Tuesday, March 01, 2005
By Roger Friedman
Jacko Mystery Witness: Family Planned It
A close friend of the family involved in the Michael Jackson child molestation case has a startling statement ready when she's called by the defense.
"She will say that the daughter told her they would own Michael Jackson's home."
So says H. Russell Halpern, attorney for the father of the children involved in the case. What Halpern says is interesting, because it goes to the heart of the relationships in the family. These stories could come out when the defense presents its case. However, so far, Halpern says Jackson's defense team has not contacted him for assistance.
Halpern often comes across as a publicity hound, because he's given so many interviews since the Jackson scandal erupted. On the other hand, he's never sold a story, and his accounts of the family are probably closer to the truth than any others. He's handled years and years of their domestic litigations as well as criminal matters.
Halpern says that at some point before all of this started, the couple in question's oldest child, their daughter, went to stay with a family friend after she fought with her mother.
"She told the friend that they were going to wind up with Michael Jackson's house," Halpern told me. "The daughter also claimed that her mother beat her. Later, she recanted and said it was her father."
Last week, Halpern confirmed for press organizations that the boy in the case once instigated an investigation into his mother for abuse with the Department of Social Services.
Strangely enough, Halpern says that at one point in their domestic war, the mother got the two sons to sign letters saying they didn't want to see their father anymore. The daughter wouldn't sign, even though the mother had alleged in one of her many family court skirmishes that the father had gone to the daughter's school and threatened to kill her. There were no witnesses to that incident, however.
The daughter, now 18, moved away from her mother and brothers and in with her maternal grandparents in 2003, just as the scandal broke with Jackson. My sources have long argued that she did this because she disagreed with the mother's actions in the case.
Yesterday, in his opening remarks, Jackson's defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. depicted the mother as grifter on the make who bilked lots of people, especially celebrities, out of money using her kids' illness and apparent poverty as bait.
This much we do know is incontrovertible: the mother solicited financial help several times from outside private sources including the LAPD, never telling anyone that she had also had celebrity help, welfare checks and a six-figure settlement in a case involving JCPenney.
So Mesereau has a mound of evidence that will show the mother did more than, as lead prosecutor Tom Sneddon said yesterday in his own opening remarks, "make a lot of mistakes."
Mesereau will set out to prove, if he can get all his ducks in a row, that the only "mistakes" made by the mother was leaving a bread-crumb trail of lies right to her own front door.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,149092,00.html
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