Mom: Who would believe me?
2005-04-15 09:32
California - The mother of Michael Jackson's child sex accuser claimed on Thursday that aides to the pop icon used a potent mix of fear and surveillance to keep her family prisoner for three weeks.
The woman told Jackson's trial that she even agreed to allow the entertainer's entourage to whisk her family off to Brazil because she feared her loved ones would be killed if she refused to co-operate.
Asked why she signed passport applications for herself and her three children in early 2003 when she claimed she did not want to leave the United States, she said: "Because of my parents' life and (boyfriend's) life."
The woman's extraordinary account of how her family was allegedly shuttled around, shadowed and menaced by Jackson's entourage is crucial to prosecution claims that the star plotted to kidnap them to ensure their silence over suggestions that he abused her then 13-year-old son.
Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting the young cancer survivor, plying him with alcohol and conspiring to hold his family at his Neverland Ranch and a Los Angeles area hotel between February 21 and March 12 2003.
Prosecutors claim the panicked singer and his aides isolated the family and plotted to whisk them out of the country after the airing of a television documentary in which Jackson held his future accuser's hand and admitted that children shared his bed.
The woman, whom Jackson's team has painted as a con artist, said her family was coerced into describing Jackson as a father figure in a "rebuttal video" and in an interview with child welfare workers who contacted her after the documentary aired.
The mother of the now 15-year-old accuser said the family was driven around by a Jackson driver and followed by another carload of alleged henchmen during their three weeks in captivity.
Their phone calls were constantly monitored and guards were posted outside her room at Neverland and the hotel, she claimed.
Because of the close scrutiny, the woman said, she never managed to raise the alarm, even though she had unfettered access to a telephone and was taken shopping, to a beauty salon and to doctor and orthodontist appointments.
She claimed she did not call police because she felt that would be too dangerous. In any case, she asked the court, "Who could possibly believe this?"
Prosecutors produced several documents that appeared to support parts of her story.
On March 12, she tricked Jackson's aides into releasing her children from captivity at Neverland by telling them that the youngsters' grandparents were ill, she said. The family never returned to the ranch.
But Jackson's alleged victim was furious when told he would not see his hero again, she recounted.
The teenager was "angry and violent" and was "hollering, telling me at the top of his lungs that Michael loved him, that he had to go back." At the time, she said, she did not realise her son had been molested.