Family Dysfunction
The earlier (and important) denials of sexual abuse aside to Michael Jackson’s videographer and also to the DCFS, there are elements of the case against Michael that are still questionable: evidence of dysfunction in the Arvizo family, and what such strange and troubled dynamics may have to do with the charges against the singer, are important to review.
Years ago, in August 1998, the Arvizo family was detained on a shoplifting charge at a J.C. Penney department store in West Covina, California. According to J.C. Penney, the boys – Gavin and Star – were sent out of the store by their father with an armload of clothes, the family was then detained and Janet Ventura-Arvizo started a scuffle with three security officers. The family’s side of the story, however, is that the boys were simply modelling clothes for J.C. Penney – odd in that there was no evidence to support this notion – not stealing them.
The shoplifting charges were eventually dropped, but Gavin, Star and their mother filed a lawsuit against J.C. Penney’s for $3 million. Janet then charged that, while being detained, she and her sons were ‘viciously’ beaten by the three security officers, one of whom is a woman.
In more than 200 pages of documents pertaining to the case, a troubling picture of the family matriarch emerges. The psychiatrist hired by J.C. Penney’s to evaluate Janet Ventura-Arvizo found her to be ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘delusional’. According to the doctor, ‘She felt “sad over being a nobody.” With no job… a “sad housewife getting fat.”’ He reports that she was ‘treated with Zoloft’. He wrote, ‘her depression may have lingered or worsened.’ Of course, that doctor was hired by the department store; his report would not have been used by J.C. Penney had it not been favourable to their case. Janet’s own therapist found her to be ‘anxious and depressed’ after the incident, but not delusional.
Most disturbing about the case, though, is that more than two years after the incident, Janet Ventura-Arvizo added a new charge: she claimed that one of the two male security guards had ‘sexually fondled’ her breasts and pelvic area ‘for up to seven minutes’. It seems odd that so many years passed before she decided to mention the sexual assault. During litigation, the store’s psychiatrist asserted that she had rehearsed her sons to back up her ‘far-fetched story’, and that they had all – mother and sons – suffered ‘broken bones’ in addition to her sexual assault. ‘She just came up with this horror story, and ran with it,’ says Tom Griffin, the attorney who represented J.C. Penney in the case. He insists there was no evidence to back up any of the allegations; David Arvizo did not seem to want to be involved in this aspect of the allegations.
Ultimately the department store settled with the family, paying them $137,000 days before the scheduled trial in 2001. ‘It was an incident that turned into, in my opinion, a scam to extract money from J.C. Penney,’ says Tom Griffin. ‘They’re going for a home run this time,’ he concluded of the family’s action with Michael Jackson. ‘This is a shake down. Shake down, Part Two.’
Making matters more complex and disturbing, Gavin’s parents – who were married as teenagers and divorced in their thirties – have had an acrimonious relationship for years. Janet Ventura-Arvizo filed for divorce in late 2001, about a month after the J.C. Penney settlement. By court order, David Arvizo has not seen his children since 2002 when he pleaded ‘no contest’ to spousal abuse. A year later, he pleaded ‘no contest’ to child cruelty. A three-year restraining order was put into place. Since the time of Michael’s arrest, David Arvizo has repeatedly petitioned the courts to allow him to see his offspring. Though he insists that the children have been rehearsed by Janet to make statements against him, he has been denied the chance to see them, every legal step along the way.
While the family’s troubles are unfortunate, some of their actions do cast a dark shadow over the case against Michael. There seems, at least from appearances, to be a troubling history of exaggeration on Janet Ventura-Arvizo’s part, and maybe confabulation, as well – which will be relevant in the trial, say sources in the Los Angeles legal community. ‘One wonders, is this a pattern?’ asks Karen Russell, a trial attorney in Los Angeles, not involved in the Jackson case. ‘What happened with J.C. Penney’s, really? Does Mrs Ventura-Arvizo have a habit of not getting what she wants, and then coaching her kids into saying what she wants them to say, and then proceeding legally? These are questions that will, no doubt, be posed at trial.’
Says Dr Robert Butterworth, a New York psychologist, again not associated with the Jackson case, ‘There’s a possibility for a child to be told something so many times, he is not rehearsing it but, rather, actually believes it. It’s possible for a child to become, in a sense, hypnotized by a parent to believe a reality that didn’t occur. They go over and over it again, but the facts have been distorted. It’s a very troubling phenomenon, very disturbing, and it could be the death knell on this case.’
It could be argued that Michael Jackson, a celebrity with a great deal to lose, should have made a decision to avoid Gavin’s family at all costs, if he had known about their history (and he probably did, since he and Janet and Gavin were, apparently, close enough to share confidences). However, the youngster was, and is, quite ill, and perhaps Michael felt he couldn’t abandon him under those circumstances.
Also, who knows how many other families in Michael Jackson’s life over the years have had problems even more severe that those of his present accuser’s? We don’t know about them because matters never escalated as they have with the Arvizo family at the centre of the present investigation, but it’s likely there’ve been many similar stories over the years. Without exaggeration, it would be impossible to count the number of disadvantaged families with whom Michael has formed emotional attachments in the last ten, maybe fifteen, years – and equally impossible to fathom the number of boys he has known, befriended and taken into his home and his confidence. There is simply no way to count them, there have been so many. He’s fortunate that only two out of what must surely be hundreds have presented a problem for him.