Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Alternate theories deserve consideration. One legitimate possibility was that the secret room was where Michael Jackson came to join those babies on the wall, to be one among them, not necessarily wearing a diaper or sucking on a milk bottle (though such notions couldn’t be simply dismissed in Michael’s case), but to travel back in time as far as it was possible to go, to that point where he could imagine being born again as the child he had so long yearned to be, the one who had grown up on the other side of the window, not in the studio, but on the playground.

  Michael himself had been trying to tell people something like this for the last thirty years of his life. “One of my favorite pastimes is being with children—talking to them, playing games with them in the grass,” he told an interviewer from Melody Maker shortly after the release of Off the Wall. “They’re one of the main reasons I do what I do. They know everything that people are trying to find out—they know so many secrets—but it’s hard for them to get it out. I can recognize them and learn from it.”

  Ultimately, no one could be certain of the truth. Admitting that, though, did not change the fact that the tiny hidden room behind the closet and down the stairs was the best spot on the planet to acknowledge a truth: Of all the answers one might offer to the central question hanging over the memory of Michael Jackson, the one best supported by the evidence was that he had died as a fifty-year-old virgin, never having had sexual intercourse with any man, woman, or child, in a special state of loneliness that was a large part of what made him so unique as an artist and so unhappy as a human being. In that room, a person could choose to mourn for the Michael Jackson who had lived his last fifteen years convinced that he had been found guilty in the court of public opinion, and to permit him the presumption of an innocence he spent his whole life trying to reclaim.

  In that room it would be possible, perhaps, even to grant him the wish that he isn’t sleeping alone tonight.

  Afterword

  The theme of the trial of the man accused in Michael Jackson’s death was the same one that had played out so poignantly in Michael Jackson’s life: Where did the fault lie, in what had been done to Michael, or in what he had done to himself? It had been made clear months in advance that the defense would take the second position, while the prosecution assumed the first.

  In a case where both sides had revealed their strategies well ahead of time, the biggest surprise was that there were any surprises. The most significant had come even before a jury was selected, when Conrad Murray’s defense team was blindsided by a ruling from Judge Michael Pastor stating that he would not permit the testimony of as many as a dozen people the defense had described as “key witnesses,” among them Tohme Tohme and Dr. Arnold Klein. “As much as possible,” Judge Pastor explained, he intended to “limit” the trial to the last seventy-two hours of Michael Jackson’s life.

  The media was nearly as disappointed by the judge’s decision as were Murray and his attorneys. The reporters covering the trial had anticipated that its juiciest moments would come during an examination of Dr. Klein and his medical records. The defense team hadn’t kept it a secret that they intended to convince the jury that Michael Jackson had been reduced to a pathetically vulnerable condition by Klein’s overprescription of narcotics, especially Demerol. As Michael built up greater and greater tolerances to Demerol, Murray’s attorneys planned to argue, his addictive personality had driven him to seek out stronger drugs that included the anesthetic propofol, and eventually to self-administer a fatal overdose.

  Drugs prescribed by Klein had been recovered from Jackson’s home. Those turned out to be muscle relaxants, though, not narcotics. Klein acknowledged administering Demerol to Michael in his office on a regular basis, but continued to insist this had been simply his way of prepping his “needle phobic” patient prior to Botox and Restylane injections. DEA agents spent weeks comparing the narcotics scripts they removed from Klein’s office with the triplicate copies filed with the California attorney general’s office and the state’s medical board was reportedly preparing to initiate an action to suspend Klein’s license. What really had both the media and the Murray defense team salivating, though, was the counterclaim that Jason Pfeiffer had filed against Klein with the bankruptcy court in August 2011, a month before the criminal trial was scheduled to begin. Pfeiffer’s allegations about both Klein’s medical practice and his personal life achieved a whole new level of lurid.

  The most significant of Pfeiffer’s claims in the eyes of the defense lawyers was that Klein regularly sent Michael Jackson out of his office so loaded on Demerol that the star couldn’t walk out the door under his own power. “Several times, Klein told Pfeiffer to help Michael down to the car because Michael was too drugged up and disoriented to stand on his own,” the lawsuit stated. He and the nurses “were worried that Michael was being ‘overmedicated’ by Klein,” according to Pfeiffer, who claimed to have expressed concern for Jackson’s “safety” and been told by Klein to “keep his mouth shut.” The lawsuit also claimed that Klein had attempted to sneak scripts for muscle relaxants to Jackson by writing Pfeiffer’s name on the prescriptions and that the doctor helped Michael try to “get out of a court appearance” (the one scheduled to take place at the Sheikh Abdullah trial in London) by issuing a note based on a fabricated test that his patient was suffering from a staph infection.

  What the Internet media most appreciated were Pfeiffer’s relevations about Klein’s debauched lifestyle: “Dr. Klein searched obsessively for sex partners online and otherwise. From home, his medical offices, and elsewhere, Klein usually spent hours per day online searching for sex. Once home from work, Klein typically stayed awake until 2:00 a.m. or later . . . Klein required that Pfeiffer stay awake with him late into the night dictating e-mails Mr. Pfeiffer was required to send for Dr. Klein to potential sex partners . . . Pfeiffer repeatedly told Klein that he did not want to assist . . . that he needed to sleep. Klein responded by bellowing at Pfeiffer that this was his job, that Pfeiffer would do what he told him, and that Pfeiffer would be fired if he refused. On occasions when Pfeiffer dared to doze off in a chair while Klein was searching the Internet, Dr. Klein threw things at him to wake him up . . .

  “Throughout Mr. Pfeiffer’s employment, Dr. Klein required that Mr. Pfeiffer prepare him for sexual encounters with masseurs, paid escorts and prostitutes, and others. Mr. Pfeiffer was required to prepare Dr. Klein for sex frequently as Dr. Klein generally had several sex partners each week and on occasions multiple partners daily. Klein required that Mr. Pfeiffer wash Klein’s groin, administer Klein’s Cialis, Viagra, and similar prescription drugs, greet and accompany Dr. Klein’s masseurs and other sex partners when they arrived at the Los Angeles or Laguna Beach homes and, as they were leaving, pay masseurs and others on Klein’s behalf.

  “After Dr. Klein had purchased his home in Palm Springs, Klein dispatched Pfeiffer and another employee into the Warm Sands Drive neighborhood to find a man with whom Klein could have sex. [They] returned with a large-bodied homeless man for Klein and a smaller homeless man for the other employee . . .”

  His refusal to submit to Klein’s “unwelcome, unwanted, offensive” sexual advances on him, Pfeiffer claimed, had made him into a target for Klein’s cruel and crude jokes: “In Pfeiffer’s presence, Klein told other male employees that they should urinate on Pfeiffer. ‘Let’s throw Jason in a bathtub and piss on him,’ Klein said, laughing at Pfeiffer. ‘He’ll love it.’”

  Pfeiffer was being quite public about his intention to ruin Arnold Klein. He provided the Daily Beast with prescriptions from two Beverly Hills pharmacies (Mickey Fine being one) that Klein had allegedly written identifying Pfeiffer as his patient and told reporters that he’d never received any such drugs. On his blog, Pfeiffer was not only excoriating the man he called “FrankenKlein,” but also soliciting complaints about Dr. Klein’s professional practices that could be submitted to the medical board of California. Skip Miller, Dr. Klein’s Los Angeles attorney, replied to the fi
ling against his client with the statement that, “All of Jason Pfeiffer’s allegations are false and will be demonstrated to be baseless in court.”

  Reporters assigned to cover the Murray trial imagined that at least a little of this stuff would be admitted into testimony, but such hopes were dashed when Judge Pastor refused to allow even Dr. Klein’s medical records into evidence. Pastor’s ruling meant that what had promised to be a deliciously scandalous trial would now be reduced to “expert testimony,” the outcome hanging on the dry recitations of a pair of physicians whose outlandish egos were their most remarkable qualities.

  The judge “essentially gutted our defense strategy,” Ed Chernoff moaned. Some in the media recognized that Pastor and the prosecution had even done their best to eradicate the most intriguing subtext to the trial, the impact of these proceedings on the wrongful death lawsuit Katherine Jackson had filed against AEG. Within moments after the first AEG executive called as a witness, Paul Gongaware, took the stand, it became obvious that the questions and answers had been choreographed, and that Gongaware would not be asked to say anything that might jeopardize his company’s defense against Mrs. Jackson’s civil action.

  Gongaware, though, was preceded to the witness stand by Kenny Ortega, and there was no way to prevent the “This Is It” director from providing fodder for Mrs. Jackson’s attorneys. Prior to the criminal trial, Katherine Jackson’s lawyers had removed Ortega’s name from the list of defendants in the wrongful death lawsuit, leaving the director with little incentive to skew his testimony in AEG’s favor. The highlight of Ortega’s appearance on the stand was his reading of the June 20, 2009, e-mail to Randy Phillips in which Ortega expressed his mounting concern about Michael Jackson’s mental condition. When the director read aloud, “Everything in me says he should be psychologically evaluated,” then went on to the parts of his e-mail where he pleaded for the intervention of “a strong therapist” and some “physical nurturing,” AEG’s executives only had to observe the triumphant expressions on the faces of the Jackson family to imagine the impact of Ortega’s words on the civil trial to come. The prosecution attempted to provide immediate relief by swinging the weight of Ortega’s testimony toward Conrad Murray. Deputy District Attorney David Walgren prompted the director to recall the meeting with the doctor at which Murray had told him, essentially, to stand aside and let his physician determine whether or not he was ready to work.

  When Gongaware followed Ortega to the stand, the AEG executive was encouraged by the prosecutor to lay the blame for Michael Jackson’s deterioration and death entirely at the feet of Dr. Murray, and at the same time permitted to put the responsibility for Murray’s employment on Jackson himself. He had argued that Jackson should hire a British physician, Gongaware said, but Michael insisted, “I want Dr. Murray.” Gongaware’s description of Murray’s initial demand for a salary of $5 million per year supported the prosecution’s portrait of a physician who was both greedy and reckless. The AEG executive ended his testimony, though, by giving both the prosecution and the defense grist for their mills. His recollection of a meeting with Michael Jackson shortly after rehearsals for the O2 shows began, Gongaware said, was that “Michael had been “a little bit off. His speech was just very slightly slurred and he was a little slower than I’d known him to be.” Jackson said he had just come from seeing his doctor, Gongaware remembered, but the AEG executive couldn’t recall whether the physician in question was Conrad Murray or Arnold Klein.

  From the prosecution’s perspective, Gongaware’s recollection folded nicely into its presentation of an audio file recovered from Murray’s iPhone. He was merely giving them “a taste” of the recorded conversation between Michael Jackson and Conrad Murray, Deputy District Attorney David Walgren had told the jurors when he played it for them during his opening statement. What those in the courtroom heard was Jackson speaking in a voice that was considerably more that “just very slightly slurred” as he attempted to explain what the London concerts were all about. Sounding like a man whose mouth was filled with marbles and molasses, Michael told Murray that the young people of the world were in a state of depression that he intended to treat with the biggest pediatric care facility on the planet, the Michael Jackson Children’s Hospital.

  “My performances will be up there helping children and always be my dream,” Michael mumbled slowly, his words barely comprehensible. “I love them. I love them because I didn’t have a childhood. I had no childhood. I feel their pain. I feel their hurt. I can deal with it. ‘Heal the World,’ ‘We Are the World,’ ‘Will You Be There,’ ‘The Lost Children’ . . . these are songs I’ve written because I hurt, you know. I hurt.”

  Children “don’t have enough hope, no more hope,” he went on, sounding like a record on a turntable that had been unplugged and was slowly coming to a stop. “That’s the next generation that’s going to save our planet, starting with—we’ll talk about it. United States, Europe, Prague, my babies. They walk around with no mother. They drop them off, they leave . . . They reach out to me: ‘Please take me with you.’”

  For all the abandoned children, for his own children, for the child he himself had wanted to be, “We have to be phenomenal [in London],” Michael said, then digressed into a grandiosity that was rendered pathetic by his fading voice. “When people leave this show, when people leave my show, I want them to say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Go. Go. I’ve never seen nothing like this. Go. It’s amazing. He’s the greatest entertainer in the world.’”

  The audio file would be submitted as evidence that the accused was fully aware of Michael Jackson’s “state” even as he continued supplying the entertainer with more and stronger drugs, Deputy DA Walgren explained.

  When Walgren’s examination of Paul Gongaware was finished, the prosecutor summoned AEG lawyer Kathy Jorrie to the witness stand so that she could tell the jury, “Dr. Murray told me repeatedly that Mr. Jackson was in perfect health.”

  With the formal introduction of the iPhone evidence, the prosecution revealed that Dr. Murray’s phone had also yielded the voice mail left by Frank Dileo on the morning of June 20, 2009, the one in which Dileo had told the doctor, “I’m sure you are aware he had an episode last night. He’s sick.”

  In addition to voice mails and audio files, the iPhone had also provided a record of the e-mails and text messages sent and received by Conrad Murray on the morning of Michael Jackson’s death. At 7:03 a.m., while his sleepless patient was still thrashing about in bed, jurors learned, a pair of e-mails had been delivered to Dr. Murray by lawyers working out the details of his $150,000-per-month contract. Even more jarring was the evidence that, at 9:45 a.m., well before Murray knew Jackson was in any distress, he had been reviewing medical records sent from his Las Vegas practice that referenced the care of a patient named “Omar Arnold,” which the jury already knew was the most commonly used of Michael’s drug aliases. Most startling of all, though, was the e-mail Murray had sent to a London insurance broker at 11:17 a.m., more than half an hour after the doctor, by his own account, had administered the dose of propofol that resulted in Jackson’s death: Press reports about the precarious condition of Michael’s health were, Conrad Murray wrote, “fallacious.”

  Before the prosecution moved on from the subject of Murray’s dubious character to the forensic evidence at the heart of its case, David Walgren wanted the jury to hear from the doctor himself, and played the two-and-a-half-hour tape-recorded interview that LAPD Detective Scott Smith and his partner Detective Orlando Martinez had conducted with Murray in a small office off the banquet hall of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey on June 27, 2009.

  The Conrad Murray that the jurors heard on the tape bore little resemblance to either the frenzied, sweaty man described by witnesses to the events surrounding Michael Jackson’s death or the wide-eyed, frightened one they now saw at the defense table. The Murray on the tape was measured, suave even, a distinguished physician seemingly convinced he could explain
to everyone’s satisfaction what had happened. The doctor’s expression as he listened to himself in court, though, made it clear he understood now that the LAPD interview had trapped him in a corner from which there was little chance of escape. Murray’s story of trying to ease the suffering of a patient who was desperate for sleep with benzodiazepine drugs and then finally caving in to Jackson’s pleas for his “milk” with a dose of propofol that was just half the amount Michael normally took was already familiar to most of the people in the courtroom, as was the doctor’s claim that he had left Jackson’s bedside for no more than two minutes while he went to the bathroom, only to return and find that Michael was no longer breathing. On the tape, Murray’s voice grew louder and more intense only when the detectives began to ask why he hadn’t called 911 sooner. Talking to the operator at a time when his patient needed him to be resuscitated would have been a form of neglect, the doctor insisted. Murray also denied taking the time to gather up medicine bottles and the IV bag before calling 911, something that previous witnesses had described in compelling detail. Murray seemed especially intent during the LAPD interview on making the detectives understand that Michael Jackson had been using propofol for years and was very familiar with the anesthetic. He was quite amazed by Mr. Jackson’s “pharmacological knowledge,” the doctor said, and had attempted to use it to his advantage as he weaned Michael off propofol.

  Chernoff made tiny dents in the prosecution case by eliciting an acknowledgment from Detective Smith that the interviews with Michael Amir Williams, Alberto Alvarez, and Faheem Muhammad—all three devastating to Dr. Murray as prosecution witnesses—had taken place days after the coroner’s office made public its finding that Michael Jackson’s death was a homicide. Smith also admitted to Chernoff that he had not said anything to Dr. Murray about propofol found in an IV bag. The defense attorney’s most penetrating questions were about why the LAPD had permitted the Jackson family the run of the Carolwood house for more than twenty-four hours before the coroner’s investigators showed up to retrieve the medical evidence. Smith had no good answers, other than that “given the circumstances” it should hardly come as a surprise that the house had not been locked down.