Background: This was a trial that had the three ingredients of Steven Soderbergh's famous movie title: "Sex, lies and videotapes". Lies were told about Michael Jackson's sexual behaviour with small boys and the jury had to decide who was telling the lies, with the help of no less that three controversial videotapes.
The first, the one that shocked the world and set in motion the pop star's prosecution, was the famous Martin Bashir tape. It came about when Michael Jackson was facing new charges of sexually molesting a minor. Jackson's friend Uri Geller persuaded him to allow the interviewer to spend some time in the singer's 3,000-acre Neverland ranch to make a documentary that would show that Jackson's love for children was - well nothing more than child-like.
"I didn't want to do a long drawn-out thing on TV like OJ and all that stupid stuff," the star told Bashir. "It wouldn't look right. I said 'Look. Let's get this over with.' I want to go on with my life. This is ridiculous. I've had enough."
The resulting programme Living With Michael Jackson was shown on Granada Television in the UK on February 3rd, 2003 and later on ABC in the US. The documentary had the opposite effect to that intended by the performer.
Viewers were shocked to hear Jackson admit that he loved to have young boys sleep in his bed. Jackson recommended others should do it as well. "It's what the whole world should do," he said. "I see God in the face of children, and man, I just love being around them all the time."
He boasted about letting a 12-year-old boy with cancer sleep in his bedroom but denied anything improper had occurred, saying he himself slept on the floor.
It was the second video, shot some 22 weeks later, that proved the more damaging of the two. Prosecutor Tom Sneddon had watched the Bashir interview with more than passing interest. He had been looking for a chance to bring Jackson to court since 10 years before, when the parents of a 13-year-old California boy, Jordan Chandler, first accused Jackson of sexually abusing their son at Neverland, and then dropped their charge after an estimated $20 million settlement. He arranged for a taped interview with the boy in the county sexual abuse response cottage in Santa Barbara on July 6th, 2003. It showed the boy being assured by Sgt Steve Robel that he was in no danger but that in order to make a criminal case against Jackson he needed his co-operation.
The boy, in denim shorts and a blue shirt, described being molested. In contrast to his defence of the singer and his praise for helping him beat cancer in the Bashir interview, he said Jackson masturbated him five or so times, though he changed this during the interview to five times or less.
He described what Jackson allegedly told him, including that boys need to masturbate or they would go crazy. "He said that he wanted to show me how to masturbate," the boy said. "I said no. Then he said he could do it for me." Jackson grabbed him, he said. "He grabbed me," he said, in "my private area (for) a long time."
He said that Jackson "put his hands in my pants. He started masturbating me. I told him I didn't want to do that and he kept on doing it. I told him no."
The interrogator told the boy that he was proud of him, that Jackson was "the bad person, not you. You and your mother and brother and sister are the good people."
The boy is now 15 and the testimony he gave in court at the start of the trial matched that on the second tape. He described two incidents of abuse, and his brother said he twice saw the boy being molested while asleep.
The prosecution asked to introduce the tape during its rebuttal case, which began after the defence rested earlier this week.
Judge Rodney Melville allowed the prosecution to show the tape. It was the last thing the jury of eight women and four men saw when the prosecution wound up its case and before they began their deliberations on June 3rd.
The charges levelled against Jackson eventually included molesting the boy in February or March 2003, plying him with alcohol and conspiring to hold his family captive so that they could rebut damaging aspects of the Bashir documentary.
The prosecution was also allowed to bring in evidence of four other boys being molested which seemed to turn the case against Jackson. In the three months of the trial the jury saw other seemingly-incriminating evidence, including adult magazines found in Jackson's home with the boy's fingerprints. They also heard testimony from more than 130 witnesses including actor Macaulay Culkin, who said that as a boy he had slept in Jackson's bedroom and had never been molested. It became clear as the case progressed that the verdict would swing on whether or not they jury fully believed the accuser.
The defence tried to put the boy and his mother on trial, depicting her as a person who tried to con celebrities out of money and who had put her son up to giving false testimony.
They called comedian Chris Tucker to testify that he once warned Jackson to be wary of the boy and his mother to whom he had given expensive gifts including a $39,000 flight to Miami, Florida. "I said, 'Michael, something ain't right'," he said, describing how the boy and his family came to the set of a film he was making and refused to leave. Other witnesses described her as a welfare cheat who used her son's cancer to get money from Hollywood stars.
A welfare worker said the mother fraudulently failed to disclose when applying for welfare that she had received proceeds from a $152,000 (unrelated) legal settlement 10 days earlier.
Judge Melville refused to allow the defence to present testimony by CNN's Larry King that a lawyer who once represented the mother had told him she was "wacko" and out for money.
The defence did not call Jackson to the stand but among the 50 witnesses they summoned, some testified that the mother and her children had the freedom of Neverland and were taken on trips and shopping excursions while supposedly held captive, running up expenses totalling $7,000 in a week at a hotel.
Defence attorney Thomas Mesereau said the boy was unusually "cunning" for a 12-year-old.
While Jackson did not take the stand, he was allowed - to Sneddon's fury - to address the jury through a third video. It was a three-hour tour of Neverland. It showed a note written on a blackboard by one of Jackson's children, saying "I love you daddy". It showed children at play, amusement rides, animals, and a video library.
There were happy ranch workers and numerous clocks, a point the defence made much of, as the boy's family said they were unable to find out what time it was when allegedly being held captive. The tape included scenes cut out of the Bashir documentary which showed the interviewer being more sympathetic to Jackson than in the final cut.
Mesereau made a point of declaring "nowhere on the Bashir documentary does he say he slept with little boys", just that they slept in the room while Jackson used the floor. The singer protested in the video that his feelings for children were innocent and loving.
"I haven't been betrayed or deceived by children," he said. "Adults have let me down."