Santa Maria, Calif. – The lawyers defending Michael Jackson on charges of child molesting have always implied that his accuser’s family members were grifters who concocted the allegations as a way to get to Jackson’s millions.
But in court here Thursday, David LeGrand, a lawyer who worked for Jackson two years ago, when the allegations surfaced, said the accuser’s mother had turned down his offer of $25,000 in “goodwill” money.
LeGrand said also she had not demanded, nor had she been paid, any money to participate in a video praising Jackson even as the singer and his associates were collecting $3 million from the Fox TV network for the right to broadcast it.
Under cross-examination, LeGrand acknowledged that he had made the offer to elicit the mother’s cooperation in a complaint filed by Jackson with Britain’s Broadcasting Standards Board in response to the documentary “Living With Michael Jackson,” in which the singer is shown holding hands with the boy who became his accuser and admitting to the interviewer, Martin Bashir, that he sleeps with boys, innocently.
The boy’s mother, LeGrand said, declined to take part in the complaint or in a separate lawsuit filed by Jackson against Granada Television, which produced the documentary.
In previous testimony, the mother and her three children said they were coerced and intimidated into taking part in the so-called rebuttal video, which sought to refute suggestions that Jackson had molested the boy, a cancer survivor who was then 13. The family members and other witnesses said that Jackson surrogates planned to take the family to Brazil, ostensibly to get them away from reporters in the United States.