Behind The Michael Jackson Verdict | 2 Angry Men
I am going to tell a story that I have never talked about publicly before. A story that Quincy Jones told me. It involves Michael Jackson, a chimp, and an enema. I will explain later. Mark, we are going to talk about the Netflix show The Verdict about the Michael Jackson molestation trial. You are prominently featured in this documentary.
“You know, I did a Piers Morgan show and there was a guy on there who referenced you and referenced Celebrity Justice.”
Yep. We covered it. We covered it wall-to-wall.
Yes. Well, and for those who do not remember, that was a predecessor of TMZ—Celebrity Justice. It was a show I sold to Telepictures, and it was a Monday-through-Friday show where we covered celebrities in the justice system. We were all over the Michael Jackson case. So I want to get into this because you were involved, and in the end, obviously, Michael Jackson was found not guilty. From my vantage point, one of the main reasons Jackson was found not guilty in that case was because of the credibility of the Arvizo family. Gavin, who was I think thirteen or fourteen years old, was very combative on the stand, and the mother, Janet, whom a lot of people just called a fraudster—there was a lot of information on her.
What really struck me about that—and I am not in any way saying I feel like Jackson was guilty or not guilty because I was not in the courtroom every day—but one of the things that seemed to come up over a period of years is that Michael Jackson found a lot of dysfunctional families. And I think there is something behind that.
“Well, I do not know that you have the chicken or the egg at some point. Anybody who is in the public eye—and I mentioned this both the other night and in the series as well—it is hard, if you were not alive at the time or of age at the time, to overstate. In fact, it is impossible to overstate the level of fame and notoriety and talent and just the phenomenon that was Michael Jackson in the eighties and going into the nineties. I do not remember, and I do not think there is anybody who has ever approached it since. And that is technically before the dawn of the internet in some ways. With the emergence of the internet, even people who are wall-to-wall now, you do not have—”
I think you are right. I agree with you on that.
“Yeah. Did you go to the—in the eighties, the Dodger Stadium concerts on that tour?”
Yeah, no, he was—it was insane. Look, you are right, but you know that there is this thing about kids who become celebrities: their growth gets stunted. They really do not develop after that because then they are around adults all the time who make decisions for them. You see a lot of—one of the reasons child stars are so messed up is because they never mature. He became famous, world-famous, at six or seven. So, you know, at first you thought, oh, he is gravitating to kids because his growth was stunted. But he just—hanging out with all these kids and coming up with nicknames like “Blowhole” for these kids—it became problematic for a lot of people as they started to really look at Michael Jackson.
So the interesting thing about—and for those who do not know, we are referencing not the biopic that came out at the behest of the estate, which has done wildly successful—last time I looked, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred million dollars worldwide—but this is the Netflix docu-series which is focused on the trial, and it is called The Verdict. For those who do not remember, he was tried and prosecuted by the then-D.A., who has passed away, Tom Sneddon, in Santa Barbara County—specifically the Santa Maria court, presided over by Judge Melville. That case ended in an acquittal across the board on every count.
In full disclosure, I represented him in the run-up to that in the Child Protective Services investigation that took place before that. In fact, I was not only his lawyer when he was arrested. I have told you before: I was sitting doing Scott Peterson’s preliminary hearing wearing a pager. For those who do not remember what a pager was, it is something that vibrates on your belt when somebody wants to get a hold of you. I was doing Scott’s prelim and got a page from an 805 area code—Santa Barbara—that search warrants were being executed. We had to scramble a jet, go get him, pick up Michael from Vegas, and take him to surrender because there were search warrants being executed.
“I remember that. Well, we covered that, and there was a lot of drama on that flight. Michael Jackson was in a bad, bad state.”
Well, not only was there a lot of drama on that flight, there was also a gentleman—who has also passed away since then—who was the private jet operator. He decided he was going to—I only learned later—he decided he was going to put a pinhole camera inside the private jet, and he filmed us as we were flying from Vegas to L.A.
“And that film got released and—”
Well, and he tried to sell it. I got a call from Greta Van Susteren telling me that somebody had offered it to her for a million bucks. I am sure they came to you as well.
“I believe he was prosecuted, by the way.”
Well, I got a restraining order the next day. Before I could—to extract the video from the lawyer who had it before I could get there, I think Tom O’Brien was the U.S. Attorney. He had the FBI run over there, pick it up, and they prosecuted the guy.
“You were worried he was going to kill himself or die.”
I will tell you, I just talked to Ben Brafman recently about this. I brought in Ben because Count One of that indictment I always thought was directed at me and the investigation. I said, “I am going to need to testify in this case.” And I did end up testifying—not once, but twice. But I did not think, and Ben did not think, that Michael would survive a trial. I remember the arraignment where Michael somehow levitated to the top of that SUV, and there is a picture of Ben and I looking up at that. Ben jokingly said to me, “If we do not get this guy under control, he is going to come to court in his pajamas.” And he did end up doing that.
Yeah. And look, we will get into the drug issues. But I guess, look, he was found not guilty. It was not necessarily satisfying to the public. There are some people who always felt he was not guilty, and then there were people who just did not buy it. There was a lot of smoke around Michael Jackson. You have got to acknowledge that.
“Let me tell you something that I find interesting. I have not talked to Tom Mesereau. The last time I saw Tom, we were both at the Metropolitan Detention Center—just said hi. I have not talked to him since. He is separate and apart from me. I tried the Peterson case, and I said the biggest mistake I ever made in Peterson was that I had agreed with the prosecution not to have cameras in the courtroom.”
Right. Because I thought that the urban legends and the fact you did not have a sequestered jury had polluted it. It was in the ether. People expected what they were supposed to do. By the way, I think I was prescient because the foreman was removed because he said he was not delivering the verdict. He said it on the record: “I am not able to deliver the verdict that the community expects.”
Separate and apart from me, Tom did an interview, and he said at one point that that was one of his regrets in Michael’s trial—that it was not televised—for a completely different reason, but ultimately because if the public had seen the evidence as it came out, they would have understood just how ridiculous the case was. I remember testifying in a very small courtroom. I was sitting in the witness stand very close to that jury, and I remember Ron Zonen, who was the deputy lead prosecutor—
“I know all these names.”
Yeah. He was cross-examining me, and he made a couple of mistakes. I was my flipping self and said a couple of things, and this jury was laughing. I remember coming out of there and telling Pat Harris, who was with me, “This jury is never going to convict him.”
I remember there used to be a restaurant—do you remember, in Pasadena, a place called Burger Continental?
“No.”
Burger Continental was kind of an institution in Pasadena. It was run by Harry and Gary Hendoyan, and they used to serve voluminous amounts of food. It was a favorite haunting place of law enforcement for obvious reasons. I invited Sneddon to come down before he brought the case, but after the search warrant, to try to talk him out of filing the case. We sat at Burger Continental, and I will never forget it. I ordered—you cannot order a small portion of food. It was mounds of food, and we were eating it. I will never forget Sneddon walking out of the place holding a plastic bag with—
“That is why he is dead, Mark.”
Yes. Because he ate too much food at Burger Continental. I kept telling him, “There is no way you can win this case. I have investigated this family. I know everything there is to know about this family. It is a disaster for you to go forward with this. How is this going to be your legacy—that you are looking after Michael as the great white whale, so to speak?” But he was determined to bring this case. He was determined to prosecute this case against all odds and against all—
“Because they thought the jury would believe the kid. And I agree with you. The family was a disaster, and the verdict was unsurprising.”
You want to hear my story?
“Yes.”
Then I want to really get into some of the things, including the drug use that ended up killing him years later. So here is my story. When the trial went down in ’93—
“Ninety-three was Jordy Chandler.”
Oh, excuse me. I am actually thinking of ’93. Right. I know you are. Ninety-three was when Jordy Chandler made the allegations against Michael Jackson, and they ended up settling for a reported twenty million dollars. So in the middle of this trial, I get a call from Quincy Jones’s production company, which was in Burbank right around the pass. They said, “We are thinking of doing a series kind of called Ripped from the Headlines, and we wondered if we could have a meeting with you to go over the types of stories you are covering because we are brainstorming this.” I said, “Sure.” So I drive over there one afternoon, and there are like twenty people in this conference room—not Quincy Jones yet. All these guys are asking me questions about the stories I am covering. We are going through it.
All of a sudden, Quincy Jones walks in. He sees me and says, “Hey, man. I got a story for you.”
And he starts telling me this story. He said, “I went to Neverland one weekend”—I think he even told me the time frame, but I forgot. He said, “I went to Neverland, and Michael let me sleep in his suite. Michael took a different suite at Neverland.” So he says around midnight, there is a knock at the door, and he is thinking, “Who the heck is this?” He says he hears the housekeeper in the dark saying, “Michael? Bubbles.”
Bubbles is the chimp, right?
Quincy says to me, “I turned the light on, and there is the housekeeper holding two enemas.” Quincy says the housekeeper looked at him and realized it is obviously not Michael. She said, “Oh, I am sorry,” and she walked away.
Quincy was laughing. And everybody in the room was horrified that he was telling—you know, I am the investigative reporter for CBS. So he leaves, and they do not know what to say. So they just continue the meeting. The next day, I get a slew of phone calls from his people saying, “That was off the record.” And I am saying to them, “Guys, just so you know, if you want something off the record, you have to say it before you tell whatever story it is you are telling.” But he never said off the record. He just told me the story, and they were freaking out.
I never did the story because I could not verify it. But this is Quincy Jones telling me this story. I have never talked about it before. It is just one of those things that shows his life was so bizarre, and it kind of opens the door to a lot of what we were hearing at that point and thereafter.
“So, have you ever been to Neverland? Or were you ever in Neverland?”
People—I remember when representing Michael, and even in years since, one of the questions, besides “How do you sleep at night when you defend these people?”—one of the other common refrains was, “What is Neverland like? Would you ever take your son to Neverland?” And they said, well, actually, yes. I have taken Jake to Neverland. There was a two-story video arcade—I call it two-story because it appeared to be. You flip the lights on, and I will never forget Jake’s eyes bugging out as he was playing at Neverland and going inside the house. Then you go and take a look at the theater. The theater had an incredible working candy area and a popcorn machine and that train that was very reminiscent of Disneyland. It was kind of a magical place.
For those who did not know Michael—by the time I got there, because it is funny you mentioned ’93—in ’93, as you will remember, the late, great Howard Weitzman was representing Michael.
“Right.”
Fast-forward ten years to 2003. Johnny Cochran was already sick at that point. Johnny had, along with Ben Brafman, tried Diddy’s case in New York, got the acquittal, had sworn after O.J. he was never going to do a criminal case. Diddy got him to go back and try with Brafman the case in New York. But Johnny was already sick, and he could not handle Michael’s case at that point. I met with him, and we talked about it. Johnny was sick, but Johnny also was extremely concerned—as I was—as to whether he could make it through a trial. Tom got him acquitted across the board, but he was—I hate to say because I did not know him that well—a shadow of his former self.
Ninety-three took it out of him. Ninety-three, by all accounts talking to people who were around him—I talked to all of them. There was a delightful woman that was kind of by his side. I saw reports about Paris, his daughter, saying that he had overdosed at one point.
“Well, he was out of it for so much of the trial on drugs.”
Well, he was out of it just in general at that point. It had taken such a toll. It really brings home in sharp focus just what people do not understand. When you go through something like that—when you are watching somebody go through that kind of attention, that kind of scrutiny, with horrific allegations—it takes a toll that people cannot withstand. He could not withstand it. I think the trial killed him, actually.
“Well, or Dr. Klein and other doctors killed him by keeping him addicted to drugs. There was a moment where the judge said, ‘I am going to throw him in jail if he does not get to court within an hour.’ And then he showed up looking utterly out of it in his pajamas. He was in the throes of addiction back then. It did not take many years thereafter for him to die from it. But Michael Jackson by that time was a drug addict for years. It happened because of the Pepsi commercial, and doctors would never take him off it. They just kept fueling it. So in a way, he was really the victim of doctors. But he had been an addict for many years before that trial, Mark.”
Well, the fact of somebody having that kind of scrutiny and being criminally prosecuted and worrying about the consequences—that was a constant worry. Even the brief amount of time in the cell when he was booked and then released—he came out and he was very, very vocal about how impactful that was.
So then the next phase of this is people say, “Do you think he was guilty in that case?” I have always consistently said, based on everything I saw involving that family, there was no way. And I meant it when I talked to Sneddon. I meant it afterwards. There was no way that I believe that that case was a criminal prosecution. I cannot speak to any other case, any other accusation. But that case, to my mind, there—I could go on and on as to why that case never should have been brought.
“Well, I hear you on the Arvizo family. I hear you. Did not they get the same lawyer that had previously represented the accuser from ten years before? The JCPenney incident—some of the other things that were—”
I remember that now. Yeah, I forgot about the JCPenney thing.
Look, I want to bring up something else. They played the Martin Bashir documentary about Michael Jackson during the trial. One of the things was a lot of people thought Bashir was trying to do a hit piece on Michael, and they were playing this whole thing. But something came from this, and it really struck me because it connects with another case I covered. When they played the Martin Bashir documentary, there were jurors that were dancing in their seats listening to the music. There is a star power that is undeniable in trials like this. You have got Michael Jackson sitting there, and then all of a sudden you are watching his music. You have got stars like Macaulay Culkin coming in and supporting him. Jurors get starstruck. They fanboy and fangirl out with people that resonate with them. Being able to play his music really mattered.
It reminded me of one of the most interesting cases I have ever covered, Mark. Dolly Parton was sued in federal court in L.A. for allegedly ripping off *9 to 5*. These two songwriters sued her. I covered this trial. There was a similarity between their song and *9 to 5*. Then they called Dolly Parton to the stand. She gets up and walks past the jurors, and I could see probably four or five of them already were saying not liable as soon as she passed them. But man, she sat down with a guitar. The lawyer started saying, “I want to go through your history of songwriting.” She starts playing songs from when she was a little girl. Then she starts playing some of the hit songs she had. Then they start asking her about *9 to 5*. I remember in that twang, she looks at the jury and says, “Well, I can put it this way: I consider all of my songs my children. It just happened that *9 to 5* grew up to be president.”
Then she pulls the guitar out, and she starts playing *9 to 5* and singing. Not only is the jury doing this, but the judge is swaying. I just thought, how many minutes is it going to take for this jury to say not liable? It took a few minutes, and that was it. Dolly Parton won the case. It really taught me the power of celebrity when I watched that trial.
“Well, you put your finger on the pulse of something. When you are famous, you do get a presumption. When you are infamous, you get a presumption, but it is usually the opposite direction. The thing that I never understood tactically by either Ron Zonen or Sneddon is why did they bring it in Santa Maria? That was the venue, presumably. But remember that the ranch required hundreds of people—vendors, workers—to maintain it and keep it. He was one of the great, probably the number one or number two, employers in that portion of the north county of Santa Barbara. Everybody had one or two degrees of separation from Michael Jackson. The one thing you will find back then historically is that he was a very generous employer. So I never understood how they were going to overcome that because he knew everybody. That was his home base. But after they did the search warrant, he never really wanted to go back there. It had been tarnished for him. It was a place of not fond memories.”
“Well, it also just fell into deep, deep disrepair, and it was getting repossessed. When he died, he was underwater—which is really kind of amazing, financially. And now the estate is worth hundreds of millions, if not a billion-plus dollars. It is remarkable how that turned around because Michael Jackson was deep in debt when he died. Part of Neverland—there were repossession actions going on at some point on the ranch.”
“For some reason—”
“And I think it is one of the reasons he sold some of the catalog to keep it afloat, but he was in deep, deep trouble financially.”
“Yeah, I think Tom Barrack and Colony Capital ended up buying Neverland, and Barrack is—I think he is ambassador to Turkey now. Part of the financial straits at the time—and you are absolutely right, when he was prosecuted, it was a dire financial crisis.”
“Did you get paid?”
“Yes. But that is a story that I am under an NDA on.”
“You actually got paid because a lot of people have not been paid by Michael Jackson.”
“And that was a story that, in fact, Ed Bradley at CBS—who has now passed away—they did both a 60 Minutes interview, a series of interviews, and they licensed Michael’s special at the same time. There was a lot of accusation at the time that there was linkage there, which Ed Bradley denied as I remember. But he had tremendous financial issues back then, not the least of which was because of his generosity and wild spending.”
“Did Mesereau get paid?”
You know, I do not know. I was kind of knee-deep at the time in the Peterson case, and I do not know what Tom’s arrangements were. Tom is still—when I saw him the other day—great lawyer, great person. He will be remembered for that case. That was his kind of signature achievement.
So, in the end, I am just curious what you think about how the public received the verdict. You were in the middle of it. I had my own vantage point. Do you think people bought the verdict, or do you think he got away with it? Do you think the public felt he got away with it?
“Oh, I think that the public felt—at the time—I think time has an interesting way of changing people’s perception. But I think at the time, no. I think that is one of the reasons that probably should have been televised, along with Peterson, for the opposite reason. Because if people had seen the quality of the evidence and been able to judge the credibility of the witnesses, it would not have been a surprise. The problem when cases are not televised is that you are always relying on somebody else to be your historian, and that is always being filtered through whatever team they are rooting for. That is not fair.”
“Yeah, you are right. You are absolutely right.”
Okay. Really interesting. I have not seen it yet, but I am going to watch it. It is The Verdict on Netflix.
“I was told this morning, believe it or not, that they talk about Michael Jackson and the success and enduring success. You have got the biopic, which is closer to a billion dollars now—a breakout success. You then have this Netflix show, which I was told this morning is number one in over eighty countries. It has only been out for two days.”
Yeah, it is amazing.
Okay, my friend. See you next week.
“Bye-bye.”
