Exile from Neverland was accuser's motive to lie: Lawyer

He was to face continued cross-examination today.

The boy said he envisioned a future with Jackson as a mentor in a sort of Big Brother programme.

But the Neverland idyll that began when the boy had cancer ended with the family being delivered by limousine to a grandmother’s house.

“You realised you were not going to spend the rest of your lives as part of Michael Jackson’s family,” defence lawyer Thomas Mesereau asked in the court in Santa Maria, California.

“We realised he wasn’t as nice a guy as we thought he was,” the boy said. “We weren’t expecting to live with him forever. I was thinking of him as a father figure. … I saw him as like someone who could guide me the way a father would.”

When the time came to leave, the boy acknowledged his mother was anxious to go but “I wanted to stay there”.

Striking at the heart of the prosecution’s allegations of child molestation and conspiracy, Mesereau displayed a video tribute by the boy and his family in which they credited Jackson with changing their lives and helping to cure the boy of cancer.

The video had already been shown in the trial twice, but this time, with the accuser on the stand, Mesereau stopped it repeatedly to note gushing testimonials to Jackson and to ask if the boy and his family were lying.

The boy said his mother was not lying and expressed his happiness with Jackson at the time.

“Michael was nice to me,” he testified. “I felt like he was a father to me.”

He spoke warmly of Jackson’s children Prince and Paris and said he considered them a brother and sister. But the tone changed when the accuser testified of his later exile from Jackson’s fairy-tale-inspired estate.

“When you left Neverland for the last time, you felt your father, Michael Jackson, had rejected you,” Mesereau said.

The boy bristled and answered: “I didn’t need him. I didn’t want him. I didn’t feel I was rejected because I had my own real father now,” referring to a man who would later marry his mother.

Jackson, wearing a bright red jacket, sat across the courtroom still as a statue, watching the boy testify.

Earlier, the boy acknowledged that when an administrator questioned him in the wake of the televised documentary, he denied any inappropriate sexual conduct by Jackson.

Mesereau quoted the school official, Jeffrey Alpert, as saying to the boy: “Look at me, look at me. … I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth - did any of this happen?”

The boy acknowledged that he did have the conversation with Alpert, who was dean at John Burroughs Middle School in Los Angeles.

“I told Dean Alpert he didn’t do anything to me,” the boy said.

Jackson was indicted in early 2004 after an investigation that followed broadcast of Martin Bashir’s TV documentary, which showed Jackson with the boy at Neverland. The programme triggered controversy because Jackson acknowledged he let children sleep in his bed.

Prosecutors allege that after the documentary was broadcast, Jackson conspired to hold the family captive to get them to make the rebuttal video and that he gave the boy alcohol and then molested him.

Mesereau noted that Jackson's accuser initially told the prosecutor he was molested before the making of the rebuttal video rather than afterward. He emphasised that the boy is asserting he was molested after a worldwide outcry over the documentary.

The boy also denied he ever spoke to Jay Leno but said he once placed a call to the TV chat show host from a hospital and left a message on an answering machine.

The defence, which claims the family sought to get money from celebrities, has said Leno alerted police after a call from the boy because he thought the family was looking for a “mark”.

As he left court, Jackson said he was still in pain from a back injury that he said made him late for court last Thursday.

“Mesereau did a great job,” Jackson said of his lawyer.