Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  With that, Mesereau moved to Star’s claims that he had witnessed his brother’s molestation by Michael Jackson, establishing immediately that the boy had not said a word about any of this to anyone until he and his family met with Larry Feldman, that Feldman had sent Star to see Dr. Stan Katz, and that it was Katz’s complaint that had resulted in criminal charges being filed against Michael Jackson. The attorney probed a few small discrepancies between the boy’s testimony on direct examination the previous day and what he had told Katz eighteen months earlier, then became steadily more specific—and graphic. Referring to the second alleged molestation, Mesereau asked, “Did you tell Stanley Katz that Michael Jackson had his hand on your brother’s crotch?” Yes, Star answered, just as he had testified the day before.

  “That’s not really what you told him, is it?” Mesereau said.

  “What are you talking about?” Star asked, and for the first time looked apprehensive.

  “Well, you told Stanley Katz that Michael Jackson was rubbing his penis against Gavin’s buttocks, didn’t you?”

  Star hadn’t said anything like that during his direct examination. “No,” he answered.

  “Would it refresh your recollection if I showed you [Katz’s] grand jury testimony?” asked Mesereau. The attorney retrieved a copy from the defense table, but Star refused to look at it, and insisted he had never said anything like that to Dr. Katz.

  Star had earlier denied that he ever wanted to be an entertainer, but Mesereau quickly established that the boy had attended a dance school and a comedy school, and had asked Michael Jackson to help him become an actor. He and his brother had also entered the main house at Neverland “hundreds of times” without Jackson’s knowledge. Michael had given them the house alarm code when they returned from Miami to California after the airing of the Bashir documentary, Star explained; he and Gavin could go anywhere they wanted in the house, including Michael’s bedroom. Mesereau asked about a time when Star and Gavin had been caught drinking in the Neverland wine cellar during one of Jackson’s absences, but the boy denied it, and the attorney appeared pleased that he had. Star’s attitude grew increasingly arrogant and dismissive as the cross-examination continued. He visibly lost the sympathy of most members of the jury when he admitted carving up Michael’s expensive, leather-bound guest book, the one that had been signed by all of his most famous houseguests. Jessica Simpson seemed to be the only guest Star could remember, and the boy seemed far from contrite about what he had done.

  On direct examination, Star had said his nickname at Neverland was “Blowhole,” and under Sneddon’s questioning this sounded distinctly suggestive. On cross-examination, though, Star admitted that he had given himself the nickname. Mesereau produced a card Star had given to Michael Jackson on Father’s Day in 2002, with an inscription that read, “Michael, we love you unconditionally, to infinity and beyond forever. Thank you, Michael, for being our family. Blowhole Star Arvizo.” More than a dozen other cards and notes written to Jackson by the Arvizos were then offered into evidence. In one of them, Star had written, “When we get our hearts broken into tiny little pieces, we always still love, need, and care about you with every tiny little piece of our heart, because you heal us in a very special way.” That note didn’t mean anything, Star said: He’d copied the words from a card his grandmother had bought at the supermarket.

  Fifteen-year-old Gavin Arvizo took the stand in Santa Maria looking nothing at all like the frail, sweet-faced boy the jury had seen in three separate videos. This Gavin Arvizo was a broad-shouldered, bull-necked adolescent who wore a blue button-down shirt and dark slacks and had a buzz cut that gave him the look of a recent Marine Corps recruit. He had obviously been shaving for some time and spoke in a voice that was deep even when he tried to make it soft. Nevertheless, the teenager melted the guarded expressions of several jurors at the beginning of his direct examination with a recapitulation of the ordeal his life had been during the years when he battled cancer in a one-bedroom East LA apartment that overflowed with the violent tumult of his parents’ relationship. He thought Michael Jackson was “the coolest guy ever” when the star began to phone him at the hospital—more than twenty times, Gavin said—before they ever met face-to-face. That opinion held when Michael started to invite him and his family for weekends at Neverland.

  Mesereau observed that the jurors began to take notes right around the first time Gavin contradicted what he had said on the rebuttal video, claiming in court that it was Jackson’s idea to have him and his brother Star sleep in the master bedroom. He and Star watched The Simpsons on TV that first night, Gavin said, but became distracted when Michael and Frank Cascio began to show them “female adult materials.” He repeated his brother’s story about Jackson looking at topless women and joking, “Got milk?”

  The recitation was oddly stilted and the boy’s manner curiously detached. The only genuine emotion Gavin showed on the stand came when he recalled his next six visits to Neverland, and being told each time that Michael was either not there or not available. There was real hurt and anger in the boy’s voice as he described how, on one of those occasions, he “bumped into” Michael after being told the star was away on business. Gavin also grew animated as he told the jurors that almost immediately after the interview with Martin Bashir was taped, Michael left Neverland and did not return until the Arvizos were gone. He never heard from Michael again, Gavin said, until the Bashir documentary aired in the UK.

  Jackson’s own emotions were on the surface all during Gavin’s testimony, just as they had been when Davellin and Star occupied the witness stand. His fury had seemed to darken with each successive appearance by the Arvizo children, and he became increasingly agitated as Gavin sneered that Michael had coached him to tell Martin Bashir that “he pretty much cured me of cancer.” Mesereau laid a hand on his client’s arm, as if pressing him to remain seated, fearing, he would admit later, a repetition of what had happened during Davellin Arvizo’s testimony. Just as the girl told the jury that she had seen the defendant repeatedly kiss her brother on the forehead, Michael abruptly stood and stormed out of the courtroom. Mesereau, looking flustered for the first time during the trial, had chased his client, then returned moments later, flushed and slightly disheveled, to tell Judge Melville, “Mr. Jackson had to go to the bathroom, Your Honor.”

  The drama of that scene was eclipsed on the morning of Gavin Arvizo’s return to the witness stand. Just before court was to convene at 8:30 a.m., Mesereau took an emergency call from his client. “Michael said he had been up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and was walking around Neverland in the dark when he fell and hurt his back,” the attorney recalled. Just moments later, Mesereau responded to Melville’s incredulous “The defendant’s not here?” question by answering, “No, Your Honor, Mr. Jackson is at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Ynez with a serious back problem . . . he does plan to come.” Enraged, the judge warned that if the defendant was not in his courtroom within one hour he would issue a warrant for Jackson’s arrest and revoke his bail. “I knew the judge meant it,” Mesereau would say later. The defense attorney was so distraught that he barely seemed to notice the cameras and sound booms that followed him into the parking lot, where he paced nervously and could be heard repeating, alternately pleading and demanding, “Michael, you’ve got to get here now!” Michael’s return to the courthouse in a big black SUV at five minutes past the 9:30 deadline would become the most emblematic moment of the entire trial. Amid a throng of feverishly concerned fans, Jackson emerged from the vehicle looking distinctly groggy and glassy-eyed as he tottered through the crush of the crowd wearing a blue blazer over a white T-shirt, iridescent blue pajama bottoms, and Gucci slippers.

  “I had told Michael he couldn’t go home to change,” Mesereau explained. “We couldn’t take the chance of bail being revoked. He had to get to court as quickly as he could. So we just threw a jacket over the pajamas. The funny thing is that the jurors told me later that they didn’t even
notice,” Mesereau recalled. “Michael was sitting down at the defense table when they came in, and the fact that he had pajama bottoms on made no impression on them at all. When they heard about it later, they couldn’t believe there had been so much fuss.”

  The “pain medications” Michael had taken at the hospital were probably what got him through a day of testimony in which Gavin Arvizo described the various acts of sexual abuse he claimed had been perpetrated on his person by Michael Jackson. It had all been set up, the boy insisted, when Michael served him wine on the private jet that carried them back to California from Florida the morning after the Bashir documentary aired on ABC. Michael continued to serve him alcohol during the Arvizos’ subsequent stay at Neverland, where he and his brother Star spent the night in Michael’s bedroom, Gavin testified, but Jackson did not touch him sexually. It was during this time that Michael began to call him “son,” Gavin said, and he returned the favor by calling Jackson “Daddy.” District Attorney Sneddon introduced as evidence a note Michael had written to Gavin that read, “I want you to have a good time in Florida. I’m very happy to be your DADDY. Blanket, Prince, and Paris are your brothers and sisters. But you really have to be honest in your heart and know that I am your DAD and will take good care of you. DAD.”

  “Nothing bad happened,” Gavin continued, until after the taping of the rebuttal video on February 20, 2003. That very evening, Michael had walked naked into the bedroom where he and Star sat watching TV. In contradiction of his brother, though, Gavin said that Michael did not have an erection. The strangest quality of the boy’s testimony continued to be the flat, rote tone of it. He might have been talking about what he had eaten for lunch as he described the evening when Michael began to talk about masturbation and told him it was “normal.” “He told me that if men don’t masturbate, then they can get to a level where they might rape a girl,” Gavin told the jurors, who looked far more uncomfortable than the boy did. Michael asked him if he masturbated, and, “I told him that I didn’t,” Gavin went on. “And then he said he would do it for me . . . And I said that I really didn’t want to.” But Michael put his hands under the covers, reached inside his pajamas, and began stroking his penis. Eventually he ejaculated, Gavin said, then became embarrassed, but Michael again told him it was “natural,” and they both fell asleep. Michael masturbated him again a few nights later, when they were sitting on the bed watching TV, Gavin continued. “He said he wanted to teach me. And we were laying there, and he started doing it to me. And then he kind of grabbed my hand in a way to try to do it to him. And I kind of pulled my hand away, because I didn’t want to do it.”

  After Gavin told Sneddon that these were the only two instances of sexual molestation by Mr. Jackson, the prosecutor turned the boy over to Mesereau, who began by asking the witness to recall his years as a student at John Burroughs Middle School in Los Angeles, where he had twice told the dean that Michael Jackson “didn’t do anything to me.” Mesereau then walked Gavin through the litany of complaints from teachers at the school who had described the boy as “disruptive.” Assorted memoranda that noted Gavin’s bad behavior and refusal to do homework were introduced into evidence. The boy seemed barely able to suppress a smile when Mesereau read that a Miss Bender had complained he was regularly defiant, but disagreed vehemently when shown that the same teacher had written that he had “good acting skills.”

  Mesereau then played the entire rebuttal video for Gavin, stopping every few minutes to ask if what he and the other Arvizos had just said was true or a lie. The boy called himself and his family liars so many times that even Judge Melville became visibly disgusted with the witness, swatting away Sneddon’s objections with a dismissive backhand.

  When Mesereau asked Gavin about riding in chauffeured limousines and a Rolls-Royce, the boy offered a reply that cracked up the courtroom: “I only rode in a Rolls-Royce when I was escaping.” After establishing that during his “escapes” Gavin had gone shopping at Toys “R” Us and visited an orthodontist who removed his braces, all at Michael Jackson’s expense, Mesereau produced a sheaf of receipts (courtesy of Marc Schaffel) showing that while they claimed to have been held prisoner in Calabasas, the Arvizos had run up thousands of dollars of bills for cosmetics, designer clothing, spa and beauty treatments, expensive restaurant meals, and lodging, charging it all to Neverland Valley Entertainment.

  Mesereau got Gavin to admit that he and his family had met with Larry Feldman before speaking to either the police or the district attorney’s office about Michael Jackson’s alleged misconduct. The boy insisted he did not know that he could profit financially by filing a lawsuit against Jackson before he turned eighteen. Gavin then acknowledged he had told detectives it was not Michael Jackson but his grandmother who said that men masturbate “so they do not rape women.” Mesereau used a series of questions that he knew Sneddon would never permit the boy to answer to make the jurors aware that Gavin had been caught drinking alcohol at Neverland, searching for porn on the Internet, and masturbating during times when Michael Jackson was not at the ranch. The attorney finished by asking Gavin if he and his family were angry that after the boy’s cancer went into remission, Michael Jackson had stopped inviting the Arvizos to the ranch. “You felt he had abandoned you, right?” Mesereau asked. “Yes!” Gavin answered. It was the most emotionally expressive moment of the boy’s entire examination.

  The media in general, and the cable television correspondents in particular, seemed to convince Sneddon that he was gaining ground with the jury when he was in fact losing it. “Again and again you’d see the TV reporters run outside to talk to the cameras when some salacious detail was presented,” Mesereau recalled, “and they wouldn’t even be in the courtroom when the witness was taken apart on cross-examination. One witness after another was shown to have a financial motive for testifying, or to have contradicted earlier sworn statements, or to have a shady background that made them suspect, but you weren’t hearing a word about it from the media. The media was completely invested in convicting Michael Jackson, because that’s where they thought the ratings and revenue were. And I could see that Sneddon believed he was winning the case because the media said he was winning the case. But the jurors couldn’t run out of the courtroom after the direct examination. They had to sit through the cross-examination, and I could see that at least a couple of them were getting more and more disgusted with the prosecution witnesses. I didn’t know about the rest, but I could see that at least a couple didn’t believe a word Gavin Arvizo said.”

  Still, Mesereau refrained from saying as much to his client. “I don’t know if Michael understood that the prosecution case was falling apart,” Mesereau said. “I just know that he was very scared. Very scared. He would call me or Susan Yu at three or four in the morning, crying. He was always worried that somebody somehow would corrupt us. He said over and over again, ‘Please don’t let them get to you.’ We didn’t even know who ‘they’ were. Sony, I guess. Anyway, even though we were doing well, and he knew it, the trial turned into an immensely exhausting and painful experience for Michael, and for us. We were far from finished when Gavin Arvizo left the stand. Michael understood that. We all believed that the most dangerous prosecution witnesses were yet to come. But we were completely in the dark about who and what Sneddon was going to use to back up his claim that Michael had molested five other boys. And that was scary.”

  On March 30, 2005, Judge Melville ruled that the prosecution would be permitted to introduce into evidence the allegations against Michael Jackson involving Jordan Chandler and four other boys: Jason Francia, Wade Robson, Brett Barnes, and Macaulay Culkin. “I knew that three of those boys—Robson, Barnes, and Macaulay Culkin—were not going to testify for the prosecution,” Mesereau recalled. “And I wasn’t that afraid of Jason Francia. The Jordan Chandler allegations, though, those were of major concern. I knew we might win or lose this case on whether or not the jurors believed Michael had molested Jordie Chandler.”

  Mes
ereau was aware of the lengths to which the prosecution had gone to make Jordan Chandler a witness against Michael Jackson. Sneddon’s most dedicated deputy, Ron Zonen, had flown to New York to personally threaten, cajole, and finally plead with Jordie to fly out to California to testify at the criminal trial. No one outside the district attorney’s office knew that Zonen had been unsuccessful, and both the defense and the media were similarly unaware that the Santa Barbara County prosecutors had prevailed upon the FBI to assist them with their problem. In June 2004, Zonen and another deputy district attorney assigned to the case, Gordon Auchincloss, had flown to Virginia to meet with agents from the FBI’s Behavior Analysis Unit to ask if the bureau might become involved in the case against Jackson, perhaps even initiate a federal prosecution. After an August 30, 2004, conference call between the BAU agents and the Santa Barbara prosecutors, as an FBI memo produced two weeks later recalled, it was agreed that the bureau’s agent in Santa Maria would “open a case.” In September, two FBI agents met with now twenty-nine-year-old Jordie Chandler at a hotel in New York City, but the young man was just as adamant about avoiding an appearance at Michael Jackson’s trial as he had been when Zonen met with him. According the report filed by the FBI agents, Jordie said he “had no interest in testifying against Jackson” and “advised that he would legally fight any attempt” to compel him to do so. “I don’t think Jordie was concerned with vindication or with what people thought about him,” said his uncle Ray. “He was concerned with being left alone, with being safe.”