Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  The Arvizos’ proven pattern of lying under oath was by itself grounds for acquittal in this case, Mesereau told the jurors. It was a proven fact that the Arvizo children had lied at their mother’s behest to further a civil lawsuit filed against JCPenney. And Gavin Arvizo had been the most persuasive among them in telling those lies: “He was very young, he was very street-smart, he had been schooled by his parents.” The JCPenney lawsuit served as a training program for the Arvizos, Mesereau said, one that had prepared them to take down Michael Jackson in the “the biggest con of their careers.”

  The attorney knew that in the end he would have to bring his argument back to the character of the defendant. Mesereau told the jury: “If you look in your hearts, do you believe Michael Jackson is evil in that way?” Mesereau asked as he approached the end of his speech. “Is it even possible? It really is not. If you look deep in your heart, do you think it’s even remotely possible that he’s built that way?”

  The judge had instructed them to bear in mind that this wasn’t a civil case in which the issue before them was a preponderance of evidence, the attorney observed. Even by that standard, Michael Jackson should prevail. But at this criminal trial the standard was proof beyond a reasonable doubt, Mesereau reminded the jurors, meaning that, “If you have the slightest suspicion [about his guilt], Mr. Jackson must go home. He must go free.”

  Court TV’s Nancy Grace, a pioneer in the transformation of criminal trial coverage into serial evening soap opera, flatly predicted that Michael Jackson would be found guilty on most if not all of the ten felony and four misdemeanor counts that had gone to the jury. And her counterpart on Fox News, former prosecutor Wendy Murphy, was every bit as sure: “There is no question we will see convictions here.” Virtually no dissent from these opinions was heard on television or read in newspapers. Only a handful of commentators even admitted uncertainty.

  “You have to remember how invested the media was in seeing Michael convicted,” Mesereau said. “The story just wasn’t as good if he was acquitted.” Coverage of the Michael Jackson trial had rivaled the O. J. Simpson murder case in terms of media saturation. The twenty-four-hour coverage kicked in from the moment of the Neverland Ranch raid. Only CNN broke away from Michael Jackson coverage to a press conference shortly afterward at which George Bush and Tony Blair stood side by side to brief the world on a terrorist attack in Turkey. Within weeks of Jackson’s arrest, ABC, CBS, and NBC all had churned out hour-long specials on the accusations against the entertainer. Daily Variety called the Jackson sex scandal “a godsend [for] cable new channels and local stations looking to pump up Nielsen numbers in the final week of the all-important November sweeps.” On December 18, 2003, the date that the criminal charges against Michael Jackson were formally filed, Judge Melville’s court administrator came outside with only five hundred copies and “had to be rescued by sheriff’s deputies,” as the judge recalled it, “after being overrun by the media.”

  The jury was still out on the evening of June 10, when Tom Sneddon and his team gathered for their “celebration dinner” at northern Santa Barbara County’s top steak house,the Hitching Post in Buellton. Heady with the praise of their presentation that was being broadcast on one cable news network after another, the prosecutors not only toasted one another repeatedly but seemed to enjoy the audience of television correspondents who kibbitzed from the bar area. Mesereau and Yu, meanwhile, appeared to have gone underground. The defense attorneys wouldn’t even answer their cell phones. “There really wasn’t anything to do but wait,” Mesereau explained. “We ate in our condos.”

  Over the weekend, as the jury’s deliberations passed the one-week mark, cable news operations reported that the jury had been requesting “read backs” of testimony, mostly from prosecution witnesses. On MSNBC, Mesereau’s friend Ron Richards, one of the few pundits who had predicted acquittals, said he was becoming “nervous for the defense.”

  Just after noon on June 13, 2005, word came that the jury had reached verdicts on all counts. Judge Melville ordered that the parties be present in his courtroom at 1:30 p.m.

  Preparations for the media frenzy that would engulf the delivery of the jury’s verdicts at the courthouse in Santa Maria would have suited the theaters either of the absurd or of the grotesque. A security detail that now included the Santa Maria Police Department, the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department, and the interagency Santa Barbara Mobile Field Force, replete with flak-jacketed SWAT teams and bomb-sniffing dogs, herded the hundreds of reporters who had been denied seats in the courtroom and the “overflow room” into the holding pens that surrounded the courthouse. An escalating scale of “County Impact Fees” were paid by those who won the four pool camera positions in the courthouse or the fifty-two TV camera stations outside the front entrance or the fifty kneeling-still camera spots in front of those. There was even a “helicopter pool.” Plans were put together for a jury news conference, a prosecution news conference, and a defense news conference—as well as for camera positions at the county jail, should those be necessary. Gaining access to even the most remote fringes of the tented “Media Area” required reporters to run a staggering gauntlet of rules, regulations, signature sheets, and inspections.

  As the appointed hour ticked past, the networks reported that Michael Jackson would be arriving late at the courthouse. Helicopter cameras tracked the motorcade of black SUVs that made its way from Neverland toward Santa Maria. The sheriff’s deputies in charge of crowd control barked orders at the media horde and snarled commands to the legion of Michael Jackson fans that had arranged itself in assorted camps wherever there was open space near the courthouse. Fans pressed as close as they could to the Cyclone fence and steel gate that protected the entrance to the courthouse parking lot, awaiting the defendant’s arrival. The fans appeared “apprehensive,” one television correspondent after another told viewers. The crowd roused themselves to boo and jeer when Sneddon and the prosecution team arrived at the courthouse. They chanted, “Liar! Liar! Liar!” at various reporters and commentators who were considered to be especially prejudiced against Michael. Quoting “law enforcement sources,” at least two cable channels reported that the Santa Maria authorities were concerned that the fans might attack certain members of the media if Michael Jackson was convicted.

  Mesereau and Yu had come out of the courthouse to wait in the parking lot by the time Michael’s black Suburban finally pulled through the gate. Many of the fans brandished either camcorders or cell phone cameras. The sunlight glinting off all that shiny metal, combined with the wailing cheer that erupted from their numbers when Michael stepped out of the SUV, produced atmospherics that suggested the siege of an ancient city.

  Haggard, gaunt, and heavily made up, Michael moved forward in tiny steps, surrounded by bodyguards who seemed to be keeping him on his feet. Behind his mirrored sunglasses and beneath his black umbrella, he followed Mesereau and Yu to the courthouse entrance. Before walking through the doors, Michael turned to wave to his fans, summoning up a slight smile as their cheers and screams rose to deafening volume. That smile was gone, though, the moment he stepped inside.

  “He was strained beyond description,” Mesereau recalled. “He looked more emaciated, more frail, more out of it than I had ever seen him.” The dazed expression and robotic movements evidenced an unprecedented level of self-medication. “I don’t know if he was on drugs,” Mesereau said, “but if he was, who could blame him?”

  The six seats inside the courtroom reserved for the Jackson family were taken by Joe and Katherine, Randy, Tito, Rebbie, and La Toya, who managed to spend more time in front of the cameras that day than all the others combined. Janet Jackson waited outside.

  Eleven deputies wearing sidearms spread out around the courtroom as the eight women and four men of the jury filed into their seats. At 2:10 p.m. the verdict envelopes were delivered to Judge Melville, who opened and read each one without expression. Tears welled in the eyes of several female jurors. “Every secon
d seemed to last ten hours,” Mesereau remembered. Melville finally handed the verdict sheets to his clerk, Lorna Ray, who read them aloud from the top. “Count One: Conspiracy—Not Guilty. Count Two: Lewd Act upon a Child—Not Guilty. Count Three . . . Not Guilty.” Michael Jackson had been acquitted on all counts.

  The media at first couldn’t believe it, then wouldn’t believe it. An incompetent, overawed jury was the default explanation offered up by experts who had predicted multiple convictions. “Not guilty by reason of celebrity,” was the way Nancy Grace described the verdict on Court TV. “I don’t think the jurors even understand how influenced they were by who Michael Jackson is,” Wendy Murphy chimed in on Fox News. In New York, the Daily News and the Post ran their stories on the verdict under the very same headline: “Boy, Oh, Boy!” Those newspapers were restrained by comparison to London tabloids, which baldly asserted that Jacko “got away with it” and excoriated “what they laughably call American justice.”

  On the morning after, Diane Sawyer of ABC’s Good Morning America actually tried to convince jurors that Michael Jackson’s enormous fame had overwhelmed them: “Are you sure? Are you sure this gigantically known guy walking into the room had no influence at all?” Tom Sneddon took to invoking “the celebrity factor” in each and every interview he gave, in which he also denied any personal responsibility.

  In interview after interview, the jurors made it clear that they were insulted by questions about whether they had been swayed by Michael Jackson’s celebrity, and insisted their verdicts had been based on the facts of the case. Jury foreman Paul Rodriguez said that the videotape of Gavin Arvizo’s police interview had been the single most significant piece of evidence, and that he and the other jurors had viewed it multiple times. The boy simply hadn’t been believable, Rodriguez explained. Nearly every one of the jury’s eight women described Janet Arvizo as both despicable and dishonest. Several jurors said they saw the Arvizos as a family of professional grifters who had tried to frame Michael Jackson. Other members of the panel told reporters that there was no compelling proof of sexual abuse. A few complained that the prosecution had used tawdry evidence that had little relevance to the case before the court in order to mock, insult, and degrade the famous defendant.

  The media’s reporting (and posturing) held sway in the immediate aftermath of the verdicts. A Gallup Poll taken hours after Michael Jackson’s acquittal showed that 48 percent of the country (and 54 percent of white Americans) disagreed with the jury’s verdict. More than 60 percent said they believed Jackson’s celebrity was a major reason the panel had voted not guilty on every count. A third of those polled said they were “saddened” by the verdict, and a quarter said they were “outraged.”

  “We were all oblivious to what was being said in the media that first afternoon and evening,” Mesereau recalled. The Jackson family, along with Mesereau, Yu, and a handful of invited guests, headed straight back to Neverland. They were awaited by the members of a staff that had lined the ranch’s driveway, holding hands, only a couple of hours earlier, when they sent Michael off to the courthouse without knowing whether they would ever see him again.

  The crowd of fans at the gate was so thick and so raucous that Michael’s security team had to help Mesereau and Yu pass through. Inside the main house, though, the atmosphere was remarkably subdued. “It wasn’t really a celebration,” Mesereau remembered. “It was more spiritual, very quiet, very calm—almost serene. Everyone was thanking God.” Mesereau believed that religious faith—Katherine’s religious faith, really—had been what had most sustained Michael during the past nineteen months. “His mother would tell him in a soft voice, but very firmly, that God was with him,” Mesereau recalled. “And I could see the way that soothed Michael. Joe would shake his fist and tell him to keep fighting, but I don’t think that really did a lot of good. Michael wasn’t that person. He wasn’t a fighter. The gentle approach is what worked for him.”

  After letting “Michael’s kids crawl all over me” for a couple of hours, Mesereau returned to his condo and went to bed early, so he could be up at 2 a.m. to begin an all-day schedule of television interviews. Neither Mesereau’s triumph nor Jackson’s deliverance were greeted with much enthusiasm, though, by either the American media or the American public. “You cost the worldwide media billions,” Berry Gordy told Mesereau. “We have a less interesting story now,” CNN head Jonathan Klein said to his lieutenants on the afternoon of the verdicts. Klein was proven correct that very evening, when three broadcast networks rushed Michael Jackson acquittal specials onto the air only to see them outperformed in ratings by Fox’s rerun of Nanny 911.

  The competence and integrity of the Jackson trial jury would be questioned for weeks, even months, after the verdicts were delivered. Wendy Murphy suggested that the jurors “should take IQ tests.” Ron Zonen described the Jackson jury as inferior to those he usually dealt with in Santa Barbara County. The length of the trial meant that those who led full lives, people with important jobs and those who ran businesses, could not make the expected six-month commitment. “So we were left with the unemployed, the underemployed, and the retired,” Zonen said. “It certainly wasn’t a jury that was as educated or accomplished as I’m used to seeing.”

  Mesereau accused Zonen of calling the jurors “idiots” and retorted that the panel included a civil engineer, a man with a master’s degree in mathematics, and a retired school principal. “I thought it was a very intelligent jury,” Mesereau said. “They paid good attention, took excellent notes, and deliberated for almost nine days.”

  The district attorney’s office had discovered later that some of the jurors read newspapers during the trial even though they were instructed not to, Zonen said, and that one juror was negotiating a book deal while the trial was in progress. Even if Michael Jackson had been convicted, Zonen said, the verdict would probably have been overturned. Judge Melville offered no opinion on that, instead simply observing the “incredible pressure” that the jury had coped with during the Michael Jackson trial. “We had jurors who reported being followed home by suspicious cars,” Melville said, “and others who said that flowers were sent to their homes with notes attached inviting them to appear on this or that TV talk show.”

  Mesereau would be as taken aback as anyone else when, weeks after Michael Jackson’s acquittal, two jurors appeared on MSNBC to say they thought Jackson was guilty, but had voted for acquittal because they felt pressured by other members of the panel. Three of their fellow jurors were such devoted Michael Jackson fans that they had made it clear early on they would never vote to convict him, Eleanor Cook and Ray Hultman said; one woman on the panel even referred to the defendant as “my Michael.” They had caved, Hultman and Cook said, when the jury foreman threatened to have them removed unless they voted for acquittal. At the same time, both Cook, who was seventy-nine years old, and Hultman, who was sixty-two, admitted they had been shopping books and that their deals had fallen apart when Jackson was found not guilty. Cook revealed that she had brought in a medical text during deliberations in order to convince the other jurors that Jackson fit the definition of a pedophile.

  Mesereau called the two jurors’ televised remarks “absurd,” and noted that they had been among the most outspoken proponents of Michael Jackson’s innocence when he spoke with the panel immediately after the trial. “The other jurors were upset with them, to put it mildly,” Mesereau recalled.

  The guest of honor was nowhere to be seen at the Jackson family celebration of Michael’s acquittal held at the Chumash Casino Resort near Santa Ynez on the evening of June 17. Tito and his band performed and Janet shook hands with her brother’s fans, while Katherine Jackson assured them, “We couldn’t have done it without you.” Nearly every news organization that took note of the party, though, led with the report that one of the jurors had attended, and was quoted as saying she had blinked back tears when “Beat It” began to play on the sound system.

  At Mesereau’s urging, Michael had l
eft Neverland less than forty-eight hours after his acquittal. “I just had this gut feeling that the authorities in Santa Barbara weren’t going to let it go, that they were going to find a way to make a new case against Michael,” Mesereau said. In fact, Sneddon and his associates were already discussing how they might charge Jackson for obtaining prescription drugs under false names. A preliminary investigation of this possibility would last well into the next autumn. After a series of phone conversations with Grace Rwaramba and other intermediaries, Mesereau spoke to Michael on the evening of June 15: “I told him, ‘Michael, I know how much Neverland means to you. And that it’s a glorious, enchanted place, and that you’ve known real peace there. But I really believe that its time in your life is passed. We all have to move on. You have to move on. I don’t think you’ll ever be really safe there again. Go somewhere else.’”

  Two days later, Jackson’s passport and the $300,000 posted to secure his bail were returned to him and he began to make plans to travel overseas. He had become convinced by then that he was no longer really welcome in the United States.

  As a Washington Post editorial put it, “An acquittal doesn’t clear his name, it only muddies the water.” Wendy Murphy described Jackson on Fox News as “a Teflon monster,” and accused jurors of “putting targets on the backs of all—especially highly vulnerable—kids that will now come into Michael Jackson’s life.” In the New York Post, Diane Dimond wrote that Jackson was more dangerous now than ever before: “He walked out of court a free man, not guilty on all counts. But Michael Jackson is so much more than free. He now has carte blanche to live his life any way he wants, with whomever he wants . . .” Maureen Orth reported in Vanity Fair that Michael Jackson was in discussions to put together a world tour called “Framed!” in order to restore his shattered finances. “That was the most ridiculous of all the things reported about Michael,” said Dieter Wiesner. “A world tour was the very last thing Michael would have wanted to do.”