Michael Jackson (111 page)

Debbie Rowe’s testimony on 28 May 2005 – the fortieth day – was probably the most dramatic of the trial. She hadn’t seen Michael
in many years; he wouldn’t speak to her. As far as he was concerned, she’d betrayed him more than once by wanting to see the
two children – Paris and Prince Michael – she’d had for him. ‘Sometimes she wants them,’ he’d once told me in a phone conversation,
‘and sometimes she doesn’t, and I’m not gonna screw my kids up by dropping her into the picture and then out of the picture.
I’m mad at her now.’

Michael was certainly angry when Debbie made a play for the children right after he was arrested in 2003. In a legal declaration
at the time, she claimed that she kept up her visiting rights to the children for about a year but relinquished them because
she couldn’t handle all of the publicity surrounding the relationship and thought it would be ‘in the children’s best interests’.
However, according to her statement:

‘During the past few years I maintained contact with persons close to Michael so that I could keep updates on the children.
I have their pictures throughout my home and often reflected on the fabulous life they must have enjoyed with their father.
I was always told that our children were treated like royalty and were very happy children. I wanted to speak with Michael
over the past few years to talk about our children but he did not want to speak with me. Michael never returned any phone
calls nor initiated any conversation with me, so I unfortunately continued to rely on observations of others that had personal
knowledge of the children and their welfare.’

She also maintained that child abuse charges against Jackson had forced her to reconsider, adding: ‘I believe that I will
provide a more stable environment for our children at this particular time. I believe that I have a responsibility to protect
and be involved with my children’s life and well-being until such time as a full investigation can be conducted to determine
really what is in the children’s best interests. If I did not intercede now to help our children I would not be fulfilling
my responsibility as a parent.’ Fearing that Jackson was about to flee the country with her children before his trial, she
requested that the children’s passports be immediately surrendered. She wrote: ‘Michael has close, influential and rich friends
all over the world. He has the ability to rent a private jet at a moment’s notice, have the children taken from the United
States and never returned.’

To Michael, a deal was a deal, no matter what – and as far as he was concerned Debbie had signed away her parental rights in
2001 and had also received a sizable payment from him: millions, in fact. He definitely had a stubborn way about him, which
I always presumed he got from his father, Joseph. A person can never reason with Joseph Jackson when he has his mind made
up about something, and Michael was exactly the same way. Also, once someone had been cut out of Michael’s life, that person
was – except for a few occasions – never thought of again by Michael. So Debbie was out of the picture, we all knew it – and now
she was being called by the prosecution. Everyone suspected her testimony was going to be very damaging. Certainly the prosecution
thought as much, based on their pre-interviews with her, or they wouldn’t have called her.

When Debbie was sworn in, Michael stared at her with an icy expression. Then it was just one bombshell after another with
Debbie, as always seemed to be the case.

First of all, she admitted that she and Jackson never shared a home together – that she never moved into Neverland. It looked
as if she was going to testify that her marriage and relationship to Jackson was just a sham. But then, as often happened
at that trial, things turned on a dime. Suddenly – and much to everyone’s surprise, especially the prosecutors’ – Debbie began
to veer from the story she was expected to tell. First of all, the DA promised the jury Debbie would testify that all of the
compliments she made about Michael in the ‘rebuttal video’ had been scripted. She said just the opposite: ‘Mr. Jackson knows
no one could tell me what to say.’ However, she did admit that the reason she took part in the video was that she thought
she would be ‘reintroduced to them [her children] and to be reacquainted with their dad.’ When asked why, she got choked up,
looked at Michael and said, ‘Because he’s my friend.’ Then, when asked if she was able to see her children after making the
video, she quietly answered that she had tried to do so for nine months until finally giving up.

Debbie also began to insist that Michael was a great father, that he would never harm a child and that she believed with all
her heart that he was innocent of everything he was being accused of during these proceedings. Of course, she had to admit,
she hadn’t actually seen him or talked to him for, well, she couldn’t even remember how long, it had been that many years.
Still, she said she thought of him as a friend, ‘if he’d just talk to me.’ It was sad. She was incredibly likeable, full of
spit-and-vinegar (at one point she claimed one of Jackson’s advisers was ‘full of shit’ and then turned to the judge and apologized).
When she learned while on the witness stand that the DA had taped conversations with her without her knowledge, she looked
aghast and said, ‘You did?
You did?
Damn you guys!’

If anything, Debbie Rowe did Michael Jackson quite a big service that day. If she had testified against him, as his ex-wife
and mother of his two children, there seemed no way he would ever be found not guilty. After the trial, I interviewed prosecutor
Ron Zonen for Court TV and he told me that, indeed, Debbie ‘was probably the biggest surprise of the entire trial. We didn’t
see that one coming, did we?’

After Debbie Rowe’s testimony, we all thought
, Well, she’s sure going to get to see her kids, now
. Unfortunately, even though she probably helped keep Michael out of jail, according to most accounts she would see her children
only one time after that trial.

When Michael was in self-imposed exile in Bahrain after the trial, he sent Prince Michael and Paris back to the States for
a supervised visit with their mother at a Beverly Hills hotel. It was the first time Debbie had seen them in three years.
The tots were told that Debbie was a family friend, not their mother. Certainly that had to have been very painful for her.
But that was it. If she ever saw the children again, no one seems to know about it.

Following Debbie’s initial 2003 application for custody, and Michael’s acquittal in 2005, the two of them reportedly came
to an agreement for her to give up all parental rights in exchange for about $6 million, staggered in a ten-year deal. She
received a lump sum of about $900,000 late in 2006 and then her first installment of about $600,000 on 1 September 2007. The
question is: Did she receive the other payments? It’s likely that she didn’t, since Michael wasn’t exactly paying his bills
in the last few years of his life. If not, that could influence Debbie’s decision as to whether or not she wants to now claim
the children as her own after the death of their father.

As is now well known, Debbie would be notably left out of Michael’s will. Keep in mind, though, that it was drawn up in 2003,
a couple of years before the trial. Apparently, though, he didn’t update it after the trial was over.

The prosecution rested on 4 May 2005 after forty-five days. The defence began presenting its case the next day.

Ironically, some of us felt that the defence’s witnesses were even more damaging than the prosecution’s! For instance, the
first witnesses were Wade Robson and Brett Barnes, two young men called by Michael’s attorney, Tom Mesereau, to testify that
as youngsters they had both slept in the same bed as Michael. My stomach twisted into knots as they told their stories. The
point was that in Michael Jackson’s world, it was okay to sleep with little kids – it didn’t mean you were having sex with them,
it just meant you were having fun, sleep-overs. Never mind the inappropriate nature of the whole thing or the fact that most
reasonable people would find it appalling and, at the very least, suspicious.

On the second day of testimony, Joy Robson, Wade’s mother, testified about walking her ten-year-old son across the street
from the hotel in which they were staying to a condo in which Michael was staying and dropping him off there to spend the
night with Jackson. And, as far as she was concerned, it was all innocent. Why? Because she knew Michael loved children. ‘Michael
Jackson is a very special person,’ she said. ‘Unless you know him, it’s hard to understand him. He’s not the boy next door.’
I was more than a little perplexed. I couldn’t imagine that the jury would think this kind of thing made sense. But still,
Joy seemed like a reasonable person, so maybe it did. In Michael’s world, what made sense and what seemed like lunacy often
converged into a reality that was not easy to describe.

At one point, Joy Robson recalled tension and jealousy among the boys who were sleeping with Jackson, including actor Macaulay
Culkin and his brother Kieran. There was also jealousy among the families: Robson said she told June Chandler that ‘there
was tremendous emotional impact on the children when Michael moved on to another boy’. Moreover, she said she thought that
June was ‘a gold digger’ who wanted to be ‘mistress of Neverland’.

Marie Lisbeth Barnes testified that her son, Brett, spent dozens of nights in bed with Michael, even accompanying the pop
star on concert tours to South America and Europe. During the tours, Brett Barnes and Michael would share one hotel room,
while the rest of the Barnes family stayed in another, the mother said. ‘You just feel when you can trust someone and not
trust someone, and I have complete trust in him,’ Barnes explained. Was I the only one who thought this did not speak well
of Jackson? I didn’t think so. Looking around the room, I saw a lot of confused faces. Then, when Brett’s sister Karlee said
that Michael slept with her brother for a total of ‘365 days’ over a two-year period when Brett was ten or eleven years old,
I threw my hands in the air and decided that this defence made no sense to me at all.

In fact, throughout the defence’s case, there were stories of Michael sleeping with boys in what was maintained to be innocent
behaviour. Even Macaulay Culkin was called to the witness stand on the fiftieth day to pretty much testify to the same effect.
But in my opinion, the defence was at its best when pointing out inconsistencies in the Arvizos’ stories and in those of the
other witnesses against Michael. It was at its worst when trying to make Michael’s inappropriate behaviour sound reasonable
and understandable.

It wasn’t all high-stakes melodrama, though. Some memories of Santa Maria actually make me laugh. For instance, I remember
the day we were all in court ready for the proceedings to begin when there was a ruckus in the back of the room. It was 3
June 2005, and Tom Mesereau was on the second day of his closing arguments. All heads turned to see three attractive black
women trying to make their way to the front of the courtroom – all three were teased, weaved and adorned with clanging jewelry.
It was orchestrated chaos; think The Supremes trying to get to the floor-show stage from the back of a crowded nightclub and
you’ll get the picture. It was Janet, LaToya and Rebbie making, doubtless, the best entrance of the trial dressed in matching
black-and-white outfits. The three Jackson sisters marched up the center aisle in perfect unison, led by Janet as if she’d
just said, ‘Okay, girls... let’s hit it. One. Two. Three. Go.’ They sat in the front row as Thomas Mesereau finished his closing
argument. ‘It only takes one lie under oath to throw this case out of court by you,’ Mesereau told jurors. ‘And you can’t
count the lies here.’ When he was finished, the judge announced that Ron Zonen was about to begin the prosecution’s brief
rebuttal. Just then, on cue, all three Jackson sisters stood up, turned around and promptly marched right out of the courtroom.