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What took so long?
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The accuser never had a chance. This was not a white picket fence kind of family. This wasn’t the cast of “7th Heaven.” The way lead defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. saw it, this was the kind of clan where one member runs a three-card monte game on a street corner while the others go through the crowd and pick pockets. The prosecutors were asking a jury of eight women and four men to send the little boy who fronted the Jackson 5 someplace grim where you just don’t moonwalk because you’re never sure what you’ll bump into.
Michael’s habit of inviting young boys over to indulge in his cornucopia of adolescent pleasures was not enough to convict. But it would have been if it were anyone else.
Make believe this wasn’t Michael Jackson, but John Q. Public, a middle-aged accountant who lives alone down the block. You hear he’s been inviting underage boys over to sleep in his bed. He admits — on camera, no less — that he does so. You hear that wine may have been served. You hear he settled a child molestation case years ago. Chances are that case would never go to trial because John Q. Public would be escorted out of town by the local Tar and Feather Committee.
The Jackson case wasn’t tried in a vacuum. Besides the brawn of his illustrious career, Michael surely was aided in this trial by the many mixed nuts who showed up each day to cheer him on, berate the media and lash out at the prosecution. Through their collective idiocy, they raised the celebrity bar, lowered the one that measures the IQ of a mob, and turned a sober legal proceeding into the red-carpet arrivals at the MTV Awards.
Ready for a repeat?
I bet if the 12 members of the jury hadn’t had to serve, they would have been in the crowd helping to make signs that say, “Michael, on behalf of mankind, we’re sorry” and seeing that the doves had enough food and water. I shudder to think what would have happened if Michael had been convicted on a count or two and some of the birds didn’t get to fly away. Prosecutors would have had a case of animal abuse against 500 angry sycophants.
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I’m guessing the accuser’s family will not be happy, and will file a civil suit against the entertainer. In a civil suit, of course, the burden of proof is easier — a preponderance of the evidence rather than guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Well, memo to accusers: I got your preponderance right here.
This civil case will be no different from the criminal case. The accuser and his family can repeat everything they said the first time over a 14-week criminal trial, but Michael Jackson is still the guy whose hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial, and a lot of people feel bad about it to this day. Folks had no such love for O.J. That’s why he got nailed in his civil case. That and the mountain range of evidence, of course. This family, whether dirty or clean, does not have nearly enough ammunition to bring down this star.
No one outside of Michael and the accuser will ever really know what transpired inside Boys Town, a.k.a. Michael’s bedroom. All we know now is that Michael is strange, and free. But we were sure about that all along.
Michael Ventre lives in Los Angeles and is a regular contributor to MSNBC.com.
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