Jackson's fame a double-edged sword

Michael Jackson

Having been the trial that seemed as if it would never start, it turned into the trial that, at times, seemed as if it would never end.

And yet Michael Jackson's criminal trial on child molestation charges is now in the hands of the jury.

Within days, we will know whether the weirdest man in showbusiness will merely limp home with his reputation and his finances in tatters, or whether he is destined to spend the next several years behind bars as a convicted sex offender.

It has been more than three months since the trial began in the squat courthouse in Santa Maria in central California, more than two years since the alleged events now under such withering scrutiny, and a dizzying 12 years since accusations of sexual abuse triggered the first serious investigation by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's department into the dark side of Jackson's Neverland ranch.

If the wheels of justice have moved slowly, it has been almost entirely because of Jackson's celebrity. He and his lawyers say his prominence has made him a target of chancers and con-artists and grifters of all stripes who have invented the child sex charges as a way of laying claim to his millions.

His prosecutors would argue, by contrast, that the incessant media scrutiny and the wiliness of Jackson's legal advisers have forced them to tread very carefully. If Jackson were not so famous, and able to afford the best legal representation, chances are that the elegant appeals to high principle would have long since been thrown out and the prosecution, rightly or wrongly, could have relied on the undeniably tawdry elements to score an easy victory.

While Tom Sneddon and his colleagues made a compelling circumstantial case that Jackson conducts questionable relationships with pre-pubescent boys and invites them to sleep with him in a bedroom filled with pornographic magazines, they have been hampered by the highly problematic inconsistencies, distortions and acknowledged lies under oath of their star witnesses - a recovered cancer patient, who alleged being masturbated by Jackson against his will at least twice, and his wider family.

In his final summing-up, Jackson's lead lawyer, Tom Mesereau, ripped through the family members one by one and concluded: "The witnesses are preposterous, the perjury is everywhere ... The only thing they [the prosecution] have left is throwing dirt everywhere to see if any of it sticks."

That might have been an overstatement, but there is no doubt that the prosecution has been forced to explain away and apologise for at least some members of the family, especially the accuser's mother, whose four days of testimony in March gave a less than sterling impression of her mental stability.

The dodginess of the family might have mattered less if the prosecution had a smoking gun - some kind of incontrovertible physical evidence such as a DNA sample, say, or a diary entry about a sexual encounter - but it does not. It can't even pin down the dates of the alleged molestation.

In his own summing-up, deputy district attorney Ron Zonen outlined what was in effect an elegant theory of Jackson's guilt - his pattern of behaviour around pubescent boys for more than a decade, his permissive indulgence of their every whim, his alleged fondness for feeding his guests alcohol and his alleged use of pornography to soften them up.

But of course in criminal trials, with their burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt, theory is not necessarily going to be enough.

From the moment the first family member, the accuser's elder sister, took the stand three months ago and revealed herself, like her relatives, to be a shifty and less than sympathetic witness, journalists and legal pundits have been predicting acquittal for Jackson.

As Mesereau argued in his closing statement, it might take only one element of doubt about the veracity of the family to throw the entire case into question.

That said, the prosecution has a few strong cards in its hands, none more so than the police video of the accuser's first disclosure of the alleged abuse.

The tape of him squirming uncomfortably in his chair and speaking in a barely audible voice of hands slipping down his trousers and bringing him to unwanted sexual arousal moved one juror to tears the first time it was played in court. And Zonen took care to play it one more time before the jury retired to consider its verdict.

If the jury finds the accuser's disclosure credible, it might just be able to overlook the multiple problems with the family and chalk them up to the trauma of a group that lived under the shadow of domestic violence for years and clearly showed poor judgment, one way or the other, in its dealings with Jackson and his entourage.

One can only speculate what impression they have gleaned of Michael Jackson himself. He did not testify, appearing only in video format via out-takes and other material from Martin Bashir's documentary Living with Michael Jackson.

In many ways, the Michael Jackson trial has been admirably uncircus-like. Judge Rodney Melville issued some stern warnings to the defendant near the beginning of the case and moved proceedings on at a healthy clip.

These three months have sometimes seemed very long, but they pale in comparison with the 15 months of testimony in the OJ Simpson murder trial a decade ago.

- INDEPENDENT