she answered questions about flying with her son in private jets that belonged to Sony and to Steve Wynn, about the trips she and her children took with Michael Jackson to Orlando and Las Vegas, about meeting Elizabeth Taylor, Nelson Mandela, and Prince Albert of Monaco. She seemed to recognize that Mesereau was painting her as a gold digger, and yet could summon up no better response than to go numb. Several of the women on the jury wore reproving expressions when June admitted that her ex-husband Evan Chandler had suggested that the family’s relationship with Michael Jackson could be “a wonderful means for Jordie not having to worry for the rest of his life.”

  Mesereau was still absorbing the realization that June would be the only Chandler called to testify in Santa Maria when Tom Sneddon summoned Janet Arvizo to the stand. “I had a feeling this would be the most important moment of the entire trial,” Mesereau said later. “And I was right.”

  For weeks the jury and the gallery had been watching clips of Janet Arvizo from the rebuttal video that had been shot in the spring of 2003. Two years and twenty pounds later, there was no sign of the giggling coquette whose teased and permed curls, red-lipsticked mouth, and too-tight sweater had given her the look of an oversexed Kewpie doll. This real-life Janet Arvizo was a pear-shaped woman on the cusp of middle age, her broad face scrubbed clean. She wore a baggy pink sweatshirt and had straight dark hair that she had clipped into place with sparkly barrettes better suited for a six-year-old girl.

  Judge Melville prefaced Janet’s testimony by explaining that Mrs. Arvizo was invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and would refuse to answer any questions about welfare fraud or perjury. Mesereau had prepared the jury with an opening statement in which he alleged that Janet Arvizo was a professional scammer who illegally obtained months of welfare payments during a time when she had more than $30,000 in bank accounts, and now was the subject of a criminal investigation that had been initiated by the California Department of Social Services.

  Sneddon delegated the task of rehabilitating Janet Arvizo in the jury’s eyes to his assistant, Ron Zonen, who gave it a heroic effort. The prosecutor’s questions led Janet through a tale of illness, poverty, and abuse that had filled most of her adult life, beginning with her marriage at age sixteen to a drug addict who beat her constantly, broke his own children’s bones, and even tortured their pets. Eventually, though, Zonen had to turn his witness toward the subject at hand, the supposed “captivity” that Janet and her children had endured after Michael Jackson phoned to say he wanted the Arvizos to join him in Miami for a press conference to respond to the Bashir documentary.

  In Janet’s telling, Michael had said her family might be “in danger” after Living with Michael Jackson aired in early February 2003 and that he wanted to place them under his protection because there had been “death threats.” Once they arrived in Florida, Michael decided that no press conference was necessary, but from that moment forward the entire family was under the control of Jackson’s “people,” Janet said. She described being “locked up” in Michael’s huge suite at the Turnberry Resort, where her children spent all their time with Prince and Paris Jackson and the three Cascio kids, Frank, Marie Nicole, and Eddie. The entire time, Janet said, Michael and his adult associates were “scripting” the media response to the Bashir documentary that eventually became the rebuttal video.

  Under Mesereau’s cross-examination, Janet Arvizo used derivations of the word “script” as a verb, noun, or adjective in nearly every answer she gave, no matter how unrelated to the question.

  “Now, Mrs. Arvizo, you said you and your children were neglected and spit on, right?” Mesereau began.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “And who were you referring to?” Mesereau asked.

  “They took elements of my life and my children’s life that were truthful, and they incorporated them into their script,” Janet Arvizo answered. “And this happened in the initial meeting in Miami. They were already in the works on this. It took me a while to find out.”

  Mesereau pressed on: “Who neglected your family?”

  “In this script, everything is scripted,” the witness replied.

  Mesereau tried again: “When you said your family was spit upon, who were you referring to?” the attorney asked.

  “On this rebuttal thing, everything is scripted,” Janet answered. “They took elements of mine and my children’s life which were true, and incorporated them there.”

  “When you said, ‘We weren’t in the right zip code, and we weren’t in the right race,’ what were you referring to?” Mesereau inquired.

  “This was all scripted,” was Janet’s only reply.

  Janet insisted she had no idea that Gavin and his siblings had been interviewed on camera by Martin Bashir before Living with Michael Jackson aired. She conceded that she pursued, then abandoned, a lawsuit against Granada Television for using her children’s images without permission. Janet vehemently insisted that the sexual abuse of Gavin had begun after the Bashir documentary aired, then admitted that she had never seen Michael Jackson do anything sexual with her son, other than lick his hair on the flight from Florida back to California.

  Using a sheaf of receipts provided by Marc Schaffel, Mesereau took Janet through each of the expenses she had rung up while deciding whether to participate in the rebuttal video, allowing Michael Jackson to pay for her family’s extended stay at the Calabasas Country Inn, where they spent their days on shopping sprees and spa treatments, and ate in expensive restaurants nightly. During this period of what she called “captivity,” she had even taken her son Gavin to an appointment to have his braces removed at Mr. Jackson’s expense. Had Mrs. Arvizo considered calling the police to report that she was being held prisoner while she sat in the orthodontist’s office for five hours? Mesereau asked. She hadn’t contacted the authorities because, “Who could believe this?” Janet explained.

  Mesereau chose that moment to play outtakes from the rebuttal video. The jurors appeared riveted by footage in which Janet Arvizo told her children to sit up straight and behave themselves, and in particular a section of tape in which Janet suggested to the videographer that she and Gavin hold hands, then urged the camera to move in for a close-up. Was this footage “scripted,” too? Mesereau asked. Jurors shook their heads as Janet insisted that it was: “Everything on there was choreographed. It’s all acting.” “I’m not a very good actress,” she added a moment later. Mesereau replied, “Oh, I think you are.”

  Janet Arvizo grew steadily more histrionic as the cross-examination continued, turning to the jurors at one point to tell them, “Don’t judge me.” Seemingly out of nowhere, she began to snap her fingers at the jury to punctuate her points. “A number of the jurors told me later that they wanted to tell her, ‘Don’t snap your fingers at me, lady,’” Mesereau recalled.

  Jurors also said later that they were amazed by Janet’s determination to lie about even the smallest detail. During a discussion of her spa treatments in Calabasas, she insisted that she had gotten only a leg wax, then sat sullenly when Mesereau showed her a receipt she had signed for a full body wax. No, it was only a leg wax, Janet said after a few moments. So the receipt was fabricated? Mesereau asked. Janet replied by pointing to Michael Jackson: “He has the ability to choreograph everything.”

  To Mesereau, it seemed a good time to i
ntroduce records showing that Janet Arvizo had collected $19,000 in welfare payments by making false claims about her financial status. The attorney followed this by establishing that the Arvizos had used money donated for Gavin’s cancer treatments to buy a big-screen TV, among other items, then introduced a newspaper article in which Janet had claimed that the family was paying ten times the actual cost of Gavin’s chemotherapy sessions. A typo, Janet insisted. Mesereau had saved for last the evidence he believed would completely destroy Janet Arvizo’s credibility in the jurors’ eyes: She and her family had collected a $152,000 settlement after suing JCPenney for alleged physical and sexual assaults by store security guards, on the basis of lies and falsified evidence.

  Mesereau focused at length on Janet’s assertion in a deposition that one of the security guards had twisted her nipple between ten and twenty-five times. When Janet attempted to explain that there were “inaccuracies” in her deposition and that she had tried to get her attorney to make “corrections” before the case was settled, Mesereau turned her attention to the fact that both of her sons, Gavin and Star, had supported the nipple-twisting story. Star had gone so far as to state under oath that he had to put his mother’s breast “back into her bra” after this abuse, and that he had seen one of the guards grope his mother’s vaginal area. Janet had claimed that the guards punched her repeatedly, using their handcuffs as if they were brass knuckles, and had also said that she saw Gavin and Star being punched by the guards.

  Shortly after these supposed assaults, she was booked into the West Covina city jail, where she was photographed and fingerprinted, recounted Mesereau, who then showed Janet police reports that noted that she showed no sign of injury and did not need medical treatment. Yet only two days later she showed up at an attorney’s office claiming to have been physically and sexually assaulted, and was photographed displaying bruises that covered her arms and legs. Her son Gavin had been photographed at the same time with a broken arm. These photographs were the main evidence of her civil case.