US: The mother of Michael Jackson's teen accuser yesterday described a climate of fear and intimidation in the weeks following the 2003 broadcast of a damaging TV documentary about the singer's bizarre lifestyle.
Janet Arvizo, the mother of 13- year-old Gavin, a recovering cancer patient who was seen holding hands with Jackson in the documentary, testified that she was kept up all night making a so-called rebuttal video that heaped praise on Jackson.
Before she was interviewed by child-protection officials about Jackson's relationship with her son, one of the singer's aides made veiled threats against her own parents, she said in a Santa Maria, California, courtroom.
"He [ the aide] told me if I put Michael in a bad light, that they knew where my parents lived."
Ms Arvizo, whom Jackson's lawyers have portrayed as a liar and a swindler who preyed on celebrities, is a key prosecution witness to charges that Jackson conspired to commit abduction, false imprisonment and extortion.
The judge ruled on Wednesday that she could invoke her constitutional rights to testify about any matters except her past welfare benefit claims - an area where she fears incriminating herself.
Ms Arvizo said the family had been put under pressure to make the rebuttal video, but the singer's aides were not happy with the result. "We had not done an adequate job on the video and we were going to have to leave the country," she recalled one of them as saying. "I was not on script about [ my son's] cancer. I was supposed to say that Michael healed [ him]."
The morning after the video was made, the family were summoned to a meeting with child-protection officials investigating Jackson. She was driven there by one aide, tailed in a car driven by another and told to secretly tape the conversation when the officials insisted on questioning the family alone.