A Lick and a Promise

Janet Jackson (nee Arvizo) took the stand in the Michael Jackson trial yesterday.

She made a fair stab at seeming to be emotional, begging the jury "Please don't judge me,".

She told them that she once saw Jackson lick Gavin's forehead, like a cat. However, despite this rather obvious sign that something was amiss, she still allowed him to sleep in Jackson's bedroom.

Quote:

"I had not slept for so long..Like this, over and over,"

She added:

"I thought it was me. I thought I was seeing things. Everybody was asleep,".

One must conclude that she is either stupid or lying.

She then got her dander up, and railed against Jackson's aides, Ronald Konitzer and Dieter Wiesner; "those Germans who were following me everywhere."

Mrs Jackson said that she said she was unaware that he had been filmed at Neverland for a documentary about Jackson. She claimed that she had never personally spoken to Jackson until he called her in February 2003, to say her children's lives were in danger.

Quote:

"He spoke in a normal, male voice..He told me to trust him and believe him."

Jackson said that Jackson asked her to fly with her children to Miami, to participate in a press conference that would rebut the Bashir documentary "Living with Michael Jackson.".

Mrs Jackson then likened herself to a sponge:

"I was just like a sponge. Believing him. Trusting him..He said he would protect us from these killers. He said he was more than a father figure to my children."

They went to Miami, but there was no press conference or explanations, she said.

Quote:

"When I started to ask questions, that's when a lot of the craziness happened,".

Big Mike, Jackson's head of security, told her that she could join Jackson and her children on his private plane if she kept quiet.

It seems that the jury regarded the testimony as a pile of BS. Undoubtedly they were put off by Mrs Jackson "emotional" style of presentation; I thought lawyers these days schooled their witnesses before they took the stand?

She said she begged a Spanish-speaking house manager to borrow the Rolls Royce to take her and her children home to Los Angeles; then, for reasons that are not at all clear, she returned to Neverland.

Tom Mesereau, for the defence, very wisely allowed the rambling and delusional testimony to go unchallenged. Evidently Mrs Jackson was determined to commit "plausibility suicide", and Mesereau for one was not going to stand in her way.

She did at least manage to keep her mouth shut about one aspect of her life, namely welfare fraud.

Mrs Jackson decided, wisely, that she would expose herself to prosecution on this matter if she spoke about it; therefore she took the Fifth.

I suspect that the prosecution must be wishing that she took the Fifth for the entire testimony.

It's never like this in "The Practice".