Jackson lawyer highlights witness inconsistency
The brother of Michael Jackson’s molestation accuser was today confronted by the singer’s lawyer with a statement he made to investigators showing he gave a different account of the alleged incidents than the one he told to jurors.
The boy, 14, testified this week that he twice saw his sleeping brother being molested by Jackson, both times by walking up stairs into the star’s bedroom in the master bedroom suite at the singer’s Neverland ranch.
Defence lawyer Thomas Mesereau produced an interview the boy gave to sheriff’s deputies in which he said he was lying on a couch pretending to be asleep when he witnessed the second molestation.
“I was pretending like I was sleeping. I was in his couch, the little couch,” Mesereau quoted from a transcript.
Mesereau asked the boy whether his account of the second molestation had changed.
“It was actually three times,” the boy replied from the witness box in the court in Santa Maria, California.
Mesereau also asked him about what exactly Jackson was doing to his brother in the second incident and how he was touching him.
“I was nervous when I did the interview,” said the boy.
“So because you were nervous you didn’t get the facts right,” the lawyer asked. “Yes,” the boy said.
On Tuesday, Mesereau produced a transcript of grand jury testimony by a psychologist who interviewed the brother and reported yet another description of the second molestation with fundamentally different physical details.
Mesereau today also challenged prosecutors’ claims that the boys’ family was held against their will at Neverland for nearly a month, getting the boy to acknowledge that the family left three times.
“How many times do you think your family escaped from Neverland and then went back so they could escape again?” Mesereau asked.
“I don’t get the question,” the boy said.
The boy later said he only considered the third departure from Neverland to be an escape.
Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting the then 13-year-old cancer survivor at Neverland in 2003, giving him alcohol and conspiring to hold the boy’s family captive to get them to rebut a damaging TV documentary in which Jackson said he allowed children to sleep in his bedroom.
