Maybe it really was a lightning attack of back spasms that kept Michael Jackson out of court last week. (It's plausible.) Or maybe he just thought the event thus far had been short on melodrama. (It hadn't.) But on Thursday, when he finally appeared in Santa Barbara County Superior Court after the judge in his child-molestation case threatened to revoke his $3 million bail, the deposed King of Pop displayed his usual showmanship, even if not his usual sartorial flair.
Wearing a dark jacket over blue pajama bottoms, and supported by bodyguards, the 46-year-old moonwalker did a slow, frail moon swoon past the gaggle of reporters. The moment had echoes of the famous James Brown routine, in which the soul man, feigning exhaustion, would be shepherded toward the wings by bandmates, only to break free and sing one more chorus of Please, Please, Please. Jackson's version was pretty persuasive ... until he heard the encouraging cries of his admirers. Instantly he executed a neck swivel in their direction. His body might have been in agony, but his fan radar was as limber as ever.
Jackson has treated the trial as an occasion for performance art--arriving fashionably late, as if to his own concert, doling out gallery seats to his family and the lingering faithful, some of whom are sleeping over at the Gloved One's Neverland estate, where the crimes are alleged to have occurred. But he should have been jolted into reality when he listened to last week's sobering, detailed testimony by the star witness: a boy, 15, who related a catalog of sexual abuse at the hands of the man he had thought of as "my best friend."
On the witness stand, guided by district attorney Thomas Sneddon, the boy, who is not being named to protect his identity, declared that two years ago, in Jackson's bedroom, the singer twice molested him. "I was under the covers, and that is when he put his hand down my pants and started masturbating me," the boy said. A day or two later, "he did it one more time." He said that Jackson showed him and his younger brother pornography in magazines and on the Internet, and plied them with wine--"Jesus juice"--in Diet Coke cans. Under stern cross-examination by Jackson lawyer Thomas Mesereau Jr., who argues that the family's charges are a scam to elicit money from Jackson, the boy wavered in some particulars but did not break.
The accuser and the accused make a poignant pair. Both have attested to physical abuse by their fathers. And both cried out for a gentle touch. Jurors will decide which of the two is to be believed: the one who is a child or the one who thinks he still is.
The boy met Jackson in 2000, when the accuser was 10 and suffering from what was diagnosed as incurable leukemia. Surgeons removed his left kidney and spleen and a 16-lb. tumor. He was given large doses of chemotherapy, which doctors said would either save his life or kill him. The kid deserved a break. When he asked to meet his hero, Michael Jackson, it was arranged.