MJ (42 page)

The prosecution’s star witness, Gavin Arvizo himself, took the stand on March 9, 2005. He was fifteen. On the first day, he talked poignantly about having surgery for cancer. He recalled his first trip to Neverland.
“[Michael] was like my best friend ever,” Gavin told the jury. Jackson called him “son,” and Gavin dubbed MJ “Michael Daddy.”

His testimony was apparently too much for Michael. On the second day of Gavin’s appearance, Michael was not in the courtroom. The judge asked Mesereau for the whereabouts of his client. He turned out to be at the Marian Medical Center in Santa Maria. Melville had run out of patience with the unexpected disappearance of a criminal defendant. He gave Mesereau an hour to find his client. Otherwise, he’d issue a bench warrant for Jackson’s arrest and forfeit his bail if he didn’t show up within an hour. Jackson turned out to have slipped in the shower and injured himself; he showed up, dutifully, within the hour, wearing pajama bottoms. After a few weeks, the trial was clearly beginning to wear on Michael. No longer was he the defiant superstar who saluted fans from the top of his SUV.
“You could see his health declining,” says Peter Bowes of the BBC. “He was painfully thin and very, very white.”

MJ had reason to be anxious. On the stand, Gavin said of him: “We were under the covers, and I had his pajamas on. . . . And then that’s when he put his hand in my pants and then he started masturbating me.” This went on for five minutes, Gavin said, and at the end, he ejaculated. “I kind of felt weird. I was embarrassed about it,” he told the jury. “And then he said it was okay, that it was natural.” Then they fell asleep. It happened again, on a different day, in just about the same way.

Then Mesereau asked Gavin whether he’d had trouble in school, long before he met Jackson. The boy acknowledged teachers found him “uncooperative and disruptive”—he’d refused to sign detention forms and asked questions without raising his hand. “I would stand up to the teacher,” he said. “A lot of the kids would kind of congratulate me.” Mesereau caught Gavin in a startling admission. He asked whether Gavin felt “abandoned” after the Arvizos left the ranch for the last time. “Yes!” Gavin responded. It seemed obvious that he loved Michael Jackson and had been sad to leave him.

Michael Jackson’s defense was going well. But the prosecution still had one major card to play, and it was Mesereau’s biggest worry. Earlier, Judge Melville had allowed the prosecution to bring up previous child-molestation allegations against Michael Jackson, meaning Jordan Chandler could testify.
Mesereau sympathized with Michael’s desire to
“close the book” on those charges, but he also acknowledged “most people thought anybody who would pay that kind of money must be guilty of something.” Sneddon and his prosecutors felt the same way. Sneddon called Chandler at least twice at his home in New York to try to persuade him to testify, taking care not to make threats and promising he would not issue a subpoena.
“We wanted a cooperative witness,” Zonen recalls, “not an angry one.” But Chandler declined.
^V
It seems Jordan Chandler’s settlement with Michael Jackson stipulated
the young accuser would never have to deal with these issues again.
“Michael wasn’t paying him twenty million dollars so he would go into a criminal proceeding. He was paying him twenty million dollars to essentially go away,” Zonen says.

Instead, the prosecution called Chandler’s mother, June, to the stand.
“Dressed impeccably, Ms. Chandler looked like a vision, like she just stepped off the pages of
Vogue
,” Aphrodite Jones wrote in a book defending MJ. “It was obvious that Sneddon was impressed by this exotic-looking woman.” Chandler recalled the “Don’t you trust me?” argument in which Michael tearfully insisted on sleeping in a bed with Jordie, above her objections. But Chandler also testified about MJ giving her the Cartier watch and a
$7,000 gift certificate from a posh LA boutique. During Mesereau’s cross-examination, her testimony grew cloudy. “I don’t recall,” she kept saying. She said she hadn’t seen Jordie in eleven years. What came across most clearly from Chandler’s testimony is how much she benefited from Jordie’s relationship with Michael.

“Gold digger,” Aphrodite Jones wrote.

It took only a few minutes of
Janet Arvizo’s four-hour testimony to finally dismantle the prosecution’s case. She didn’t mention child molestation even once. Instead, weirdly, she was obsessed with MJ’s alleged imprisonment of her family. She insisted he and his coconspirators, including Cascio, Wiesner, and Konitzer, pressured the Arvizos to read scripted remarks about Michael’s innocence for the rebuttal video, then refused to let them watch the documentary. She repeated Davellin’s story, in a more rambling and confusing way, that MJ’s people wouldn’t let the Arvizos leave Neverland until an employee snuck them out. But the imprisonment of the Arvizos seemed farfetched, especially when Arvizo became forceful and animated as she talked, snapping her fingers and turning her chair toward the jury, as if ordering them to believe her story.
“It was just startling,” recalls Linda Deutsch, the AP reporter. “She seemed to think the courtroom was hers.”

If she’d been imprisoned, Mesereau asked during his cross-examination, did she ever go to court to get a restraining order against MJ? “I was too scared of him,” she said. But she had hired several lawyers by that point, right? Her response: “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” Then Mesereau mentioned a 1999 incident in which the Arvizo family went to JC Penney, left with allegedly stolen merchandise, scuffled with employees and security, then sued the department store for $3 million before settling. Her response was too convoluted to quote succinctly here, but she said, in part: “I would like to make that correct statement because the statements that were there were incorrect.”

“Don’t judge me,” she concluded, which seemed like a bizarre thing to say before a jury.

Mesereau opened his defense with the one-two-three punch of Macaulay Culkin, Brett Barnes, and Wade Robson, who were well-known friends of Michael when they were kids, and all three testified that nothing untoward happened when they were with him. (Robson would change his story after Jackson’s death.) The prosecution had done most of Mesereau’s work for him, allowing the Arvizos to undercut their own accusations, but nonetheless, he paraded witness after witness onto the stand: Jay Leno, Chris Tucker, George Lopez, Larry King.
(“Why not Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett, too?” asked Matt Taibbi in
Rolling Stone
.) The defense rested on May 25, 2005.

On June 14, the court followed prearranged protocol for the jury verdict and gave Michael Jackson ninety minutes’ notice, just enough time for him to drive with his city motorcycle escort from Neverland to Santa Maria. The courtroom and overflow room began to fill up with reporters. It took two hours for the courts to get everybody in place and announce the verdict.
Peter Shaplen, the media pool producer, had a two-way radio and narrated the action for reporters in other parts of the courthouse as Jackson arrived—“Judge Melville has come in . . . Judge Melville has taken his seat . . . Judge Melville has opened the verdict first and put the envelope on his right side.” He kept up the play-by-
play as verdicts for each of the fourteen counts were announced: “Not guilty.” In the courtroom, upon hearing the first two words, Katherine Jackson wept. Joe Jackson clasped his hands together and stared straight ahead. Michael showed no emotion, then slumped in his chair. Fans cheered and chanted outside.

ABC’s producers worked quickly. They convinced six jurors to board a jet to take them to a taping of
Good Morning America
. CNN pried away another couple of jurors. The network was so paranoid about losing its scoop that it dispatched all available staff members to stand arm in arm, locking out
other networks from making their own pitches.

MJ fan Sheree Wilkins, the teacher turned fast-food employee, suffered an emotional collapse. Paramedics arrived in the midst of the courthouse chaos to carry her away on a
stretcher. She’d been praying for Michael, fasting and not drinking. Her blood pressure had dipped to dangerously low levels. “I had given absolutely everything,” she says. While other fans drove to Neverland to celebrate at the gates, Wilkins received IV fluid at the hospital.

“The one thing I really regret,” says Michael Clayton, the attorney and MJ trial entrepreneur across the street, “was when the verdict came out, I didn’t drop a banner with a ten-by-thirty-foot
NOT GUILTY
.”

Michael wouldn’t have noticed. In his mind, he had already moved to his next phase: leaving Neverland forever.

I
. Years after MJ’s death, Sony executives would at least consider selling the still-lucrative Beatles catalog due to the record industry’s uncertain digital future—it had a “rather complex capital and governance structure and is impacted by the market shift to streaming,” the electronics giant’s chief financial officer, Kenichiro Yoshida, wrote to a colleague in an e-mail leaked in late 2014.

II
. Henry Aubrey, Michael’s bodyguard, questions Schaffel’s repeated claims in interviews and court documents that he provided cash in this way. “I pretty much doubt it,” Aubrey says, adding it was he, not Schaffel, who carried as much as $50,000 at a time for MJ’s impromptu spending needs. Schaffel responds that Aubrey was a security guard, “nothing more, nothing less,” and Michael dumped him when he “felt Henry was stepping out beyond his duties as bodyguard.” Schaffel does, however, credit Aubrey for arranging to get Michael Jackson a driver’s license, privately, at a Department of Motor Vehicles office.

III
. Schaffel identifies Michael’s hotel on September 11 as the Plaza Athénée of Manhattan; Aubrey can’t remember, but believes it was the Plaza, a larger hotel not far away.

IV
. Sneddon died November 1, 2014, of complications from cancer. “A man of integrity has died,” Diane Dimond wrote on Facebook. “He abused the legal system,” Karen Faye countered on Twitter.

V
. In June 2004, Zonen and Gordon Auchincloss, a senior DA, had attempted to get the FBI involved in the prosecution, but two agents met with Chandler later that year and found that he had “no interest.”

F
or more than a decade, Formula 1 race cars have whooshed through the desert on a track fifty miles south of
Manama, the capital city of Bahrain. On this oil-rich island, affluent Saudi tourists could take a break from their repressive laws and legally drink alcohol, watch movies in theaters, shop and eat in coed establishments and, occasionally, pick from an armada of Thai and Chinese prostitutes. Into this
“baby Dubai, with its prenatal skyscrapers and tax shelters, with its rinky-dink wildlife park and the Dolphin Park water show,” as
GQ
called it, flew
DJ Whoo Kid of Queens, New York. The sheiks had hired the affable member of hip-hop star 50 Cent’s G-Unit posse to provide music for a Formula 1 party in October 2005. His flight from the US to Bahrain was going fine until he lost his passport during a stop in the Dubai airport.

Whoo Kid was in trouble. Dubai officials were threatening to send him back to the US, even though his Formula 1 appearance was scheduled for later that day. In a panic, he texted the man who’d hired him, Sheik Abdullah bin Hamad Al Khalifa, crown prince of Bahrain and second son of the king. Next thing he knew, a member of the
sheik’s family was outside, on the runway, searching underneath the planes for his lost passport. The Bahrainis found nothing, but they took care of
everything—airport officials in Dubai and Bahrain swept him through every security checkpoint even though his only form of ID was a card for an American fitness center. Whoo Kid stayed in the sheik’s palace for four days, two waiting for a new passport. He wandered out to a huge pool to get a drink. And that’s when he saw Michael Jackson, his bright-white legs exposed in shorts.

The DJ, who had been eleven when
Thriller
came out, spun around. “Do you not
understand
?” he asked. “I’m a
black person
. Why didn’t you tell me
Michael Jackson
is here?”

“Oh, he’s just my neighbor now,” the sheik responded.

As Whoo Kid understood it, Abdullah paid for Jackson and his kids to live at a second complex, next door to his own. The King of Pop would walk or drive over to hang out for hours at a time in blissful privacy.

To Sheik Abdullah bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Jackson was more than a neighbor. He was a kindred spirit, a collaborator.
“It’s difficult to explain to people without it sounding weird—they were friends,” says Guy Holmes, chief executive of 2 Seas, the record company MJ and Abdullah created together. “They would play video games together. They would tell stupid jokes. They loved toy models, scale electric planes, cars and bikes.” Abdullah had reportedly written a ballad called
“Where Have You Been?,” and it received regional airplay, although no trace of it exists on the Internet. It seems the prince had been producing a local artist for his own record label, and had been looking to expand his entertainment empire internationally.

“It was like we’d already spent time together,” Abdullah said at the time. “As soon as they met, my daughter and his daughter started chatting like thirty-year-old women, and the boys were playing like boys do. It was great. Michael is now as much my brother as my blood brothers are.” During MJ’s trial, the sheik had loaned him more than
$2 million.

On June 29, 2005, Michael arrived in Bahrain via private jet with his three kids and
Grace Rwaramba, their nanny. The courtroom ordeal
had ravaged his health and appearance.
“Michael was really, really ill and not well,” Guy Holmes recalls. But Michael’s time in Bahrain was uneventful and relaxing. The most exciting thing he did was take his kids to
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
and
King Kong
. In public, he often wore a woman’s black
abaya,
or cloak. Rwaramba acted as his on-site manager, securing assurances from theater and shop owners that nobody would take photos.
DJ Whoo Kid was told Bahrain actually had a law that locals could not approach Michael Jackson.