dannyboy72
Proud Member
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2011
- Messages
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Tom Mesereau:
First of all, I want to thank the Los Angeles County Bar Association for inviting me, and this is a great panel. Needless to say, I have a very different perspective of what you’ve just heard. I don’t believe for one second that Michael Jackson molested any of these people, and neither did 12 jurors in Santa Maria, California. They acquitted him of 10 indicted felonies, and 4 lesser included misdemeanors. They couldn’t get him on a misdemeanor. He was innocent! Now, as far as the media is concerned, and I know that I don’t have a lot of time, but I will tell you a few things about my approach to the media in this case. I was brought in eventually by Randy Jackson, who I had known for years. Randy called and wanted me to meet him and his brother. He’s a very smart guy, and he said to me that “We don’t like what our lawyers are doing with the media. We don’t trust what’s going on.” In fact he told me that during the first court appearance he was at, some lawyers ran out of the building and shoved him out of the way to get in front of the camera. Which he didn’t appreciate or like, nor did he think it was in his brother’s interest, to have this sort of behavior. One of the things he said he liked about me and my partner Susan Yu was that he didn’t think we were “camera mad”. He didn’t think we were the kind of people who were basically going to put our own interest for fame and fortune over his brother’s. And the first thing I learned when I met he and his brother is this: be very careful of the media. Be very careful of their desire to seduce, be very careful of their desire to profit off of the demise of the defendant. Be real careful. It became clear to me that we were never going to win a battle with the media.
Now I understand that there has been some discussion that Mark Geragos has been on TV, but let me tell you something: the media worldwide were out to get Michael Jackson. The money was in a conviction. Berry Gordy, who founded MoTown, told me after the acquittals that “You cost the worldwide media billions by those Not Guilty verdicts. Because the kind of copy that his being convicted, remanded to jail, the buildup to a sentencing, which would have been the biggest sentencing in world history, is something they wanted. This was big, big business. They were doing everything could to spin a conviction. And it became very clear to me that you were never going to manipulate the media, or win a case in the media. Nor should you try to. Because I think this idea that the media wins cases is grossly overrated. Because the media said that Robert Blake would be convicted, OJ Simpson would be convicted, Michael Jackson would be convicted.
If you get carried away with spinning the media, you could lose focus of where it really, really is most important, and that is inside the courtroom. 13 people; the judge and the jury. I supported the gag order in the case. I dismissed Mr. Geragos’ appeal of the gag order. I did that for a lot of reasons. First of all, in a big case, if you’re dealing with the media, they can really zap your energy. I mean, in a particularly if you have an entertainer client who is used to dealing with the media. Who thinks trials are what you see on TV, as most people in the entertainment industry do. They can want you to respond to all of these media attacks, and you can spend 24 hours a day doing that, and detract from your ability to prepare for what’s happening in the courtroom, which is where the cases are won or lost. So I supported the gag order. I didn’t want to have to respond to media requests. I didn’t think we had time to. Honestly, I didn’t want Judge Melville to think I was a pain in the neck. Obviously, he wanted that gag order. And my feeling was “Why make the judge think that you’re out to dramatize everything and make things a lot more difficult.” So I supported the gag order.
I thought the process that Judge Melville had in effect where if you wanted to make a statement because something prejudicial was out there, you submitted a statement to the other side and to him, and you had a quick discussion, which we would have. Judge Melville gave us his home phone, so we would have a discussion about whether or not a statement should be made very quickly. He was always available to address that issue. And as he said, he never denied us. There was some haggling over some language sometimes, but nothing major. I think it went very well. I think the unique procedure he had about filing motions and pleadings that you could not find salacious pleadings. You would file your original pleading under seal. You would file your second pleading, which was a redacted version of the first one, which had to be prepared according to certain guidelines that Judge Melville had which were designed to keep the salacious stuff out. And you had to find a third pleading, which was a motion to seal. It was a very unique procedure. I thought it worked very well, and I do commend Judge Melville for a very, very amazingly effective way of handling this media onslaught.
As I said before, I had never tried a case in that county, and we did a few phone surveys at the beginning through a jury consultant to try to determine just what people were thinking and feeling. And again, we all do our job when we have to do it, but with all due respect, that settlement was an albatross around my neck, I discovered because the typical profile of a pro-prosecution juror would indicate that the thing that bothered that profiled juror the most was that settlement. The feeling being “Who pays that kind of money if they’re innocent?” When we profiled the typical pro-defense juror, the thing that bothered them the most was the same thing! “Why was all this money paid if you’re innocent?” I did issue a press release, and made a public statement, with Judge Melville’s permission of course. I had to do that. It was bothering too many people. And I basically said that Mr. Jackson had entered into that settlement because business advisors had told him to. They weren’t writing the check. They wanted him to get going in to his business life and stop getting derailed by this very salacious legal proceeding, and that he regretted doing it. It’s something that I just had to do because, in my opinion, it was killing us. Now he had reasons for doing that. The $20 million, many people thought, was a drop in the bucket given what he owned, and what he had, and what he could earn in the future. But nevertheless, it did bother a lot of people. So I did have to address that issue.
Media were constantly trying to get involved. Constantly trying to get to me through various people, various means. I’ll never forget one call from this idiot, who got my cell phone number, and I don’t know who, and he was very, very straight forward. He said “If you give me some hot documents, I’ll tell you who in the prosecuting office is sleeping with the media!” I said “I don’t care who they’re sleeping with! There’s a gag order!”, and I hung up. But there were constant efforts to try to find a way to profit off of this case. Linda Duetch, who I have a great respect for, who is really the Dean of trial reporters with the Associated Press, who began with the Manson case, and she’s followed virtually every major case since then. She told me it was a dreadful experience. She said she hated the Jackson trial. She lived in a nearby hotel. She said that she never saw so many gloating over the fact that they were going to profit off of this case, and it just really disturbed her. The extraordinary tabloid-ization of everything that happened in the case. But anyway, by supporting the gag order, I could tell Michael and his family “I can’t address that issue. We have to win this case in the courtroom. We’re not allowed to.” It was a great relief to me to be able to follow that course because as I said before “You win these cases with juries. You don’t win them with the media, in my opinion.” You want to be concerned with the media. You want to get some good information out if you can. You want to level the table if you can. But don’t get too carried away with it. You lose focus. You’ll start to think it’s all about you. It’s not about you; it’s about your client. And I think we handled that very well.
Now, Susan Yu, my co-counsel and law partner, had her own condo not far from the courthouse. Good distance from the hotels. I had my condo. Our staff had their condos. We had one duplex that we called the war room, and basically we were like an armed camp. Not near the media, and not near the hotels. My schedule was getting to bed at 7:30pm, 8pm, and getting up at 3am in the morning. I never was seen in a restaurant, never seen in a bar, nobody was able to get a photograph and try to put me in a compromising position. I wouldn’t do that. Susan goes to bed real early, gets up at 3am, her staff were sometimes up all night updating witness books. And that’s how we lived. We lived a very, very disciplined, very sheltered, very focused kind of existence during this trial that was almost 5 months. As far as the case goes, I have to tell you, that I’ve never seen so witnesses provide so much salacious, disturbing testimony, and I’ve never seen so many witnesses crumble so quickly under cross examination! I’ll probably never see it again. I mean it almost became a circus. People would get on that stand and say that they’ve seen the most horrific things on the planet. There would be just a heavy atmosphere in the courtroom. You could almost cut the silence with a knife. And under cross examination, they would just splatter. Now let me give you just a general example of what I’m talking about. The prosecution introduced evidence that five young men had been molested separate and apart from the accuser in the case. And all of the pundits were saying “This law in California is so harsh, so draconian, you can’t survive it. Once that evidence of other similar acts comes in, you’re dead, no matter what happened.” Well, we started our case with three of those five young men who they claimed were molested, and they all said “he never touched me”. The fourth one never showed up, and if he had, I think we were armed pretty well to deal with him. And that’s Larry Feldman’s client. There are lot of other issues that go into that case that I don’t have time to talk about. But let’s just say that I had a lot of information to go after him on, not to mention the profit motive: “Why do you take money and not go to the police and prosecute? Particularly, if you’re a family member, do you prefer to take money instead of having police and prosecutors go after you criminally?” What does that tell you about the situation? The fifth young man was a so-called “youth pastor” who claimed he had been tickled by Michael Jackson outside of his jeans, and needed 5 years’ worth of therapy to deal with his trauma. And by the way, he wanted millions of dollars, his mother wanted it, and his mother sold stories to the tabloids. So they are the five people that the prosecution claimed had been molested, separate and apart from this accuser.
Now by the way, again, Ron feels very strongly about this, and I do to. The man was innocent! Now, the accuser in this case who Ron feels so highly about, and that’s absolutely his privilege, in my opinion, and I think we proved it, had assisted his mother in a false sexual harassment claim against JC Penney stores. He was a child who took a sworn deposition to support her claim that she had been sexually attacked in a parking lot by security guards, and we proved that it was completely, utterly bogus! We got the intake information at the police department. She didn’t have a bruise on her body, or a hair out of place, and she said that she didn’t need medical attention. She popped up a few weeks later with photographs showing all of this bruising. And we had a paralegal from the law firm that represented her in the case, and kept calling me in tears. She was just devastated about what to do. She said “This woman told me it never happened. And I’m afraid to lose my job.” We had one of the lawyers from the firm testify, the privilege ended up waived, and he said that he had talked to this woman about these events. She said she was assaulted, but never said sexually assaulted until her deposition. He said it was the first time she had ever come up with that story. He was shocked! I mean I’ve got to tell you there’s another side to this, or a very conservative jury in Santa Maria, California wouldn’t have exonerated Michael Jackson so thoroughly and so completely. Look, this young man, you know, is entitled to say what he wants, and he may be doing very well, but I think he got caught in so many lies, so many misstatements. We had a video where he and his family all said “it never happened”. We had in investigator’s statement audio recorded where it all said “it never happened”. And suddenly the alleged dates of the molestation changed beyond the video.
Initially, the prosecutors were claiming the molestation started a particular date, and when this evidence was discovered they moved the dates beyond that evidence. I mean it was like “let’s just adjust to what we have, and make sure we go forward with the case”, in my particular opinion. I know that we’re going to talk about jury selection, but I just have to tell you that this was a quick jury selection. Most people think that in high profile cases you’re going to be there months investigating everyone’s backgrounds, but this was a day and a half, after hardships. I gave up half of my peremptories and just took the panel, which seemed to shock some people. I mean, the goal is not to use your peremptories; the goal is to get the best panel that you think you can get! That’s what you’re there to do. And we had a feeling that we had a panel that would be particularly fair. Now there were some controversial decisions that were made in that process. The trial was agonizing. There may have been about 140 or so witnesses testifying at the trial. Judge Melville was a workhorse. We were in there five days a week. There were hardly any dark days during the trial. I did like that schedule, with small breaks rather than a major lunch break. I thought it did fit well with our ability to go back and prepare for the next day. But it was back breaking; it was agonizing. The media, the way they reported the case, was just remarkable! They would hear salacious testimony, and the reporters would run out and report it! They would not wait for the cross, most of the time, or they’d want to ignore the cross. Their goal was ratings and revenue, which you would expect, because they’re nothing but businesses. Their goal was to see him go down. As far as client control, client efforts, this was the nicest client Susan and I ever dealt with. He was extremely down to earth, very cooperative, very nice, never tried to get in our way. The problem was the people around him. Poor Michael Jackson has always attracted just a large number of very disingenuous types who would try to ingratiate themselves with him. Try to make him think they were his friend, and then turn on him. They were always nipping at our heels, lawyers always trying to get to him, always trying to criticize what we were doing. Sometimes I felt like I was at war with my own camp then with anyone else because you never knew who was going to get to Neverland through who, to try to convince him that things were going wrong, and they are needed. But what happens with celebrities so often is this: people want to be around them, and they try to create a need for themselves. What they try to do is keep the celebrity off balance, insecure, terrified, and scared. They create their need, and they don’t want that need to be fulfilled or they won’t be needed anymore. So basically they’re constantly trying to get their .02 cents in to keep the celebrity off balance, scared, and create a reason why they should be there, and Michael was probably the biggest target of that I’ve ever seen.
The first prosecution witness was Mr. Bashir. I thought he was a disaster for the prosecution. He was asserting the Journalist Privilege. He wouldn’t answer just basic questions that couldn’t possibly hurt him in any shape or form if he was willing to answer them, and he just wouldn’t. And basically what I did was I decided, as I think most good cross-examiners do, to tell my story through my questions. And I kept asking him long-winded questions, like “Isn’t it true that Michael Jackson told you he’d never touch a child sexually, never would do that, blah, blah, blah,” and he would assert the privilege, and then I would ask my next question, and I would tell my story, and I would recite my facts, like “Isn’t it true when you confronted Michael Jackson with A, B,C,D , and E, he told you he would never, ever do anything like that?” And “Isn’t it true that you told him he was a wonderful parent, etc.”, and on, and on, and on. A lot of people around the country that I talked to were surprised that the prosecution was able to play his documentary, but I have to say that fortunately Michel Jackson was smart enough to have his own videographer at those interviews, and there were outtakes that Bashir kept out of his documentary which we were allowed to play by Judge Melville because basically, the prosecutors got their shot with a very selectively edited bunch of hearsay, and we got our edited out outtakes in as well, and he denied every single allegation, and said that he’d slit his wrists before I would ever hurt a child. I think that a lot of the things that the prosecution tried to do, we were able to neutralize by basically putting it into a different perspective. The prosecutors that I’ve heard tonight said that he “sleeps with boys, he sleeps with boys, he sleeps with boys”. Well, we showed that he sleeps with mothers, he sleeps with sisters, he sleeps with all kinds of people because they wanted to sack out in his room, which is about as big as this building. The prosecution was out to get him in the best way that they could, and I understand that, but I think the person they chose as the victim, as the accuser, and particularly that person’s family, were really a disaster for them. They brought a conspiracy charge that Michael Jackson had masterminded a criminal conspiracy to abduct children, commit extortion, and falsely imprison a family. Michael Jackson couldn’t even imagine such behavior, let alone orchestrate it. And what that charge did for them, and I can’t get in the minds of the prosecutors, but here’s what I think they were doing, is that allowed the mother, who was really the lynchpin of that a lot of the case, to bring in co-conspirator hearsay under the exception. It allowed them to intimidate witnesses who were at Neverland because they would too fearful they would be indicted as conspirators. Great conspiracy here! The only person they charged was Michael Jackson. Everyone else was unindicted. She brings hearsay testimony in, the witnesses that can refute it are terrified to come to court for fear that they’ll be indicted, so they lawyer up. And plus, it makes Michael Jackson look like this “Mafioso-type” guru, which he’s not even capable of being. But at any rate, the trial went forward, and there were just tons of surprises. Much of the time I made my cross-examinations lengthy. Some of them were days, and I made one of them four days total. I just decided that there were so many facts in our favor, to neutralize these witnesses, particular these accusers, that I just felt that there’s no way that these people were going to last, no way they were going to withstand the facts. And I don’t think they did. I don’t think they did at all.
First of all, I want to thank the Los Angeles County Bar Association for inviting me, and this is a great panel. Needless to say, I have a very different perspective of what you’ve just heard. I don’t believe for one second that Michael Jackson molested any of these people, and neither did 12 jurors in Santa Maria, California. They acquitted him of 10 indicted felonies, and 4 lesser included misdemeanors. They couldn’t get him on a misdemeanor. He was innocent! Now, as far as the media is concerned, and I know that I don’t have a lot of time, but I will tell you a few things about my approach to the media in this case. I was brought in eventually by Randy Jackson, who I had known for years. Randy called and wanted me to meet him and his brother. He’s a very smart guy, and he said to me that “We don’t like what our lawyers are doing with the media. We don’t trust what’s going on.” In fact he told me that during the first court appearance he was at, some lawyers ran out of the building and shoved him out of the way to get in front of the camera. Which he didn’t appreciate or like, nor did he think it was in his brother’s interest, to have this sort of behavior. One of the things he said he liked about me and my partner Susan Yu was that he didn’t think we were “camera mad”. He didn’t think we were the kind of people who were basically going to put our own interest for fame and fortune over his brother’s. And the first thing I learned when I met he and his brother is this: be very careful of the media. Be very careful of their desire to seduce, be very careful of their desire to profit off of the demise of the defendant. Be real careful. It became clear to me that we were never going to win a battle with the media.
Now I understand that there has been some discussion that Mark Geragos has been on TV, but let me tell you something: the media worldwide were out to get Michael Jackson. The money was in a conviction. Berry Gordy, who founded MoTown, told me after the acquittals that “You cost the worldwide media billions by those Not Guilty verdicts. Because the kind of copy that his being convicted, remanded to jail, the buildup to a sentencing, which would have been the biggest sentencing in world history, is something they wanted. This was big, big business. They were doing everything could to spin a conviction. And it became very clear to me that you were never going to manipulate the media, or win a case in the media. Nor should you try to. Because I think this idea that the media wins cases is grossly overrated. Because the media said that Robert Blake would be convicted, OJ Simpson would be convicted, Michael Jackson would be convicted.
If you get carried away with spinning the media, you could lose focus of where it really, really is most important, and that is inside the courtroom. 13 people; the judge and the jury. I supported the gag order in the case. I dismissed Mr. Geragos’ appeal of the gag order. I did that for a lot of reasons. First of all, in a big case, if you’re dealing with the media, they can really zap your energy. I mean, in a particularly if you have an entertainer client who is used to dealing with the media. Who thinks trials are what you see on TV, as most people in the entertainment industry do. They can want you to respond to all of these media attacks, and you can spend 24 hours a day doing that, and detract from your ability to prepare for what’s happening in the courtroom, which is where the cases are won or lost. So I supported the gag order. I didn’t want to have to respond to media requests. I didn’t think we had time to. Honestly, I didn’t want Judge Melville to think I was a pain in the neck. Obviously, he wanted that gag order. And my feeling was “Why make the judge think that you’re out to dramatize everything and make things a lot more difficult.” So I supported the gag order.
I thought the process that Judge Melville had in effect where if you wanted to make a statement because something prejudicial was out there, you submitted a statement to the other side and to him, and you had a quick discussion, which we would have. Judge Melville gave us his home phone, so we would have a discussion about whether or not a statement should be made very quickly. He was always available to address that issue. And as he said, he never denied us. There was some haggling over some language sometimes, but nothing major. I think it went very well. I think the unique procedure he had about filing motions and pleadings that you could not find salacious pleadings. You would file your original pleading under seal. You would file your second pleading, which was a redacted version of the first one, which had to be prepared according to certain guidelines that Judge Melville had which were designed to keep the salacious stuff out. And you had to find a third pleading, which was a motion to seal. It was a very unique procedure. I thought it worked very well, and I do commend Judge Melville for a very, very amazingly effective way of handling this media onslaught.
As I said before, I had never tried a case in that county, and we did a few phone surveys at the beginning through a jury consultant to try to determine just what people were thinking and feeling. And again, we all do our job when we have to do it, but with all due respect, that settlement was an albatross around my neck, I discovered because the typical profile of a pro-prosecution juror would indicate that the thing that bothered that profiled juror the most was that settlement. The feeling being “Who pays that kind of money if they’re innocent?” When we profiled the typical pro-defense juror, the thing that bothered them the most was the same thing! “Why was all this money paid if you’re innocent?” I did issue a press release, and made a public statement, with Judge Melville’s permission of course. I had to do that. It was bothering too many people. And I basically said that Mr. Jackson had entered into that settlement because business advisors had told him to. They weren’t writing the check. They wanted him to get going in to his business life and stop getting derailed by this very salacious legal proceeding, and that he regretted doing it. It’s something that I just had to do because, in my opinion, it was killing us. Now he had reasons for doing that. The $20 million, many people thought, was a drop in the bucket given what he owned, and what he had, and what he could earn in the future. But nevertheless, it did bother a lot of people. So I did have to address that issue.
Media were constantly trying to get involved. Constantly trying to get to me through various people, various means. I’ll never forget one call from this idiot, who got my cell phone number, and I don’t know who, and he was very, very straight forward. He said “If you give me some hot documents, I’ll tell you who in the prosecuting office is sleeping with the media!” I said “I don’t care who they’re sleeping with! There’s a gag order!”, and I hung up. But there were constant efforts to try to find a way to profit off of this case. Linda Duetch, who I have a great respect for, who is really the Dean of trial reporters with the Associated Press, who began with the Manson case, and she’s followed virtually every major case since then. She told me it was a dreadful experience. She said she hated the Jackson trial. She lived in a nearby hotel. She said that she never saw so many gloating over the fact that they were going to profit off of this case, and it just really disturbed her. The extraordinary tabloid-ization of everything that happened in the case. But anyway, by supporting the gag order, I could tell Michael and his family “I can’t address that issue. We have to win this case in the courtroom. We’re not allowed to.” It was a great relief to me to be able to follow that course because as I said before “You win these cases with juries. You don’t win them with the media, in my opinion.” You want to be concerned with the media. You want to get some good information out if you can. You want to level the table if you can. But don’t get too carried away with it. You lose focus. You’ll start to think it’s all about you. It’s not about you; it’s about your client. And I think we handled that very well.
Now, Susan Yu, my co-counsel and law partner, had her own condo not far from the courthouse. Good distance from the hotels. I had my condo. Our staff had their condos. We had one duplex that we called the war room, and basically we were like an armed camp. Not near the media, and not near the hotels. My schedule was getting to bed at 7:30pm, 8pm, and getting up at 3am in the morning. I never was seen in a restaurant, never seen in a bar, nobody was able to get a photograph and try to put me in a compromising position. I wouldn’t do that. Susan goes to bed real early, gets up at 3am, her staff were sometimes up all night updating witness books. And that’s how we lived. We lived a very, very disciplined, very sheltered, very focused kind of existence during this trial that was almost 5 months. As far as the case goes, I have to tell you, that I’ve never seen so witnesses provide so much salacious, disturbing testimony, and I’ve never seen so many witnesses crumble so quickly under cross examination! I’ll probably never see it again. I mean it almost became a circus. People would get on that stand and say that they’ve seen the most horrific things on the planet. There would be just a heavy atmosphere in the courtroom. You could almost cut the silence with a knife. And under cross examination, they would just splatter. Now let me give you just a general example of what I’m talking about. The prosecution introduced evidence that five young men had been molested separate and apart from the accuser in the case. And all of the pundits were saying “This law in California is so harsh, so draconian, you can’t survive it. Once that evidence of other similar acts comes in, you’re dead, no matter what happened.” Well, we started our case with three of those five young men who they claimed were molested, and they all said “he never touched me”. The fourth one never showed up, and if he had, I think we were armed pretty well to deal with him. And that’s Larry Feldman’s client. There are lot of other issues that go into that case that I don’t have time to talk about. But let’s just say that I had a lot of information to go after him on, not to mention the profit motive: “Why do you take money and not go to the police and prosecute? Particularly, if you’re a family member, do you prefer to take money instead of having police and prosecutors go after you criminally?” What does that tell you about the situation? The fifth young man was a so-called “youth pastor” who claimed he had been tickled by Michael Jackson outside of his jeans, and needed 5 years’ worth of therapy to deal with his trauma. And by the way, he wanted millions of dollars, his mother wanted it, and his mother sold stories to the tabloids. So they are the five people that the prosecution claimed had been molested, separate and apart from this accuser.
Now by the way, again, Ron feels very strongly about this, and I do to. The man was innocent! Now, the accuser in this case who Ron feels so highly about, and that’s absolutely his privilege, in my opinion, and I think we proved it, had assisted his mother in a false sexual harassment claim against JC Penney stores. He was a child who took a sworn deposition to support her claim that she had been sexually attacked in a parking lot by security guards, and we proved that it was completely, utterly bogus! We got the intake information at the police department. She didn’t have a bruise on her body, or a hair out of place, and she said that she didn’t need medical attention. She popped up a few weeks later with photographs showing all of this bruising. And we had a paralegal from the law firm that represented her in the case, and kept calling me in tears. She was just devastated about what to do. She said “This woman told me it never happened. And I’m afraid to lose my job.” We had one of the lawyers from the firm testify, the privilege ended up waived, and he said that he had talked to this woman about these events. She said she was assaulted, but never said sexually assaulted until her deposition. He said it was the first time she had ever come up with that story. He was shocked! I mean I’ve got to tell you there’s another side to this, or a very conservative jury in Santa Maria, California wouldn’t have exonerated Michael Jackson so thoroughly and so completely. Look, this young man, you know, is entitled to say what he wants, and he may be doing very well, but I think he got caught in so many lies, so many misstatements. We had a video where he and his family all said “it never happened”. We had in investigator’s statement audio recorded where it all said “it never happened”. And suddenly the alleged dates of the molestation changed beyond the video.
Initially, the prosecutors were claiming the molestation started a particular date, and when this evidence was discovered they moved the dates beyond that evidence. I mean it was like “let’s just adjust to what we have, and make sure we go forward with the case”, in my particular opinion. I know that we’re going to talk about jury selection, but I just have to tell you that this was a quick jury selection. Most people think that in high profile cases you’re going to be there months investigating everyone’s backgrounds, but this was a day and a half, after hardships. I gave up half of my peremptories and just took the panel, which seemed to shock some people. I mean, the goal is not to use your peremptories; the goal is to get the best panel that you think you can get! That’s what you’re there to do. And we had a feeling that we had a panel that would be particularly fair. Now there were some controversial decisions that were made in that process. The trial was agonizing. There may have been about 140 or so witnesses testifying at the trial. Judge Melville was a workhorse. We were in there five days a week. There were hardly any dark days during the trial. I did like that schedule, with small breaks rather than a major lunch break. I thought it did fit well with our ability to go back and prepare for the next day. But it was back breaking; it was agonizing. The media, the way they reported the case, was just remarkable! They would hear salacious testimony, and the reporters would run out and report it! They would not wait for the cross, most of the time, or they’d want to ignore the cross. Their goal was ratings and revenue, which you would expect, because they’re nothing but businesses. Their goal was to see him go down. As far as client control, client efforts, this was the nicest client Susan and I ever dealt with. He was extremely down to earth, very cooperative, very nice, never tried to get in our way. The problem was the people around him. Poor Michael Jackson has always attracted just a large number of very disingenuous types who would try to ingratiate themselves with him. Try to make him think they were his friend, and then turn on him. They were always nipping at our heels, lawyers always trying to get to him, always trying to criticize what we were doing. Sometimes I felt like I was at war with my own camp then with anyone else because you never knew who was going to get to Neverland through who, to try to convince him that things were going wrong, and they are needed. But what happens with celebrities so often is this: people want to be around them, and they try to create a need for themselves. What they try to do is keep the celebrity off balance, insecure, terrified, and scared. They create their need, and they don’t want that need to be fulfilled or they won’t be needed anymore. So basically they’re constantly trying to get their .02 cents in to keep the celebrity off balance, scared, and create a reason why they should be there, and Michael was probably the biggest target of that I’ve ever seen.
The first prosecution witness was Mr. Bashir. I thought he was a disaster for the prosecution. He was asserting the Journalist Privilege. He wouldn’t answer just basic questions that couldn’t possibly hurt him in any shape or form if he was willing to answer them, and he just wouldn’t. And basically what I did was I decided, as I think most good cross-examiners do, to tell my story through my questions. And I kept asking him long-winded questions, like “Isn’t it true that Michael Jackson told you he’d never touch a child sexually, never would do that, blah, blah, blah,” and he would assert the privilege, and then I would ask my next question, and I would tell my story, and I would recite my facts, like “Isn’t it true when you confronted Michael Jackson with A, B,C,D , and E, he told you he would never, ever do anything like that?” And “Isn’t it true that you told him he was a wonderful parent, etc.”, and on, and on, and on. A lot of people around the country that I talked to were surprised that the prosecution was able to play his documentary, but I have to say that fortunately Michel Jackson was smart enough to have his own videographer at those interviews, and there were outtakes that Bashir kept out of his documentary which we were allowed to play by Judge Melville because basically, the prosecutors got their shot with a very selectively edited bunch of hearsay, and we got our edited out outtakes in as well, and he denied every single allegation, and said that he’d slit his wrists before I would ever hurt a child. I think that a lot of the things that the prosecution tried to do, we were able to neutralize by basically putting it into a different perspective. The prosecutors that I’ve heard tonight said that he “sleeps with boys, he sleeps with boys, he sleeps with boys”. Well, we showed that he sleeps with mothers, he sleeps with sisters, he sleeps with all kinds of people because they wanted to sack out in his room, which is about as big as this building. The prosecution was out to get him in the best way that they could, and I understand that, but I think the person they chose as the victim, as the accuser, and particularly that person’s family, were really a disaster for them. They brought a conspiracy charge that Michael Jackson had masterminded a criminal conspiracy to abduct children, commit extortion, and falsely imprison a family. Michael Jackson couldn’t even imagine such behavior, let alone orchestrate it. And what that charge did for them, and I can’t get in the minds of the prosecutors, but here’s what I think they were doing, is that allowed the mother, who was really the lynchpin of that a lot of the case, to bring in co-conspirator hearsay under the exception. It allowed them to intimidate witnesses who were at Neverland because they would too fearful they would be indicted as conspirators. Great conspiracy here! The only person they charged was Michael Jackson. Everyone else was unindicted. She brings hearsay testimony in, the witnesses that can refute it are terrified to come to court for fear that they’ll be indicted, so they lawyer up. And plus, it makes Michael Jackson look like this “Mafioso-type” guru, which he’s not even capable of being. But at any rate, the trial went forward, and there were just tons of surprises. Much of the time I made my cross-examinations lengthy. Some of them were days, and I made one of them four days total. I just decided that there were so many facts in our favor, to neutralize these witnesses, particular these accusers, that I just felt that there’s no way that these people were going to last, no way they were going to withstand the facts. And I don’t think they did. I don’t think they did at all.
