TV host Leno says Jackson's accuser was 'suspicious'
Television comedian and talk show host Jay Leno testified today that the boy who is now accusing Michael Jackson of molestation was “overly effusive” and sounded suspicious in phone calls to him – but never asked for money.
Jackson’s defence called Leno, who regularly skewers Jackson in his monologues on The Tonight Show, to support its claim that the boy’s family schemed to get money from celebrities.
“I wasn’t asked for any money nor did I send any,” Leno said.
Leno testified that he makes 15 to 20 calls a week to children who are ill, and he began receiving voice mail messages from Jackson’s accuser, a cancer patient, around 2000.
Leno said the boy called him his hero, and he thought it was strange that a young boy would be such a fan of a comedian who is in his 50s.
“I’m not Batman. It seemed a little unusual,” Leno said.
The defence has said that Leno became so suspicious that he called Santa Barbara police to say he believed the family was looking for a “mark”. But Leno said it was police who contacted him, though it was unclear why.
The comic said he probably did tell police that it sounded like the family was seeking money.
“It sounded suspicious when a young person got overly effusive,” Leno said. “It just didn’t click with me.”
The comic said he once heard a voice in the background but said he wasn’t sure if it was the boy’s mother, a nurse or someone else. Defence lawyers have suggested that Leno heard the mother in the background coaching her son.
Leno said the calls ended when he asked comedian Louise Palanker, a friend who had become acquainted with the boy, to intercede.
Leno dedicated much of his Tonight Show monologue last night to the Jackson trial.
Noting he has often poked fun at Jackson’s expense, Leno quipped: “I was called by the defence. Apparently they’ve never seen this programme.”
Defence lawyers say Leno was one of several celebrities – including Jackson - who the accuser’s family tried to bilk out of money. Comedian Chris Tucker also is among remaining defence witnesses.
Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting the boy in February or March 2003 when he was 13, giving him alcohol and conspiring to hold the boy’s family captive to get them to rebut a documentary in which the boy appeared with Jackson as the entertainer said he let children into his bed for innocent, non-sexual sleepovers.
Jackson denies all charges.
Jackson’s attorneys yesterday called witnesses who painted the boy’s mother as a welfare cheat who exploited her son’s cancer to get money and lived lavishly at Jackson’s expense.
The defence tried to show the mother was behind several moneymaking schemes and angrily rejected people who sought to help her with anything but cash.
The mother’s former sister-in-law testified that the mother used profanity to denounce blood drives held for the accuser when he was fighting cancer.
“She told me that she didn’t need my (expletive) blood,” said the former sister-in-law, bursting into tears, “that she needed money.”
