Another day, another Jacko trial update. Fantastic. Big news from that department today is that Jacko's lawyers are asking
Judge Rodney Melville to declare a mis-trial over allegations witnesses for the prosecution have discussed their testimony outside the courtroom - a violation of court rules. Melville has said he will consider the defence's claims this week. Few expect the defence to be successful in their mis-trial call, but that won't deter anyone given that it is probably more about implying dodgy things are happening behind the scenes on the prosecution's side rather than actually succeeding in getting a mis-trial ruling.
Back to the court case itself and Friday's court proceedings touched for the first time on the 1993 allegations against Jackson.
You'll remember (surely?) that Judge Melville has given the prosecution permission to dredge up old child abuse accusations against Jacko as part of their bid to portray the singer as a serial child abuser. The 1993 case came up during a testimony from lawyer Larry Feldman, who represented Jackson's 1993 accuser
Jordan Chandler, and who first advised the mother of new accuser
Gavin Arvizo. He basically told the court what everyone already knew - that Jordy Chandler claimed he had been molested by Jackson when he was at his Neverland Ranch aged 13, but that the allegations were dropped after the boy and his family received an unspecified
[though rumour suggests $20 million] payment from the singer.
Feldman stressed that that settlement "was absolutely resolved in (the boy's) favour", presumably implying that Jackson must have had something to hide to make a payment of that kind.
Nothing particularly interesting in all that, but it was the first part of the next stage of the prosecution's case which some reckon might be the turning point in the trial. Prosecutors are expected to wheel in a stack of witnesses this week who will claim they saw Jackson in compromising positions with one of five teenage boys other than current accuser Arvizo, though only one of those boys is expected to testify himself, and some of the others have specifically denied that Jacko ever molested them in any way. Nevertheless any revelations that come forward this week should make interesting reading even if they fail to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt.
One of those five boys Jackson is accused of molesting (and one of those who denies he was molested) is one Macaulay Culkin.
His father, Kit Culkin, who once stayed at the Neverland Ranch with his children, has reportedly gone on record to defend Jackson:
Culkin Senior is quoted as saying: "I never saw or heard anything at all during my early days of knowing Michael to suggest that he was a paedophile. My kids never slept with Michael.
I need mention this because on the [Martin] Bashir program,
Michael admitted that he did sleep with children; and well he may have, but he never slept with mine. Whenever at Neverland, they always had their own quarters, as did their mother and as did I. Michael's bedroom (an enormous room with a fireplace and French doors leading out to a private garden) was almost always an open place to hang out in, as was most all of the rest of the house. My children would sit on the bed, as would
I, to play cards or checkers or watch television or whatever, but then we would do so most everywhere else also. They might of occasion fall asleep there just as they might of occasion fall asleep most anywhere else, and at most any daylight hour...
They'd fall asleep watching a movie at the movie theatre or playing with the toys trains in the toy trains room and there was one occasion, I well remember, when one of them was actually found asleep on the carousel! So, as I say, there was nothing in these days to suggest paedophilia."