by Matt Taibbi
When the kid refuses to comply—saying only: “Me and my brother were kind of like ‘Eww,’ because we had never seen a grown man naked before”—Sneddon frowns, clearly pissed, and moves on.
Still, by the time Sneddon is finished with this witness, Jackson looks fucked. Reporters scramble outside to do “Prosecution Roars Back” stand-ups, and even the most skeptical members of the press corps concede that Sneddon might not have to lift a finger for the rest of the trial.
During this testimony, Jackson scarcely moves. Mesereau, for his part, simply bides his time and waits in a seething posture for his cross examination. His demolition of Sneddon’s star witness would prove to be one of the more merciless legal fraggings you’ll ever see in an American courtroom. He gets Freddy to admit that something he had testified Michael Jackson told him—that “if a man doesn’t masturbate, he can get to the point where he might rape a girl”—had actually been told to him by his grandmother.
He gets the boy to admit that he told the dean of his middle school, a Mr. Alpert, that “nothing had ever happened sexually with Mr. Jackson.”
Mesereau asks about the alleged period of false imprisonment at Calabasas and Neverland. Sneddon sinks in his chair when Freddy answers, “I never wanted to leave. I was having too much fun.”
Then there is the timeline of the actual abuse: Mesereau gets the boy to admit that he initially told investigators that the abuse had happened before the alleged false imprisonment and the rebuttal video, then later changed his story. “To this day,” Freddy says, “I don’t remember exactly when everything happened.”
Mesereau then does a cunning thing. He leads the boy through a history of all his disciplinary problems in middle school. Freddy, it appears, was a pain in the ass to almost every teacher in his junior high: talking back and being disruptive and generally disrespecting authority. Mesereau slyly assumes the role of an accusing teacher and manages to coax out on the stand the above-it-all classroom smartass who only a few days before played the part of the mute, helpless child ruthlessly taken advantage of by an adult sexual predator.
Every disagreement he had ever had with a teacher, Freddy contends, was the teacher’s fault. Mr. Geralt ran his class like a drill sergeant, which was why the boy had stood up in class and said that Mr. Geralt “had his balls in his mouth.” He brags about arguing in Mrs. Slaughter’s class (“A lot of the times, I would stand up to the teachers, and the kids would, like, congratulate me”).
“Did you have problems in Mr. Finklestein’s class?” Mesereau asks.
“Everyone had problems in Mr. Finklestein’s class,” Freddy snaps.
“Did you have problems in Mr. Finklestein’s class?” Mesereau coldly repeats.
“If everyone had a problem,” the boy sneers, “then I’d be one of them, right?”
Later, Mesereau plays the entire rebuttal video for Freddy, stopping every few moments. Since it is the prosecution’s case that the family was told to lie in the video, Mesereau decides to get the boy to explain to the jury exactly where everyone was lying and where everyone was telling the truth—the obvious point being that it was very difficult to tell.
It’s a savage courtroom scene, and the boy withers visibly as it wears on. When the jury sees Freddy claiming on the video that “he used to pray that he would meet Michael Jackson,” Mesereau stops the DVD and asks, “Were you lying here?”
“I didn’t actually pray to meet Michael Jackson,” the boy mutters.
It goes on like this for another forty minutes. Freddy’s performance is so atrocious that even Judge Melville wakes up. Until this point, Melville seldom looked anything but pained, apparently mourning the lost dignity of the legal profession. But during Freddy’s cross examination, Melville’s impatience with the prosecution is suddenly palpable. Usually, he takes ten quiet seconds before ruling on any objection, but after a few hours of this witness, his trigger finger gets very itchy, instantly blasting even the more reasonable of Sneddon’s occasional objections. At one point, Mesereau asks the boy about his history teacher: “She complained that you were defiant on a regular basis and disrespectful, is that correct?”
Even I expect an objection to this; Mesereau is asking and answering.
“Your Honor, objection,” Sneddon says. “Asked and answ—”
“Overruled,” Melville snaps, glaring at the boy. “You may answer.”
By the end of the day, Sneddon is slumped so far in his seat that his shoulders are almost below the armrests. His humiliation is total when Mesereau asks the boy if it is true that he once wanted to be an actor. “Yes,” he says. “But now that I’ve seen other careers, I want to be in law enforcement.”
By the time Freddy steps down, the trial is only twelve days old. It was impossible to say who was winning or losing; one forgets, after all, that these things are decided by a jury, which in this case looks mostly like a row of immobile elderly white women who might think they’re judging the Lindbergh kidnapper.
Or one hopes they think that, for their sake. The elderly should be spared spectacles like the Jackson trial. This case is the ultimate sizzling shit pile of American society: It is what our culture of gross celebrity worship looks like when it comes out the other end. A pop star gone sideways under the lights, maggots nibbling at his fortune, hourly underpants updates on cable, industry insiders trading phone numbers over drinks, and boy orgasms. And people like me writing about it all. We’re the worst America has to offer—and we’re all here.
Four Amendments and a Funeral
A month inside the house of horrors that is Congress
August 25, 2005
It was a fairy-tale political season for George W. Bush, and it seemed like no one in the world noticed. Amid bombs in London, bloodshed in Iraq, a missing blonde in Aruba, and a scandal curling up on the doorstep of Karl Rove, Bush’s Republican Party quietly celebrated a massacre on Capitol Hill. Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams of the Washington Insiders Club—an energy bill and a much-delayed highway bill—breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass through the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist scene. And accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition, a second version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both houses of Congress, with most of the law being made permanent this time.
Bush’s summer bills were extraordinary pieces of legislation, broad in scope, transparently brazen, and audaciously indulgent. They gave an energy industry drowning in the most obscene profits in its history billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, including $2.9 billion for the coal industry. The highway bill set new standards for monstrous and indefensibly wasteful spending, with Congress allocating $100,000 for a single traffic light in Canoga Park, California, and $223 million for the construction of a bridge linking the mainland to an Alaskan island with a population of just fifty.
It was a veritable bonfire of public money, and it raged with all the brilliance of an Alabama book burning. And what fueled it all were the little details you never heard about. The energy bill alone was 1,724 pages long. By the time the newspapers reduced this Tolstoyan monster to the size of a single headline announcing its passage, only a very few Americans understood that it was an ambitious giveaway to energy interests. Yet the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes.
To understand the breadth of Bush’s summer sweep, you had to watch the hand fighting at close range. You had to watch opposition gambits die slow deaths in afternoon committee hearings, listen as members fell on their swords in exchange for favors, and be there to see hordes of lobbyists rush in to reverse key votes at the last minute. All of these things I did—with the help of a tour guide.
“Nobody knows how this place is run,” says Representative Bernie Sanders. “If they did, they’d go nuts.”
Sanders is a tall, angular man with a messy head of gull-white hair and a circa-1977 set of big-framed eyeglasses. Minus the austere congressional office, you might mistake him for a physics professor or a journalist of the Jimmy Breslin school.
Vermont’s sole representative in the House, Sanders is expected to become the first Independent ever elected to the U.S. Senate next year. He is something of a cause célèbre on both the left and the right these days, with each side overreacting to varying degrees to the idea of a self-described “democratic socialist” coming so near to a seat in the upper house.
Some months before, a Sanders aide had tried to sell me on a story about his boss, but over lunch we ended up talking about Congress itself. Like a lot of people who have worked on the Hill a little too long, the aide had a strange look in his eyes—the desperate look of a man who’s been marooned on a remote island, subsisting on bugs and abalone for years on end. You worry that he might grab your lapel in frustration at any moment. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “Worse than you can possibly imagine. The things that go on . . .”
Some time later I came back to the aide and told him that a standard campaign-season political profile was something I probably couldn’t do, but if Sanders would be willing to give me an insider’s guided tour of the horrors of Congress I’d be interested.
“Like an evil, adult version of Schoolhouse Rock,” I said.
The aide laughed and explained that the best time for me to go would be just before the summer recess, a period when Congress rushes to pass a number of appropriations bills. “It’s like orgy season,” he said. “You won’t want to miss that.”
I thought Sanders would be an ideal subject for a variety of reasons but mainly for his Independent status. For all the fuss over his “socialist” tag, Sanders is really a classic populist outsider. The mere fact that Sanders signed off on the idea of serving as my guide says a lot about his attitude toward government in general: he wants people to see exactly what he’s up against.
I had no way of knowing that Sanders would be a perfect subject for another, more compelling reason. In the first few weeks of my stay in Washington, Sanders introduced and passed, against very long odds, three important amendments. A fourth very nearly made it and would have passed had it gone to a vote. During this time, Sanders took on powerful adversaries, including Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, the Export-Import Bank, and the Bush administration. And by using the basic tools of democracy—floor votes on clearly posed questions, with the aid of painstakingly built coalitions of allies from both sides of the aisle—he, a lone Independent, beat them all.
It was an impressive run, with some in his office calling it the best winning streak of his career. Except for one thing.
By my last week in Washington all of his victories had been rolled back, each carefully nurtured amendment perishing in the grossly corrupt and absurd vortex of political dysfunction that is today’s U.S. Congress. What began as a tale of political valor ended as a grotesque object lesson in the ugly realities of American politics—the pitfalls of digging for hope in a shit mountain.
Sanders, to his credit, was still glad that I had come. “It’s good that you saw this,” he said. “People need to know.”
Amendment 1
At 2 p.m. on Wednesday, July 20, Sanders leaves his office in the Rayburn Building and heads down a tunnel passageway to the Capitol, en route to a Rules Committee hearing. “People have this impression that you can raise any amendment you want,” he says. “They say, ‘Why aren’t you doing something about this?’ That’s not the way the system works.”
Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators’ time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bills. Rather than write their own antiterrorism bill, for instance, lawmakers will try to amend the Patriot Act, either by creating a new clause in the law or by expanding or limiting some existing provision. The bill that ultimately becomes law is an aggregate of the original legislation and all the amendments offered and passed by all the different congresspersons along the way.
Sanders is the amendment king of the current House of Representatives. Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, no other lawmaker—not Tom DeLay, not Nancy Pelosi—has passed more roll-call amendments (amendments that actually went to a vote on the floor) than Bernie Sanders. He accomplishes this by on the one hand being relentlessly active and on the other by using his status as an Independent to form left-right coalitions.
On this particular day, Sanders carries with him an amendment to Section 215 of the second version of the Patriot Act, which is due to go to the House floor for a reauthorization vote the next day. Unlike many such measures, which are often arcane and shrouded in minutiae, the Sanders amendment is simple, a proposed rollback of one of the Patriot Act’s most egregious powers. Section 215 allows law enforcement to conduct broad searches of ordinary citizens—even those not suspected of ties to terrorism—without any judicial oversight at all. To a civil libertarian like Sanders, it is probably a gross insult that at as late a date as the year 2005 he still has to spend his time defending a concept like probable cause before an ostensibly enlightened legislature. But the legislation itself will prove not half as insulting as the roadblocks he must overcome to force a vote on the issue.
The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world’s outstanding bureaucratic abomination—a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. The official function of the committee is to decide which bills and amendments will be voted on by Congress and also to schedule the parameters of debate. If Rules votes against your amendment, your amendment dies. If you control the Rules Committee, you control Congress.
The committee has nine majority members and four minority members. But in fact only one of these thirteen people matters. Unlike on most committees, whose chairmen are usually chosen on the basis of seniority, the Rules chairman is the appointee of the Speaker of the House.
The current chairman, David Dreier, is a pencil-necked Christian Scientist from southern California, with exquisite hygiene and a passion for brightly colored ties. While a dependable enough yes-man to have remained Rules chairman for six years now, he is basically a human appendage, a prosthetic attachment on the person of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. “David carries out the wishes of the Republican leadership right down the line,” said former Texas congressman Martin Frost, until last year the committee’s ranking Democrat.
There is no proven method of influencing the Rules Committee. In fact, in taking on the committee, Democrats and Independents like Sanders normally have only one weapon at their disposal.
“Shame,” says James McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat and one of the minority members on the committee. “Once in a great while we can shame them into allowing a vote on something or other.”
The Rules Committee meets in a squalid space the size of a high school classroom, with poor lighting and nothing on the walls but lifeless landscapes and portraits of stern-looking congressmen of yore. The grim setting is an important part of the committee’s character. In the vast, majestic complex that is the U.S. Capitol—an awesome structure where every chance turn leads to architectural wonderment—the room where perhaps the most crucial decisions of all are made is a dark, seldom-visited hole in the shadow of the press gallery.
The committee is the last stop on the legislative express, a kind of border outpost where bills are held up before they are allowed to pass into law. It meets sporadically, convening when a bill is ready to be sent to the floor for a vote.
Around 3 p.m., Sanders emerges from this hole into the h
allway. For the last hour or so he has been sitting with his hands folded on his lap in a corner of the cramped committee room, listening as a parade of witnesses and committee members babbled on in stream-of-consciousness fashion about the vagaries of the Patriot Act. He heard, for instance, Texas Republican Pete Sessions explain his “philosophy” of how to deal with terrorists, which includes, he said, “killing them or removing them from the country.”
Tom Cole of Oklahoma, another Republican committee member, breathlessly congratulated witnesses who had helped prepare the act. “This is a very important piece of legislation,” he drawled. “Y’all have done a really good job.”
Nodding bashfully in agreement with Cole’s words was Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner Jr. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sensenbrenner is the majority lawmaker in whose scaly womb the Patriot Act gestated until its recent delivery to Rules. Though he was here as a witness, his obvious purpose was to bare his fangs in the direction of anyone or anything who would threaten his offspring.
Sensenbrenner is your basic Fat Evil Prick, perfectly cast as a dictatorial committee chairman. He has the requisite moist-with-sweat pink neck, the dour expression, the penchant for pointless bile and vengefulness. Only a month before, on June 10, Sensenbrenner suddenly decided he’d heard enough during a Judiciary Committee hearing on the Patriot Act and went completely Tasmanian devil on a group of Democratic witnesses who had come to share stories of abuses at places such as Guantánamo Bay. Apparently not wanting to hear any of that stuff, Sensenbrenner got up mid-meeting and killed the lights, turned off the microphones, and shut down the C-Span feed before marching his fellow Republicans out of the room—leaving the Democrats and their witnesses in the dark.
