‘I don’t recall seein’ any head lickin’’
I have so many memories of that infamous trial. Sometimes they hit me in waves when I least expect it, especially since Michael’s death.
For instance, I remember the day Gavin’s mother, Janet Arvizo, testified. Her testimony on 13 April 2005 was so preposterous, so unlikely – what with her allegation that she believed Michael was going to kidnap her children and take them away in a hot air balloon – many of us in the press corps actually began to feel as if we’d been duped. After all, we’d spent months before the trial at court hearings in Santa Maria about evidence that had been sealed. We had no idea what the DA had on Jackson, we just knew it had to be pretty bad. But the testimony thus far provided by the DA seemed weak and inconsistent, and when Janet Arvizo came to town with her quirky manner, it became clear to a lot of people that this wasn’t such a cut-and-dry case. Could it be that Michael was being set up by a family intent on making money, maybe, or a DA determined to finally nail him? After Janet’s testimony, one CNN reporter came over to me and said, ‘You know what, pal? I feel so...so...
used
.’ It was as if he’d been promised something by a suitor and been betrayed. A friend of mine named Michael Lawler – an ardent Jackson admirer who had followed the proceedings so closely he knew the evidence better than even I did – had flown in from New York to attend the trial. I helped him get into the courtroom for Janet’s testimony. He was so disgusted by it that he couldn’t help but mutter something derogatory under his breath. Overheard by the officials, he promptly got tossed right out of the courtroom. ‘The next time you help someone get into here,’ a sheriff deputy told me later, ‘you’d better tell him to keep his trap shut even if the witnesses are crazy as freaking loons.’
I also well remember the day Bob Jones testified, the twenty-ninth day of testimony.
I had known Bob sinceI was ten years old and had more than thirty years of history with him. He was a formidable man. As head publicist at Motown and later the man in charge of Michael’s PR, he was the person I had to clear in order to get to Diana Ross, The Supremes, The Temptations, The Jackson 5 and all of the other Motown stars when I wanted to do interviews and features about them. He never made it easy, either. He could be incredibly intimidating and combative. He was also, at heart, a big softy. I can’t count the number of favors we did for each other, mostly involving me writing about some obscure Motown artist not one person on the planet cared about in exchange for an interview with a true legend like Stevie Wonder or Smokey Robinson.
When Bob Jones left Motown to work for Michael Jackson, he made it tough for all of us in the press to get to Michael, as we expected would be the case. He’d known Michael since the pop star was eight, so of course he was protective of him. However, when there was a press day or some other function at Neverland, we’d all find ourselves in a bus together headed out there to cover the event. I remember him once telling me, ‘If I see you take even one picture on the property, I’ll throw you into the lake with my own two hands.’ And he meant it, too.
Bob left Michael’s employ in 2004 after almost seventeen years – not counting all the years at Motown – in what seemed an unfair way, by letter, not even a phone call. Michael just wrote him off and abandoned him for reasons that are still unclear to me and, it seems from talking to Bob about it, to him as well. Then Bob wrote a scathing book about Michael with reporter Stacy Brown. Even I was shocked by it, and I don’t shock easily when it comes to this subject matter. Of course, the prosecution loved every rage-fueled word, especially in regard to Jordie Chandler, the boy Michael was accused of having molested in 1993. And before the book was even officially published, they put Bob on the witness stand to face his former employer and tell – under oath – some of the stories about Michael and Jordie that were in his book. What must it have been like for Bob to look out from the witness stand and stare into Michael’s eyes after having written such a book? Whatever his feelings, in terms of doing what was expected of him, Bob couldn’-t – or wouldn’-t – pull it off for the prosecution. He’d spent so many years protecting – and loving – Michael Jackson, he simply couldn’t do it. He acted – or maybe it wasn’t acting, I’m not sure to this day – as if he hadn’t even read the book, let alone written it with Stacy. ‘I don’t recall seeing any head lickin’,’ Bob said when asked about a particularly strange passage in his own book. (I have to admit, that became a favorite line for a lot of us in the media.)
Tom Sneddon never really broke Bob Jones – no one was ever able to do that, not to my knowledge, anyway. Bob left the witness stand after not saying anything very damaging about Michael. In fact, in some ways, I felt he sacrificed his own dignity for Michael that day, maybe his final gift to his former friend and employer. He didn’t seem to care that the DA had made him look like a liar, as long as he didn’t betray Michael Jackson on that witness stand. Still, I had a sinking feeling that, as far as Michael was concerned, Bob was dead to him now anyway. Bob died a couple of years later without ever reconciling with Michael.
On that same day, June Chandler – Jordie’s mother – testified. She spoke of the gifts Michael gave her and the pleading and begging he did to allow him to spend time with Jordie ten years ago. She looked so devastated as she spoke about the way her relationship with her son had been ruined – she hadn’t spoken to him in eleven years, by his decision – and how much she regretted ever having trusted Michael with her son. She said that Michael lavished her with all sorts of expensive presents in order that she trust him and, maybe by extension, allow her boy to spend private time with him, on at least thirty occasions!
When I wrote about the Jordie Chandler business as it unfolded in 1993 and 1994, I was never certain what to think about it. Michael had been so adamant in my interviews with him at the time – anguished telephone calls from abroad – that he was not guilty, it was difficult for me to accept that he was that good a liar. Also, I had many credible sources who felt certain that Michael was being blackmailed, that he was innocent. But some of the stories in which Jordie was concerned were so disturbing, I wasn’t sure what to make of them. Where Gavin Arvizo was concerned, however, I came to the conclusion that Michael wasn’t guilty based on testimony presented in court. But when it came to Jordie Chandler, I wasn’t as certain. How could I be?
Many of Michael’s fans and family members have been angry with me over the years for not being unequivocal about Michael’s innocence where Jordie Chandler was concerned. I understand that they feel Michael’s denials to me in interviews should have been enough to convince me, and of course his commentary about it went a long way. But the fact of the matter is that I was never in the same room with Michael and Jordie. How could I know for sure what went on between them? And, most important – unlike the situation with Gavin – I wasn’t presented with more than sixty days of sworn testimony to help me make up my mind. I wanted to believe that Michael was innocent of any wrongdoing with Jordie Chandler, of course. I hoped that was the case. But that doesn’t necessarily make it so. In the end, in my view, blind faith is a wonderful thing reserved only for family members and very, very close friends. The rest of us just have hope – and that’s not the same as knowledge.
Then there was the small fact that Michael paid Jordie more than $25 million. Certainly that didn’t help clear his name, as far as I was concerned. I remember interviewing Michael right after the settlement was made and telling him that I was extremely disappointed that he’d paid the Chandlers so many millions. I told him that from that moment on, people would always believe he was guilty as charged. It was the first time I’d ever heard Michael swear. ‘I don’t give a [expletive deleted] what people think,’ he told me angrily. He said that the litigation had ruined his life, that he was absolutely innocent but that he also had the money to make the whole thing go away. It was the first time, I thought, Jackson didn’t make a decision with an eye toward how it would play out in the public arena. In some ways, I remember thinking it was a defining moment for him. I wondered if maybe all of the image-making days were behind him and I hoped he’d now be able to lead a more authentic life. Maybe he didn’t do it after all, I mused, and he just wanted to get on with his life and forget that the Chandlers ever existed. But then, ten years later, I sat studying June Chandler on the witness stand, this shell of a woman with dead eyes. She looked as if her whole world had come crashing down around her the day she and her boy met Michael Jackson. And I wasn’t sure what to think. She was, I felt, the prosecution’s strongest witness, and not so much because of what she said – it wasn’t much, actually – but because of how she appeared while saying it. Ruined. Totally destroyed by the circumstances of her son’s relationship with the King of Pop.