SANTA MARIA, Cal. – After pleading the Fifth over allegations she’s a welfare cheat, the mom of Michael Jackson’s young accuser testified the singer once licked her son’s head and raised eyebrows when she labeled Jackson and his aides “killers.”
In testimony salted with crying jags and finger-pointing attacks on the singer, the mom claimed Jackson and his aides held her family hostage at Neverland to get them to gush over the tarnished star in a video.
The matronly 36-year-old mother of four said Jackson and his henchmen told her there were unnamed “killers” out to harm her kids after they appeared in Martin Bashir’s damaging 2003 documentary “Living With Michael Jackson.”
She pointed right at Jackson and said “Him!” when the prosecutor asked who first told her that making a “rebuttal video” would “appease the killers.”
The pop star shook his head back and forth in denial.
Then, in one of several outbursts, the mom, who wore a churchy pale pink suit and no makeup, forcefully pointed at Jackson and shouted: “And you know what? They ended up being the killers.”
Jurors stared wide-eyed at the volatile woman, who appeared closest to a crack-up when she described the head-licking incident she claims to have seen on a charter flight from Miami to California in February 2003.
“Please don’t judge me. Please don’t judge me,” she said, turning toward the jury and cranking up the tears.
“At that time I hadn’t slept for so long … we were hours into the flight. Everyone was sleeping. … I decided it was my chance to look and see what was going on back there,” she said breaking into a wail. “That’s when I saw Michael licking [my son’s] head. … I thought it was me!!! I thought I was seeing things, Oh my God.”
Then she demonstrated an animal-like licking motion which she said Jackson did “over and over” on the boy’s forehead and hairline.
“I didn’t discuss it with nobody until way after,” she said.
Even before the accuser’s mom took the stand, she was already under a cloud.
Judge Rodney Melville instructed the jury that, outside their presence, the mom had claimed her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and would not be questioned about “possible welfare fraud.”
The mom took the Fifth on her lawyer’s advice after Jackson’s defense team made it clear they had solid proof she bilked L.A. County welfare agencies in 2003.
Jackson’s lawyers will still be able to present evidence of the alleged fraud through other witnesses, the judge ruled.
The mom’s action is likely to hurt DA Tom Sneddon, who, in his opening statement, promised the jury the mom would come forth and admit “she’d done some things she wasn’t proud of,” regarding her welfare applications.