Lawyers say that if someone is on trial and if — as under California law — cases of past molestations or molestation allegations are allowed in to show a pattern, there’s a good chance that defendent is toast.
Get out the marmalade for King of Pops Michael Jackson.
In a truly devastating development, a now 24-year-old young man who did not want to testify in Jackson’s child molestation trial did — and if Jackson is convicted you can point to yesterday as the turning point:
In a halting, emotion-choked voice, the son of Michael Jackson’s former housekeeper testified Monday that the pop star molested him during a tickling game in 1990.
The 24-year-old man was called to the stand as prosecutors in the current molestation case against Jackson began trying to show the jury that the singer has a habit of molesting boys.
The witness said that over a span of several years, Jackson twice touched his groin over his clothes during tickling games at Jackson’s Los Angeles-area condominium, which he and his mother referred to as “the hideaway,” and in a third incident reached under his clothes at Jackson’s Neverland ranch.
Jackson gave him $100 after each of the first two incidents but nothing after the third one, he said.
It gets worse:
“He was tickling me. I was wearing shorts again. … He reached on my leg and I’m still laughing and he reached up to my – privates,” the witness said.
As he began to describe the alleged molestation he apologized to prosecutor Ron Zonen for his halting testimony and said: “This took a lot of counseling to get over, just to let you know.”
The defense asked that the comment be struck from the record and Judge Rodney S. Melville agreed.
The witness said that Jackson touched him in that incident for two or three minutes and that he remembered thinking, “I should probably go.” Asked whom he first told of the incident, the witness said, “Probably God.”
The appearance of the young man was allowed under a ruling last week by the judge that prosecutors may present evidence Jackson molested or otherwise behaved inappropriately with five boys before the time period of the current allegations.
Jackson is on trial on charges of molesting a 13-year-old boy in February or March 2003.
In his ruling, the judge said prosecutors could mention that the housekeeper’s son and another boy received civil settlements from Jackson but could not tell the jury the amounts. Prosecutors have said the housekeeper’s son received $2.4 million in 1994.
The housekeeper’s son, now married and working in an anti-truancy program, was asked at the outset of his testimony if he could identify Jackson in court.
“He’s the light-complected gentleman,” the witness said, smiling at Jackson.
He must have pointed at the wrong person; Jackson recently suggested he’s being persecuted because he’s black….
We’ll have more to say about this case later. But we don’t view this as merely a media circus and a who-cares celebrity trial. Perhaps it’s because TMV does a lot of serious programs for kids in schools and has worked with troubled youths over the years. We will accept the verdict of the jury.
But this is not a trivial case: some important issues are in play in this trial. And not because Michael Jackson is black.
UPDATE: The New York Times has an account of this testimony that goes into even more detail. The most fascinating part comes at the end, showing how Jackson’s defense attorney begins to try and undermine the testimony in cross-examination:
Mr. Mesereau reminded the man that when he was first interviewed by detectives in 1993, he said Mr. Jackson had never done anything untoward to him beyond the tickling.
“I blocked it out,” the man said. “I didn’t want to repeat that stuff ever again.”
“So you were lying to the police,” Mr. Mesereau later said.
“I was at first, yeah,” the man answered.
That’s a nice debating point — but anyone who knows anything about abuse victims knows that kids will often deny anything took place. And often it takes years of counseling to get it out.
I know of one case here in San Diego of a kid who has had years of counseling and only recently could she go into detail about what happened. She was displaying odd and troubling behavior for years. She only recently — after much counseling — told her daddy at a specifically slated time exactly what a close relative did to her (California’s Child Protective Services has helped this family out).
So the fact a kid (particularly if the kid is a teenage boy) lied to the police doesn’t negate his later testimony at all. It sometimes happens as part of the humiliation or fear stemming fromthe abuse and, yes, it does often require years of counseling to regain balance.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.