So said Senior Deputy District Attorney Ron Zonen when he argued this morning for the admissibility of two books of pictorial essays containing pictures of nude boys that had been seized from Jackson's Neverland Ranch by the Los Angeles Police Department as part of a previous investigation of earlier allegations of molestation by Jackson in 1993.…
Article comments
26 - nick
hey RJ go to sleep, you will have another long say tomorrow. Don't forget your pills too.
27 - nick
day not say ;-)
28 - Helen Willis
Nice Try RJ, but no, those aren't the facts of the case. Mere rubbish.
29 - Eric Olsen
please tell us which of what RJ wrote is wrong
30 - Helen Willis
I didn't say they were wrong. I said they are not facts of the case. He isn't charged with any of those things because they aren't illegal.
Being a freak isn't against the law
Owning books openly available on Amazon.com is not illegal
Not having a normal relationship with a woman is not Illegal
Also, I could argue all those points because they have all been taken out of context with a disturbing slant.
The only thing I'd give him which is directly relevent is from the witnesses who say they saw child abuse. Well sorry but I don't trust people who do not call the police, do not stop the abuse, deny it firstly the change their story, negotiate offres with tabloids, were found to have stole from Jackson (court finding) and who owe Jackson over $1.4 million and were subsequently made bankrupt.
If you want to discuss facts of the case at hand, do so, but all you have done is spout information which has been out there for years and isn not illegal or founded.
31 - Mihos
Nancy Graceless leaves me breathless.
I just know her hemet hairdo mst smel just like artificial butter oil, he kind ewe get on your popcorn at the movies...
RJ and many otherslike to react to the facts of the trial as spouted by Court Tv gossip mongers. ANYONE that can pretend that Nancy Graceless has an ounce of credibility must acknowledge that her deep deep visionary insight led her to pronounce very recently that the kidnapped Georgia woman was" not a case of cold feet". Recall her thumping her chest? She was ready to lynch the woman's fiance for not being willing to take a lie detector test without a video documentation. She KNEW he was hiding something.
In short that woman is a talking inflateable doll.
She is entertaining to a point but the problem with the Graceless model is that she often develops a prominent leak in the rear. More often than not what one hears during her posit assertions is leaking hot air. WHat is more, that escaping air reeks of the sort of bad breath people that blow up inflateable dolls often have, a bi product of dirty minds, constipiation and failure to floss adequately.
Report
32 - Mihos
the point being
Court Tv styled reporting has a theme that borders on the aburd. This is how the political commentary and gossip mngering is disseminated. Now that the trial has lost its way and Jackson is not guilty without a doubt the trial will be less interesting and the bigots with guilty conscious will wipe the dog shit off their shoes at the door. Its not my mess and there is real news to blog about, missing the point entirely.
This could happen to you bigot.
Someone in your family can vanish or be accused a heinous crime. The press gets wind of it and they work hand in hand with the pr office of your local police department who in turn enable the slight of hand of the FBI. They'll clambor into your private lives and reveal any tidbit to the scandal starved populace. Your computers sitting in someone's crime lab for a few weeks and your children and have been being asked alarming questions by their cousins and every kid with a television. Maxim magazine is admitted into evidence as smut and the next thig you know the local gossip mongers at the dairy queen are spinning the story for their own entertainment leading to the old biddies at the beauty parlors spin. Pretty soon you are in an unenviable position as fodder or pawn of some one elses's dog shit.
But don't worry , everone will get bored when they realize no crime ever occured or that could be proven at ay rate. Lingering doubt and false updates from Dairy queen and beauty village aside, you are free and clear. Everyone else is bored with your tired pity party. Get over it. Jesus did. What woud Ghandi have done? LOSER.
YOU SHOULD BE LOCKED UP FOR FEELING SORRY FOR YOURSELF. only guilty people are made victims of such outrageous smears.
33 - Eric Olsen
mihos, you have missed your calling as a polemicist
34 - nick
The Independent, Sunday May 1st
Jackson prosecution derailed by ex-wife's testimony
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
01 May 2005
The prosecution in the Michael Jackson trial always knew it had a witness credibility problem, since the family at the centre of its child molestation allegations has an acknowledged track record of lying under oath.
Now, with just days to go before it hands the case over to the defence, the prosecution has developed a new problem of credibility - its own. The appearance of Jackson's ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, on the witness stand last week was little short of a disaster for Santa Barbara County district attorney Tom Sneddon and his team. For weeks they had announced how Ms Rowe would testify that she was pressed into giving a scripted interview for a propaganda video in the wake of Martin Bashir's damaging documentary Living with Michael Jackson.
Ms Rowe was intended to be the prosecution's climactic witness. Her promised allegations of coercion were to be an important element bolstering the contentions of the Arvizo family that they were effectively held hostage at Jackson's Neverland Ranch.
As late as Monday, prosecutor Ron Zonen assured jurors Ms Rowe would describe giving "a highly scripted interview" and that her incentive for doing so was access to her children, Prince Michael, eight, and Paris, seven. Jackson's lawyers were worried enough to try to have her testimony disqualified before it started.
When Ms Rowe appeared on Wednesday, however, shedescribed Jackson as a friend, a great father and a "brilliant" companion to children. She said unequivocally that her interview for the video was unscripted and uncoerced.
Jurors will now find it harder to believe anything the prosecution tells them - which has to be excellent news for Jackson and his team.
35 - adis
Hello Eric! Please see an instance of unbiased and objective reporting
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Tuesday May 3, 2005
The Guardian
For 43 days a procession of the bizarre, the freakish, the gullible and the trustworthy has trooped into a small courthouse in a small Californian town. But they haven't seen the half of it. As the prosecution sums up its case in the Michael Jackson trial the hullabaloo is about to take on a new lease of life, as the defence promises to serve up a smorgasbord of celebrity, from Elizabeth Taylor to Diana Ross, from Macaulay Culkin to Stevie Wonder.
Outside the courthouse camera crews and fans jostle for position; at the rear of the court buildings pensioners play bowls, seemingly unaware that the "trial of the century" is unfolding just 100 yards away.
Each day the jury has heard allegations that the defendant was a classic predatory paedophile, grooming, abusing and abandoning his victims.
At least that was the prosecution's plan when the court case started on February 28. But several of the 80-plus witnesses have been turned by a skilful defence to the aid of the 46-year-old singer, while others have needed little help to compromise the prosecution's case.
Debbie Rowe, Jackson's ex-wife and the mother of his two eldest children, epitomised those failings: she praised his parenting skills and attacked those around him as "vultures". Called by the prosecution as their star closing witness, she became the defence's most prized asset.
The prosecution hit problems almost as soon as it began. Choosing to put the accuser, Gavin Arvizo, and his siblings on the stand at the beginning of the case left them cruelly exposed to attack from Jackson's lead attorney Thomas Mesereau.
The accuser, his elder sister and younger brother dissembled, mumbled, confused events and contradicted themselves.
The accuser was calmer and clearer than his siblings, but under cross-examination the boy became argumentative, and was easily goaded by Mr Mesereau.
The prosecution case was also stymied by its decision to charge Jackson with conspiracy, including kidnapping, extortion and false imprisonment.
The allegation is that in the days following the broadcast of the Martin Bashir documentary Living with Michael Jackson, in which the singer defended his practice of sleeping with children and was shown holding hands with the then 13-year-old Arvizo, Jackson's team embarked on a strategy of damage limitation. That included, it is alleged, compelling the Arvizo family to record an interview praising Jackson as a father figure. It is during this period, over a year after Bashir had filmed the pair holding hands, that the alleged molestation took place.
But although the prosecution has shown that a conspiracy of sorts did take place, the motive remains unclear and most importantly the link to Jackson has not been established.
A cast of alleged Jackson associates were involved in persuading the family to record the interview and were around the singer's Neverland ranch at the time. But their relationship to Jackson, and the extent of his knowledge and direction of the conspiracy, remain unclear.
The decision by the prosecution to proceed with the conspiracy charge against Jackson alone has almost proved the downfall of its case. The suggestion from the defence is that the conspiracy charge is yet another part of the personal vendetta pursued by the district attorney, Tom Sneddon, against Jackson ever since the singer settled out of court against a different child accuser in 1994 in a case also led by Mr Sneddon.
The conspiracy charge also led to a rambling and eccentric appearance on the witness stand by the accuser's mother. While the truth of her testimony has yet to be determined, her manner before the jury surprised most observers.
"It was a bizarre charge and now it's a bizarre charge supported by a bizarre witness," said Laurie Leveson, a professor at the Loyola law school in Los Angeles who has attended court on several occasions.
The prosecution was more successful with its introduction of "prior acts". Californian law sometimes allows for evidence of previous allegations to be introduced in trials involving sex offences, even if those allegations never came to trial.
This has produced some of the trial's most contentious moments: a succession of former Neverland employees has taken the stand to describe inappropriate behaviour by Jackson with young boys, from giving them alcohol to sharing a shower or bed. Two have described instances of seeing Jackson fondling or masturbating the children; one alleged victim described how Jackson masturbated him when he was 11 years old.
While the defence has sought to assail the integrity of all witnesses - several took part in an unsuccessful attempt to sue the singer for unfair dismissal - it has not succeeded in dispelling the impression that Mr Sneddon promised to convey in his opening statement on the first day of the trial: that Jackson exposed children to "strange sexual behaviour", that there was "a no-rules, no-manners environment" at Neverland, and that Jackson's strategy was "to desensitise the boy, to convince him that what was being done was all right in an adult world".
The prosecution has also been successful in its attempt to portray Neverland under Jackson as a place where children were encouraged to act beyond their years. It has also shown that Jackson has made a habit of befriending pre-adolescent boys from homes where the father is absent. Furthermore, children, including the current accuser, were often around alcohol with Jackson and possibly consumed it with his encouragement. Children habitually stayed up into the early hours of the morning with Jackson and their schoolwork was abandoned.
Beyond the evidence there have been the mawkish sideshows: Jackson turning up to court in his pyjamas; Jackson attending court with an emergency room doctor in attendance; Jackson and his unlikely retinue, including his personal magician.
There have also been glimpses inside Jackson's cosseted world: the seemingly random excesses of Neverland; the sinister dolls and mannequins throughout his home; the mess in his bedroom worthy of the most rebellious teenager.
And the court has been subjected to repeated showings of the various video-taped accounts of the 46-year-old's relationship with the 13-year-old: the Bashir documentary, complete with baby dangling and hand-holding; the rebuttal video, with its off-screen cast of Jackson minders; the video recorded by Jackson showing him walking through the grounds of his ranch with the then 11-year-old emaciated cancer sufferer.
It has been a sorry spectacle and there could still be months to come. Jackson's attorney has promised to call "a lot of witnesses", although the judge may not permit him to introduce the celebrity list he presented at the start of the case.
He is expected to focus on the credibility of the family making the accusations, suggesting that Gavin Arvizo's mother invented the abuse claims and coached her children.
But the biggest promise Mr Mesereau made in his opening statement was the one that began "Michael Jackson will tell you ... " Mr Mesereau has a record of putting defendants on the witness stand in child molestation cases, and this case is not expected to be an exception.
36 - Adis
You may have a few things to learn from the writer as I have observed reading most of your postings on this issue
37 - swingingpuss
Hey Eric, I need my MJ fix! whatever happened to da news?
38 - Eric Olsen
I grew weary of the turgid slog, but have recovered and will resume
39 - swingingpuss
Better do so pronto, me got MJ withdrawls. There is nothing worse than a recovering MJ news pusher for addicts like us.
40 - sexymj
i love michael jackson and i think people should let him just live his life in peace with his three beautifull children. michael will always be the king of pop and my hero forever and i wish him to have a better life then what some people let him lead. michael is an angle sent down from heaven to help and gide people with his music and his talent and to be there for his fans just like we are for him because we love him with all our hearts and that will never stop. p.s michael i love you forever and that will never change love one of your bigest fans nicola plus im clad i got to see you when you was over here it was magical love you bye.
41 - sexymj
to who the person who called a rapist i think you shoul take a look at your self and leave my babie along his never done any thing to you and you never meet him so you dont kno any thing about him his the king and no one can change that. michael is the best looking man in the world so dont be so jelouse of him I LOVE MICHAEL JACKSON FOREVER
42 - RJ
"to who the person who called a rapist i think you shoul take a look at your self and leave my babie along his never done any thing to you and you never meet him so you dont kno any thing about him his the king and no one can change that. michael is the best looking man in the world so dont be so jelouse of him I LOVE MICHAEL JACKSON FOREVER"
Is this Bubbles?
43 - sr
NO COMMENT.