Stories of slumber parties raise more questions

Hence the “pillow fights, video games … and silly dancing” among Jackson and his child friends in his Neverland bedroom, on all those nights when bedtime was simply the time when you fell asleep. The water balloon fights and food fights, the bottomless supplies of candy and soda pop, the endless games of hide-and-seek and golf cart-bumper cars, and throwing pebbles at the lion cage to make the beast roar.

Until the beginning of the defense case, I thought the most important and largely unremarked testimony in this now 11-week old trial came from Sgt. Steve Robel, the chief investigator for the prosecution team. He was asked by District Attorney Tom Sneddon, who has pursued Jackson for a dozen years, about how the decision was made to execute the search warrants for Neverland and other locations, followed by an arrest warrant for Jackson himself on November 18, 2003.

Robel answered that after the last interviews with the accuser and his mother and two siblings, all of whom proved to be credibility-challenged witnesses at trial, there was virtually no investigation before the warrants were executed. “Sometimes, you know,” Robel testified, “we’ll go in and advance further … to gather more information prior to serving a warrant. In this case we chose not to,” because, he explained, there was a concern that Jackson or his people would destroy evidence.

I heard that exchange and made a mental note: surely the defense will argue that Sneddon, obsessed with proving his belief that Jackson is a serial child molester, decided that if a boy was willing to accuse Jackson on the witness stand -- no matter the circumstances and history of the boy and his family -- that was reason enough to arrest one of the most famous people on the planet. It’s faith-based prosecution, I could hear the defense arguing: saying he’s a molester, in the absence of physical and forensic evidence and of credible witnesses, doesn’t make it so.

Dinner at Neverland
Now, after the testimony of the first defense witnesses, I can hear the prosecution’s argument: Is it even thinkable that a grown man who admits he has slept with dozens of boys on hundreds of nights or more … who has issues with alcohol if not a full-blown problem of alcoholism … who collects pornography and has regaled his public for years with his version of urgent if mysteriously androgynous sexuality … is an innocent manchild, the self-proclaimed “Peter Pan” who has shared his home, his riches, his fantasy life and his bed with children purely out of love?

Look though the smoke, the prosecution can argue, and see the fire: saying “You’re making it sexual and it’s not … the world needs more love,” as Jackson told Martin Bashir in that infamous documentary that triggered this whole case, doesn’t make it so.

Leaving court Friday, I wondered if they’d all gather around the dinner table at Neverland in a while. Brett Barnes, who had to quit his job as a casino croupier in Melbourne to testify for Jackson, and his sister Karlee and mother Marie Lisbeth. Wade Robson, the choreographer of Britney Spears and N’Sync fame, and his sister Chantal and mother Joy. And Jackson himself, seeming more frail and diminished by the day and surely aware that a New York hedge fund, real bottom-liners, a source tells us, had just bought out his big loans from Bank of America secured by his Sony music catalogue (Beatles and Elvis songs) and by Neverland itself -- and that the New Yorkers would surely grab it all if the income-strapped Jackson can’t find a way to pay up by an onrushing end-of-year deadline.

And I heard a line of Chantal Robson’s testimony, an afterthought the judge allowed in when Mesereau had asked her to describe Neverland and her many visits there with her brother and Michael Jackson. She’d rhapsodized about the place, said “We just hung out, played games … what normal kids do.”

And then said, her eyes looking into some distant past memory, “It used to be the happiest place in the world.”

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