Stories of slumber parties raise more questions

SANTA MARIA, Calif. - They’re all staying at Neverland. It came out in court.

Wade Robson and Brett Barnes, both Australians and young adults now, who for a dozen years have been denying sleazy suggestions by tabloid-friendly former Neverland employees that as boys they’d been molested by Michael Jackson, came to court from the singer’s fabled ranch to deny it once again, emphatically and unequivocally and under oath, in Jackson’s molestation trial. Their mothers and sisters, respectively, mentioned in their supporting testimony that they too were staying at “this paradise,” as Barnes’ sister Karlee called it, “…that every time I come back feels like I’m coming home.”

But Neverland cannot feel like home now and, for Jackson’s witnesses and for Jackson himself, will never again be the child’s innocent fantasy they have all proclaimed it to be.

I say that using the absolutes that journalism usually abhors because last week there was a sea change in the logical view from here to the finish line of the central contested question of the trial.  Anyone watching or listening—including, of course, the jury—now must decide not whether Michael Jackson is a weird, eccentric, idiosyncratic pop icon who is or is not a child molester; but whether Jackson is a grown man who has innocently spent hundreds if not thousands of nights (yes, thousands!, according to the high end estimate of one pro-Jackson source) in bed with a succession of individual boys--  or whether he spent all those nights with all those boys, and molested some of them.

The defense, in the presentation of its first witnesses who so vigorously insist that Jackson held their love and trust, then and now, has conceded the point:  Michael Jackson, as a man in his 30s and 40s, chose to go to sleep at night with a pre-pubescent boy in his bed, whenever he could.  How many nights? Karlee Barnes almost off-handedly estimated that, for her 10-year old brother and the then-35 year old Jackson, it was “maybe a year’s worth of nights.”

“365 nights Jackson shared his bed with your brother?” prosecutor Gordon Auchincloss asked on cross examination, “and you didn’t think that was odd?”

“Not at all,” Karlee Barnes answered breezily, her bright smile never wavering.

I looked at the jurors, shifting my gaze from one face to the next, then acknowledged my own feelings I could not suppress:  I am a father, I was 35 years old once, I have a son who was once 10.  I could not imagine sharing my bed with any young child, boy or girl; I do not know an adult male from my long experience who so thoroughly and instantly inspired my trust that I would have allowed my son to share his bed. That my answer to the Auchincloss question, “ … and you didn’t think that was odd?” could ever have been “ … not at all.”  I remembered being startled when the mother of Jackson’s 1993 accuser testified without challenge from the defense that the popstar and her young son shared a bed on perhaps 50 nights. Startled that Jackson’s lead attorney Tom Mesereau didn’t say, “On the 50 nights you claim Jackson was in a bedroom with your son,” as would have been his approach if he wanted to contest the testimony. He just let the number stand. Now I was thinking, 50 nights is just a hint of the whole story … at least that part of the story.

Jurors are asked to be reasonable people, and usually are. Jackson and his lawyers, through their very first witnesses, are asking those reasonable people to acknowledge if not accept the possibility of an alternate universe unlike any they’ve ever considered or could imagine.  At a key point in the defense case, a source told me, Mesereau will seize upon the conclusion of Dr. Stan Katz, the Los Angeles psychiatrist and prosecution witness who elicited the molestation story of Jackson’s current accuser. In his initial report to law enforcement, as NBC News was first to report last spring, Katz said Jackson “doesn’t present as a pedophile, but as a regressed 10-year old.”

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