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MICHAEL JACKSON: ACCUSED
Recent Times coverage.
June 2, 2005, 1:16 PM EDT
Times Staff Writer Steve Chawkins has been covering the Michael Jackson trial. With closing arguments in the case underway today, he takes snapshots of the Santa Maria, Calif. courthouse and beyond.
8 a.m.
A mist is falling. A lovely fog shrouds the hills, and on Miller Street 100 voices angrily join to skewer a passing reporter. Michael Jackson fans might be taken with his message of love, but they have none to share with the press--in this case, Court TV's Diane Dimond, who they see as the prosecutors' mouthpiece.
"She should be so fired," said Lacey Reinhardt, a 20-year-old amusement park supervisor from Murrieta.
Dimond slides into the courthouse without glancing toward the fans screaming at her from behind a chain link fence 20 yards away.
With closing arguments today, the bile is rising. Ordinarily, as few as a dozen fans have gathered outside the fence cheering and booing as predictably as a crowd at the local melodrama. The only difference is that in this melodrama, an accused child molester has fans so ardent they come from as far away as Poland and Japan.
And his lead attorney, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., is affectionately referred to by the crowd as "Mez." When Santa Barbara County Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon arrived this morning, the crowd broke into a take on one of Jackson's lesser-known hits, shouting, "Tom Sneddon is a cold, cold man."
But the press is far and away the crowd's favorite target. Yesterday morning, they saw a solitary middle-aged man with a notebook and a distracted look hurrying toward the courtroom. A fan started yelling, "Here comes the Lone Liar!" Others echoed the call. I didn't look their way.
For her part, Dimond has been the most heavily lambasted reporter in Santa Maria. She said hate calls have forced her to take her name off her hotel's register. A blogger revealed that she enjoyed going to sing-alongs at an inn in Los Olivos, so she had to stop. "I can't say I'm not embarrassed. Who wants to be called a whore and a liar. But what they're saying, is, it's all my fault. Come on!"
A knot of fans now focuses on Santa Maria Times columnist Steve Corbett, a man with a greying ponytail and bushy black beard. "Cut your filthy hair!" they're chanting. "Cut your filthy hair!"
Newsday.com