Frail Jacko late for court again
A feeble-looking Michael Jackson arrived late again to his child abuse trial, but the judge took no apparent action – and the star sat through testimony from a psychologist who said few child sex abuse allegations turned out to be false.
Jackson, who is said to have back problems, trembled and wept yesterday at the defence table in Santa Maria, California, as lawyers and a doctor who came to court in hospital scrubs conferred in chambers with Judge Rodney Melville.
The judge, who previously threatened to arrest Jackson and revoke his bail when he was late on March 10, gave no explanation of what was discussed and ordered testimony to resume.
Jackson spokeswoman Raymone Bain said she spoke with the singer on Sunday and he told her he was having severe and sometimes excruciating back pain. “He said his back was killing him,” she said in a telephone interview from Washington.
Jackson, 46, arrived just minutes late, unlike the March 10 incident, when he turned up more than hour late in pyjama bottoms and slippers.
This time Jackson was fully dressed, wearing a black suit, brocade vest and a blue armband, but his hair was untidy and his steps were tentative. He turned weakly to acknowledge fans on the street, then walked unsteadily into the courthouse with his brother Jackie and a security guard holding his arms.
As Jackson left court six hours later, a reporter asked him what had happened in the morning.
Jackson looked back and moved his mouth but no words came out. He then said he was “very much hurt” and was on medication “by way of a doctor”.
Jackson is accused of molesting a boy at his Neverland ranch in 2003, giving him alcohol and conspiring to hold the boy’s family captive. He denies all the charges.
Prosecution witness Anthony Urquiza, a psychologist who has not interviewed Jackson’s accuser described “child sexual assault accommodation syndrome”, in which youngsters become secretive, feel helpless and trapped, delay reporting acts of abuse, and finally learn to cope with the situation.
He said children often underwent changes in behaviour because of the abuse, including “acting out, becoming defiant, name-calling”. Under questioning by the prosecution, the witness said that could include talking back to teachers and getting into fights – the kind of misbehaviour seen in Jackson’s accuser.
During cross-examination, defence lawyer Thomas Mesereau asked the psychologist whether Jackson’s accuser may be lying.
“Let me ask a hypothetical question,” Mesereau said. ”You’ve got a mother and three children. There is not a father figure present. There has been a traumatic divorce of recent vintage.
“For whatever reason, the mother and her children pick someone and adopt that person as their father figure … and suddenly there is a split. The mother, the children see that the person they’ve adopted as a father figure is bailing out. You can imagine … a situation like that where the mother induces the children to make false claims of sexual abuse.”
Urquiza replied that only 2-6% of molestation allegations turned out to be false according to research he had seen and he said the scenario Mesereau described would be “fairly incredible”.
He said he knew of no research concerning false molestation claims motivated by money.
Prosecutors, who claim Jackson served his accuser wine from a soft drink can during a trip on a private jet, also called Lauren Wallace, a flight attendant.
She said she served Jackson wine in soft drink cans on several flights and hid alcohol for him in the lavatory “out of children’s reach”. She said she was never on a flight with the accuser and his family.
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