MJ (30 page)

The next weekend, on a Saturday night, Michael appeared at June’s home in a limousine. He liked Jordie and was determined to make him part of his Neverland entourage. At the ranch, Jordie, June, and Lily
encountered other boys, including Macaulay Culkin, Wade Robson, and Brett Barnes—sometimes in Michael’s bed. June Chandler was more than happy to be part of it, especially since Michael kept giving her gifts and inviting the family to luxurious places. June would request food from Michael’s staff and
“sort of act like the place was hers,” recalled Robson, a dancer. “Sort of order people around a bit.” Nobody considered the bed thing weird.
“It’s not like you think,” Culkin said.
“First of all, it’s a huge bed. There’s always people, staff, servants, advisers, coming in and out of the room. The door is always open and my family was always invited. They were always around. It was like a giant slumber party.”

Michael invited June and her family again and again. The Chandlers grew close to him. Sometimes they stayed at Michael’s apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in Century City. The first time Jordan shared the same bed with Michael was in Las Vegas, at the Michael Jackson Suite in the Mirage. In late March, Michael had sent a private jet to pick up June, Jordie, and Lily, and they flew out from the Santa Monica airport. That night, Michael (in sweats) and Jordie (in pajamas) watched a movie:
The Exorcist
. Jordan became scared. “Oh, you want to stay here with me?” Michael asked. “Yeah,” Jordan told his friend, “I’ll stay here.” While his mother and sister slept in another bedroom, Jordie fell asleep in Michael’s bed.

It began to dawn on Jordie’s mother that something wasn’t quite right between Michael Jackson and her son. They wanted to sleep together in the bed, again, the next night. June tried to put her foot down. It was Michael, though, who emotionally appealed June’s decision. He confronted her. He trembled. He sobbed. He talked with June for half an hour. He told her he considered the Chandlers part of his family.
“Jordie is having fun. Why can’t he sleep in my bed? There’s nothing wrong. There’s nothing going on,” Michael said. “Don’t you trust me?” June relented. The next day, he bought June a
$12,000 gold Cartier bracelet. June withdrew her concerns. MJ and Jordan wound up
sleeping in the same room numerous times at Neverland. Michael, too, crashed at June’s house with her husband David
Schwartz, the owner of Rent-A-Wreck; he would spend the night in Jordie’s room, which contained only one bed, numerous times over a thirty-day period. When Jordie left for school, Michael left, too.

At first, Evan Chandler had been proud of his son’s relationship with Michael Jackson. It was something to talk about with his celebrity clients.
“[Chandler] would go on and on about how much his son liked Michael Jackson and, more important, how much Michael Jackson liked his son,” actress Carrie Fisher, one of Evan’s patients, recalled. Eventually, Fisher had to interrupt: “Hang on,” she told her dentist. “They’re sleeping in the
same bed
?” As more of his friends and family reacted with the same shock and indignation, Chandler began to feel something might be wrong. Michael, oblivious to Evan’s growing suspicion, continued to travel with the dentist’s family. They went to Disney World in May 1993, staying at the
Grand Floridian—Lily and June in one room, Jordie and Michael in another. Later, the three
Chandlers took a trip with Michael to the World Music Awards in Monte Carlo. Jordan and Lily were photographed on Michael’s lap, enthusiastically mouthing along to Tina Turner songs. After numerous such trips, Jordie’s family noticed a change in his behavior. “He was not wanting to be with Lily and I anymore, and he was just with Michael the whole time,” June would say, “and he wasn’t too happy. . . . I didn’t have any communication with him, really. He started dressing like Michael. He started acting withdrawn, sort of smart-alecky. Not as sweet as he normally was.”

The
National Enquirer
published a May 16 story about “Michael’s new, adopted family,” including photos of Michael and Jordie together at Disney World. It was time for Evan Chandler to meet this guy. The dentist showed up at June’s house, and the first thing he noticed was a new look to his son’s room. It was full of plastic army men, toys of all kinds, a life-size cardboard
Captain EO
, autographed photos of
Michael, and a cabinet stuffed with movies, CDs, and video games. Evan described his first, not particularly charitable impression of Michael Jackson:
“Ruby red lipstick, thick black eyeliner, long strands of dark hair hanging down in front of his pancaked face. But what struck me the most was how lonely he looked, huddled in the corner staring at the floor. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.” Chandler had brought along his other son, five-year-old Nikki, who immediately fell to the floor and began rolling around with the childlike Michael Jackson, playing with action figures. Later, Evan could no longer hold back: “Are you fucking my son up the ass?” Michael’s response to this crudity, unbelievably, was to giggle. He did not flinch. “I never use that word,” he said. Evan pressed further: “Then exactly what
is
the nature of your relationship?” Said Michael: “I don’t understand it myself. It must be cosmic.” On Memorial Day weekend 1993, Evan said he showed up to the Schwartz home in Brentwood and found the King of Pop, in bed, spooning with Jordan Chandler, both fully clothed.

Evan kept making concerned phone calls, but Michael was getting tired of soothing the dentist, so he stopped returning them. June was becoming concerned, too, and Michael soothed her in a different way, through more lavish gifts, including earrings, a necklace, and a ring, which he left on her bed at her home in Santa Monica. Evan
“began to get jealous of the involvement and felt left out,” Michael Freeman, one of June’s attorneys, would say. In a phone conversation with Dave Schwartz that June’s husband secretly taped, Evan vowed revenge:
“I am prepared to move against Michael Jackson. It’s already set. There are other people involved that are waiting for my phone call that are in certain positions. I’ve paid them to do it. . . . Once I make that phone call, this guy is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it.”

Once Evan Chandler decided Michael Jackson was molesting his son, he conspicuously did not report the abuse to the California Department of Social Services’ Children and Family Services Division.
Instead he picked out an attorney, Barry Rothman, the
“nastiest son of a bitch I could find,” as he told Schwartz. Rothman, a longtime music attorney in Century City who had negotiated deals for rock stars from the Who to the Rolling Stones, had problems of his own. Thirty creditors had been after him and more than twenty civil suits involving Rothman had been filed in LA Superior Court, and an ex-wife once said Rothman had so many enemies she was surprised one of them hadn’t “done him in.” Rothman helped Chandler decide on a plan. Part one was to modify June’s custody agreement—Evan asked a court to ban Jordie from seeing Michael.

Michael began to get wind of Evan Chandler’s aggressive moves. He called his own $500-an-hour attorney, Bert Fields, who’d represented Tom Cruise, Warren Beatty, George Lucas, John Travolta, and Dustin Hoffman over four decades in Hollywood. Michael had yet to spend away most of his fortune—HBO had just paid $20 million for the live Bucharest video. Fields brought in Anthony Pellicano as a private investigator and negotiator.
“If you’re on the side he’s against, the flamboyant Pellicano . . . is a goon and a bully who fights dirty,”
Vanity Fair
opined. “If he’s on your side, he is an invaluable ally, a trusted adviser, a canny investigator. He is most often called in when there is deep doo-doo all over that needs to be avoided or slung in the opposite direction.” Pellicano began to meet with everybody, including June Chandler and Dave Schwartz, who played him the tapes he’d made containing Evan’s belligerence. Pellicano also interviewed Jordie at Michael’s hideout apartment. He looked the thirteen-year-old in the eye and asked pointed questions for forty-five minutes:
Have you ever seen Michael Jackson naked?
Has he ever seen you naked? Have you ever done anything sexual with him?
“No,” came the answer, to every question.

Meanwhile, Rothman contacted Dr. Mathis Abrams, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, and asked hypothetical questions based on Jordie’s relationship with Michael. From this conversation, Dr. Abrams wrote a two-page letter declaring “reasonable suspicion would exist that sexual
abuse may have occurred.” He also said if such a case actually existed, he’d have to report it to Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services.

Two weeks later, Chandler pulled Jordie’s final baby tooth at his dentist office. This might have been a routine procedure. But he had Mark Torbiner, his longtime anesthesiologist, administer a drug called sodium amytal for the procedure. The results were dramatic. When Evan asked,
“Did Michael ever touch your penis?,” Jordie whispered, “Yes.” Evan then hugged his son: “I’m sorry, Jordie,” he said. “I’m sorry.” To many who’d been following the Michael Jackson child-molestation case closely, this is where the Chandlers’ story breaks down.
“Sodium amytal is a barbiturate that puts people into a hypnotic state,” writes Ian Halperin, an investigative journalist who intended to prove the allegations but wound up flipping to Michael’s side. “Once believed to be a truth serum effective in the interrogation of prisoners, it has become associated in recent years with something far more sinister—false memory syndrome.” If Jordie had merely said MJ had molested him, the charge would be difficult to deny. But Jordie was on sodium amytal when he said MJ had molested him—a totally different thing.

On August 4, Evan, Jordie, Michael, and Pellicano sat down at the Westwood Marquis Hotel. Michael told Jordie he missed him and stroked his hair. “I’ve missed you too,” Jordie told him. Evan greeted Michael cordially, then blurted out, “This doctor thinks you had sex with my kid.” He began shouting at him to “just fucking admit it!” Michael called the charge “preposterous.” He and Pellicano cut off the meeting and left. “I’m going to ruin you,” Evan said, pointing at Michael. “You’re going down, Michael. You are going down.” Afterward, Michael said: “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

Later that night, Pellicano and Rothman met in Rothman’s office. Evan Chandler wanted to make a deal: Michael would give Jordie
$20 million in a trust fund, and the Chandler family would drop all of its allegations of child molestation. After a few phone discussions and
another meeting, on August 13, Pellicano counteroffered:
$350,000 for a three-script screenwriting deal, with the promise of review from a major studio. Rothman proposed Chandler’s counteroffer a day later: a three-script, $15 million deal. Some of Evan Chandler’s friends who believed Jordie were aghast at these negotiations. “Are you
insane
?” asked Hollywood screenwriter J. D. Shapiro, who had given a credit for
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
to the dentist and moonlighting screenwriter. “A
three-picture deal
?”

As the negotiations between Michael’s people and Evan’s people continued, the Chandlers continued to fight over Jordie’s custody. June had signed an agreement that wouldn’t allow her son to leave LA County—even to travel on Michael’s
Dangerous
tour, which Jordie wanted to do. But she began to feel coerced into signing it, and on August 16, she filed a motion in California Supreme Court demanding that her son be returned to her. Evan Chandler did not appreciate the pressure. He returned to Mathis Abrams, who had evaluated Jordie’s molestation charges hypothetically, and asked the doctor to meet his son in person. Abrams listened to Jordie’s actual story for three hours on August 17. For the first time, Jordie revealed details about masturbation and oral sex with Jackson, which, he said, had taken place for months. This time, Abrams reported the claims to the Department of Children and Family Services, where a social worker interviewed Jordie further and concluded he was telling the truth. Two days later, Michael left to resume the
Dangerous
tour in Bangkok. For two days after that, LA police officers raided Neverland and Michael’s Century City hideout, digging up boxes of photos and files.

On August 23, somebody woke up freelance
KNBC reporter Don Ray to tip him off about what was happening at Neverland. Ray’s colleague, Conan Nolan, dug further and learned police had brought in a locksmith to gain access to MJ’s house. Nolan called locksmiths all over Santa Barbara County before one finally said:
“I can’t talk to you, but all I can say is, I hope they don’t find what they’re looking for.”
Nolan called the LAPD, which confirmed an investigation into child-molestation accusations of Michael Jackson. KNBC broke its story at four
P.M.
LA time. From there, MJ became the lead story on seventy-three news broadcasts in the LA area.

*  *  *

The year 1993 was supposed to be triumphant for Michael Jackson—he was putting on the most elaborate concert tour in history, before hundreds of thousands of screaming fans in every city in Europe, and he’d appeared on
Oprah
and the Super Bowl. Instead, it was full of pain. On March 16, Dr. Gordon Sasaki, a plastic surgeon outside LA, did a procedure to reduce the scarring on Michael’s scalp. By late June, Michael began to feel
“significant” pain, especially since the hairpiece he used to cover the bald spot he’d had since the Pepsi-commercial accident was pressuring his scalp.
Sasaki prescribed Percocet, then ceded his pain-medication control to Michael’s longtime doctors, Arnold Klein and Steven Hoefflin. For this procedure, as well as Michael’s continuing struggles with discoid lupus and acne scarring—plus his continuing experiments with his nose, chin, and cheekbones—Klein and Debbie Rowe administered pain medication. They were careful not to give too much, Rowe recalls. For early injections of the protein collagen, used for
“filling” of his acne scars, they offered no painkillers at first. Later, they expanded to a relatively small 100 milligrams of Demerol.