Accuser’s Sister Describes Time With Jackson’s Aides
A toy room overflows with games and other treats. There are elaborate play castles, train sets, carousel horses and figures of Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk. In a room devoted to dolls, the uniformed effigy of a Boy Scout stands next to a chair holding a female doll slumped as if asleep.
On Thursday, a jury saw it all in a video taken by a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy when he and his colleagues served a search warrant on Mr. Jackson’s ranch in November 2003.
It was there, prosecutors say, that Mr. Jackson, 46, sexually molested a boy, who was then 13 and fighting cancer, after plying him with wine.
The boy’s sister, now 18, who also stayed at Neverland on several occasions, took the stand and said Mr. Jackson served alcohol to the children in his wine cellar.
She said that one of Mr. Jackson’s aides had falsified her signature on a passport application after she, her mother and her siblings were told they were to be flown to Brazil for protection because there were death threats against them.
“Were you interested in going to Brazil?” asked Thomas W. Sneddon Jr., the Santa Barbara district attorney, who is leading the prosecution team.
“Not really,” the woman replied.
For several days in a hotel in Calabasas, northwest of Los Angeles, the family members were ordered to stay in their rooms, she said. Meals were brought to them by one of Mr. Jackson’s bodyguards, who otherwise guarded the lobby, she said, to make sure they did not leave. Two other men, Frank Tyson and Dieter Wiesner, checked on them regularly, she said.
“They just told us not to leave the room,” she said. “They seemed kind of irritated about it.”
There was a swimming pool, but she and her brothers did not venture in.
“We didn’t even bother to ask,” she said. “We knew it would be no.”
Mr. Tyson, who is also known as Frank Cascio, and Mr. Wiesner are two of five unindicted co-conspirators in the case; the other Jackson employees were Ronald Konitzer, Marc Schaffel and Vincent Amen. Prosecutors say they were part of a scheme to imprison the young accuser and his family and frighten them into doing Mr. Jackson’s bidding. Prosecutors said the group provided muscle to keep the family in line and aid in producing a video intended to refute the documentary.
The sister said Mr. Jackson had ordered the family flown to Miami, where they were told not to watch the documentary, “Living With Michael Jackson,” which was made by the British journalist Martin Bashir and which was being broadcast in the United States on Feb. 6, 2003, their second night in Florida.
The young woman, speaking so softly that she could barely be heard at times, said that the family had spent the afternoon in Mr. Jackson’s hotel suite and that the singer had pulled the boy into his bedroom and closed the door two or three times. They remained in there 15 to 20 minutes on each occasion, she said.
Prompted by Mr. Sneddon, the sister described to the jury her gradual estrangement not only from Mr. Jackson, whom she had initially considered a friend, but also from her brother as he became more attached to the pop singer.
“Me and my brother were very, very close,” she said. “During all this, he didn’t want to talk to me, he didn’t want to be near me. He was very distant. He didn’t even want to see my mom. He just thought differently.”
The woman also said her brother tended to be unusually tense and energetic around Mr. Jackson. During the visit to Mr. Jackson’s hotel suite in Miami, she said, her brother was “very hyper, very talkative, running around, very playful, more talkative, more jumpy.”
She said that one of Mr. Jackson’s bodyguards turned up when the family was meeting with Los Angeles social workers who were looking into reports that the boy had been molested by the singer.
The so-called rebuttal video, she said, was designed to counter the impression that Mr. Jackson had a propensity for sleeping with his young houseguests, and it was carefully orchestrated. The sister said Mr. Wiesner told her and her brothers to “just say nice things about Mr. Jackson and to not talk about what goes on in the ranch.”
She said Mr. Jackson had explained on camera that he regularly helped the children with their homework. Asked if that was true, she smiled and said no.
“They took us out of school,” she said. “There was no homework to help us with.”
Mr. Jackson, in a black suit, a shimmering bronze-colored waistcoat, purple socks, sandals and sunglasses, sat without visible reaction to the testimony and as his home and his possessions were displayed.