Michael Jackson defence rests
The defence rested in the Michael Jackson child abuse trial without putting the pop star on the stand, wrapping up after a three-week effort to portray the accuser and his mother as shakedown artists.
Prosecutors immediately began their rebuttal yesterday. The jury could get the case as early as the middle of next week and begin deciding whether Jackson molested a 13-year-old cancer patient at his Neverland ranch in 2003.
Defence lawyers portrayed Jackson as the victim of trumped-up charges brought by the boy’s mother when she realised that the family’s days of living lavishly at Jackson’s expense were about to end. A series of witnesses described the mother as a grifter and a welfare cheat who made a career out of hitting on celebrities for money.
The defence took only three weeks to attack a case prosecutors spent nearly 10 weeks laying out.
Initially, the defence case was projected to last up to eight weeks, with a celebrity-studded witness list some 300 names long, including Elizabeth Taylor, Stevie Wonder and Kobe Bryant.
But only a few celebrities were called, among them Jay Leno and Macaulay Culkin. Jackson did not take the stand, either, despite his lawyers’ hints at the start of the trial that he might do so.
Comedian Chris Tucker, star of the Rush Hour movies, was the final defence witness Wednesday.
He said he found the accuser to be unusually cunning for a 12-year-old after meeting the boy at a benefit while the child was battling cancer in 2001.
Tucker said his suspicions about the family set in when they came to the set of a movie he was filming in Las Vegas and refused to leave. He said he paid for their hotel and expenses, but after several weeks they were still there.
Tucker said that under pressure from the family he arranged a private flight to Miami for them after they discovered that Jackson was there, and in Florida he took Jackson aside and warned him to be wary of the family.
“I said: ‘Michael, something ain’t right,”’ Tucker said.
Leno testified on Tuesday that he became suspicious of Jackson's accuser after he received several voice-mail messages in which the boy gushingly expressed his admiration for The Tonight Show host.
Prosecutors cast Jackson, 46, as a pedophile with a history of fondling boys, including his accuser in February or March 2003 at Neverland.
Jackson is also charged with giving the boy alcohol and conspiring to hold his family captive to get them to rebut a damaging TV documentary that recounted Jackson’s penchant for letting children sleep in his bed.
