Michael Jackson’s lawyers are poised to target the credibility of his young accuser by portraying his mother as a rapacious financial predator during the singer’s trial.
They are expected to paint the boy, a 15-year-old recovering cancer patient identified only as “John Doe,” not as a victim of molestation but as a puppet of a grifter mother who coached him in making false accusations against the star.
Jackson’s crack legal team has made it clear during nearly a year of pre-trial hearings that the 36-year-old mother, known as “Jane Doe,” is firmly in their sights.
The “Doe” family – which includes the boy, his mother, a 14-year-old brother and a sister who live in Los Angeles – has been the subject of intense media scrutiny since accusing Jackson.
But the alleged victim, a Michael Jackson fan who asked a Los Angeles comedy club owner to introduce him to the star when the boy was gravely ill in 2000, has had a difficult childhood.
He has battled the cancer that forced the removal of one of his kidneys, saw his parents’ marriage break up and became the object of a bitter court custody battle between them.
Since his November 2003 arrest, Jackson’s lawyers have alleged that Jane Doe is a greedy opportunist with a history of launching questionable lawsuits to profit from the financial settlements.
In one of those alleged schemes, they say, she won a 137,500 dollar settlement from a US department store which she sued in 2001, claiming security guards had assaulted her and her sons.
Last May, the family sued Los Angeles child welfare officials seeking financial damages over the leak of a confidential memo which said a departmental investigation had found there was no evidence to suggest Jackson had sexually assaulted the boy, according to court documents.
And the Celebrity Justice television show reported that the mother allagedly tricked a newspaper into printing a story in 2000 that sought donations for her son’s cancer treatment which was fully covered by insurance.
Jackson’s lawyers will now likely try to show that the now re-married woman coached her son and his younger brother to make up stories about Jackson for the authorities in a bid to extort him.
“She made statements that her children can sue Michael Jackson after they turn 18,” Jackson’s lawyer Thomas Mesereau said in court last September. “She said she is not after money then she says she is after money.”
Mesereau did not reveal what the woman did for a living, but said she knew how to file lawsuits and had once accused her ex-husband of molesting one of her sons and falsely imprisoning him in Los Angeles.
Jackson has been charged with 10 counts, including molesting the woman’s son when he was 13, conspiring to kidnap and unlawfully imprison him and his family and plying the youngster with alcohol in order to seduce him.
The celebrity trial officially kicks off in this small central California town on Monday with the jury selection process, and light will be thrown on the still secret details of the case in opening arguments in late February.
Prosecutors contend that the boy “thought Michael Jackson was the coolest guy in the world” and that Jackson showered him with gifts.
The youngster appeared on camera in the documentary “Living with Michael Jackson,” which was broadcast in February 2003, and in which the star acknowledged having shared his bed with children, sparking off the scandal that eventually led to his arrest.
After the television program aired, prosecutors said, Jackson and his associates forced the alleged victim’s family to take a vacation in luxurious resorts.
The boy’s stepfather then admitted in court last year that he requested money for the family’s participation in a video made by Jackson aides in a bid to restore the star’s reputation after the documentary was aired.
But Jackson’s entourage contends that the family took gifts, including a car, from Jackson and that the accusations against him only emerged after the gifts stopped coming
