Jackson: Larry King barred
2005-05-19 18:14
Santa Maria - The judge in Michael Jackson's child sex trial on Thursday barred US talk-show host Larry King from taking the witness stand for the superstar, saying his testimony was irrelevant.
"At this point I don't see any reason to call Mr King to testify," Judge Rodney Melville told Jackson's lawyers out of earshot of the trial jury.
The defence wanted King to tell jurors about comments made to the television personality by Larry Feldman, a lawyer who once represented Jackson's young accuser and his mother, about the mother of Jackson's teenage accuser.
"He (Feldman) just said she (the mother) is a whacko," King told the court.
"He said she is in it for the money," he said reporting his conversation with the lawyer.
The defence has painted the accuser's mother as a "professional plaintiff" who made up the allegations against Jackson in a bid to extort him.
King had turned up at the courtroom in the California town of Santa Maria ahead of the mini-hearing to establish whether he would be allowed to testify .
King had been expected to be one of the key celebrity witnesses in the trial of the star who could be jailed for up to 20 years if convicted on all counts.
Meanwhile, AP reports that the judge also ruled against testimony by publisher Michael Viner, who was present during King's meeting with Feldman.
Without the jury present, Viner told the judge that Feldman said "he had met with them (the family) and felt that their statements, their case, didn't hold up to scrutiny and he didn't believe them".
Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy in February or March 2003 and plying him with wine.
He is also charged with conspiring to hold the boy's family captive to get them to rebut a damaging documentary in which Jackson said he let children sleep in his bed but that it was non-sexual.
He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.