Jackson's 'porn palace' aired
2005-02-28 22:29
Santa Maria - The prosecutor in Michael Jackson's child-molestation case publicly revealed for the first time on Monday the lurid details of allegations against the superstar.
Prosecutor Tom Sneddon claimed in opening arguments that Jackson's Neverland Ranch was not an innocent Peter Pan-like world, but a sordid place of molestation where children were lured with alcohol and pornography.
Sneddon dismissed Jackson's claim in a British television documentary that the time he spent with youngsters at his sprawling ranch was dedicated to childish fun, saying he used it to corrupt children.
"The private world of Michael Jackson is quite different to that video," Sneddon told the jurors who would decide Jackson's fate.
"It's not children's books, but visits to internet porn sites ... magazines like Hustler, Playboy, Barely Legal," he said.
Porn websites
"The private world of Michael Jackson reveals that, instead of cookies and milk, you can substitute wine, bourbon and vodka," said Sneddon.
He accused Jackson of plying a then-13-year-old cancer patient, identified for the first time as Gavin Arviso, with alcohol and of surfing pornography websites with the boy and his brother, who is two years younger.
The acts took place at Neverland - near the California town of Santa Maria where Jackson is on trial - between February 3 and March 3 of 2003 when the boy and his family came to stay with the now 46-year-old star, he said.
Sneddon told the jurors Jackson whispered to the boy that he should ask his mother to allow him to sleep in the middle-aged pop icon's bedroom while his brother and mother slept in a guest house.
The boy and his mother agreed.
"Here is a boy with a life-threatening disease with a chance to spend the night with one of his idols," Sneddon said.
But inside Jackson's bedroom one of the star's aides, Frank Tyson, allegedly logged on to to a pornographic internet site and showed the graphic images to the boy and his younger brother as Jackson's own young Prince Michael, then aged four or five, slept nearby.
'Slipped into Jackson's room'
"They took two boys, nine and 10, on a tour of sexually explicit websites, naked ladies," said Sneddon.
The prosecutor claimed that Jackson also served the boy, believed to have only one kidney, alcohol, telling him: "You have to be a man to drink."
The prosecutor then described what Gavin Arviso's then 11-year-old brother allegedly saw when he slipped into Jackson's bedroom unnoticed on one occasion.
He saw "Jackson masturbating himself with one hand and his other hand in the underpants of his brother", the prosecutor said.
Jackson has denied 10 charges including a complex charge of conspiring with five other people to kidnap the boy and his family and hold them against their will at Neverland after the airing of the British documentary that led to the child molestation probe against Jackson.