You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes (42 page)

EAST LA IS ONE OF THOSE
low-income districts of social challenges, housing projects and gangland turf. In many ways, its spirit and work ethic remind me of Gary. Good people. Tough lives. Michael’s heart went out to one of its number, 10-year-old Gavin Arvizo. This kid was stricken with cancer and had ‘a bucket list’ of celebrities he wanted to meet, ‘the King of Pop’ among them. Anyone who’d heard of his plight – stage-four cancer, losing a kidney and spleen, vomiting blood and seemingly at death’s door – couldn’t help but do their part. It was our mutual friend Chris Tucker who brought him to Michael’s attention after Gavin’s mother had contacted him, fellow comedian George Lopez and basketball star Kobe Bryant. Michael responded typically, keen to help. Wherever he was in the world, he took time out to call Gavin in his hospital bed or at his grandmother’s house, promising him a visit to Neverland. Gavin was in and out of hospital for an entire year: he had never met my brother but he came to know his voice in many hour-long phone-calls. When Michael said he’d call, he called, and they would talk ‘forever – literally for hours,’ said the boy’s mother. And, as Gavin said later, the thought of going to Neverland ‘would always make me happy because Michael would always put a smile on my face.’ The imagined visit, with the aggressive chemo, pulled him back from the brink and defied some doctors’ prognosis. The power of thought: survive to see Neverland.

In August 2000, when Gavin was well enough, Michael’s personal assistant Evvy sent a limo to pick him and his family up from their cramped studio in East LA and transport them to Santa Ynez. It is sad that a one-time friend of Michael’s, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, has said that ‘Michael’s characterisation of the boy as having arrived at Neverland unable to walk, and Michael having to carry him, is entirely fictitious.’ The rabbi clearly had no idea how it had been at the very beginning. The truth, as seen on film in a courtroom in 2005, was that this boy arrived without hair,
without eyebrows, and so weak he couldn’t stand. His brother, Star, pushed him around the grounds to all the places he had imagined in his hospital bed, and Michael walked with them and
did
carry him. As the mother Janet would say later: ‘Michael took us from way behind in the line and pulled us up to the front and said, “You matter to me. You may not matter to many people, but you matter to me.”’

Gavin put it differently, in the Neverland guestbook: ‘Thank you for giving me the courage to take my hat off in front of people. I love you, Michael,’ he wrote.

I doubt this back-story is one you will have seen in the newspapers because this wasn’t the humanitarian starting point that the authorities or the Arvizo family wanted to highlight once Gavin had recovered and then alleged, with the support of his mother, that Michael had molested him and tried to hold him against his will. Not just an alleged child molester but now a kidnapper. Santa Barbara DA Tom Sneddon was, predictably, all over it. He would later say that my brother had used his celebrity to invite this boy to the ranch as part of a paedophile’s grooming process.

But Sneddon didn’t come across Gavin because he had gone to the police or child protection services with a complaint: they were only alerted to him
after
Michael had, in 2002, invited his once-sick friend to sit with him on camera during taping for a television documentary. He had wanted to show how he’d helped this kid. After the loss of Ryan White, this was the story of a survivor; an example of what love could do. The documentary was called
Living with Michael Jackson
and the journalist Martin Bashir was granted access to shadow my brother for eight months. Michael trusted his gentle approach and Princess Diana credentials. Bashir had done his job: he had won my brother’s trust.

I HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS
going on until the evening of 6 February 2003, when the documentary aired in America – and I watched it with my head in my hands. All I seemed to say throughout the entire programme was ‘No … no … no … Michael,’ and the
more I heard Bashir say, ‘Really?’ to things my brother said, I wanted to put my foot through the screen.

Michael’s true character was torn up by a warped edit – but this edit was the one that brought the authorities rushing in again as it played to every twisted, wacko, weird, eccentric cliché that had dogged my brother’s life. This wasn’t a world exclusive: it was a hatchet piece that could boast about its access, not its truth.

It was heart-breaking to see Bashir take Michael’s sincere love for children and use it against him. The saddest scene was when Michael was sitting on the sofa, with Gavin Arvizo next to him, affectionately leaning his head into my brother. As bare footage without commentary, it was nothing but a tender, innocent moment with the man who was apparently central to his recovery. But in the editing suite, Bashir applied his most grave, worrisome voiceover: ‘And so it was that we came back to our meeting at Neverland with 12-year-old Gavin …’ Cue a close-up shot of Gavin holding Michael’s hand. ‘… I’d found this easily the most disturbing moment of the past eight months.’

Then Bashir was back in interview mode, referring to how Gavin had spoken about sharing Michael’s bedroom. Gavin was in the bed
on one occasion
and Michael and his producer friend Frank Cascio
slept on the floor
. Bashir suggested people would be worried by that.

‘Why should it be worrying?’ asked my brother. ‘Who’s the criminal? Who’s Jack the Ripper in the room? This is a guy trying to heal a child. I’m sleeping in a sleeping-bag on the floor … I gave him the bed and he has a brother named Star, so him and Star took the bed.’ He explained that he’d never shared the bed with Gavin, but openly volunteered he had ‘slept in bed with many children.’ Smiling at the memory, he added: ‘When Macaulay Culkin was little, Kieran Culkin would sleep this side, Macaulay Culkin on this side … his sister’s in there, we’re all just jammin’ the bed. Then we’d wake up like dawn and go in the hot-air balloon! We have the footage. I have all that footage …’

‘But is that
right
, Michael?’ asked Bashir.

‘It’s
very
right … it’s very loving … that’s what the world needs now … more love …’

‘The world needs a man who is 44, sleeping in a bed with children?’

‘No, no,’ said Michael, ‘you’re making this all wrong …’

IF THERE WAS ONE SAVING GRACE
in the fallout that followed, it was that Michael was smart enough to have the ‘insurance’ of his own camera crew filming the journalist’s unit. This would become the basis of his own documentary aired on Fox:
The Michael Jackson Interview: The Footage You Were Not Meant To See.
It wouldn’t immediately save my brother’s reputation, but it would show Bashir’s two faces and how his ego-stroking statements made my brother feel falsely safe to open up.

For example, in the documentary, Bashir said, ‘One of the most disturbing things is the fact that a lot of disadvantaged children go to Neverland. It’s a dangerous place for a vulnerable child to be …’ But privately, he told Michael, ‘I was here yesterday and I saw it, and it’s nothing short of a spiritually kind thing.’

Or when Bashir told the world about Michael as a father, raising Prince, Paris and ‘Blanket’: ‘They are restricted … they are overly protected. I was angry at the way his children were made to suffer.’ Privately, he told Michael, ‘Your relationship with your children is spectacular. And, in fact, it … it almost makes me weep when I see you with them.’

There were so many sly things about that documentary, but the most priceless moment came when Bashir, in his unused footage, asked my brother, ‘Do you sometimes despair at human nature? Can you ever do anything right?’

And Michael replied, ‘No, no, no … No matter what you do, no matter how good your intentions, there is always some mean-spirited person who wants to bring you down.’

In 2009, after Michael’s death, Bashir had the gall to pay tribute to my brother. He had since joined ABC’s
Nightline
show and asked viewers to remember ‘the greatest dancer and musician the world
has ever seen.’ He then talked about his documentary: ‘There was a small part … which contained a controversy, but the truth is that he was never convicted of any crime, I never saw any wrong-doing myself and whilst his lifestyle may have been a little unorthodox, I don’t believe it was criminal.’ Nice words that were too little, too late. His truth and fairness mattered to Michael in 2003, not 2009. Besides, the damage was done, and nothing could undo the events that his documentary set in motion. With the hullabaloo that followed, the authorities felt compelled to act again, and the Department of Child and Family Services and the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department launched investigations.

I HAD ALWAYS WONDERED WHERE MICHAEL’S
breaking point was hiding, because I knew that the kid from Gary who lashed out in his tantrums against Joseph was in there somewhere. In the back of my mind, I had always been waiting for him to smash out and scream.

That inevitable day came six months into the police investigation as Santa Barbara DA Tom Sneddon sent his cavalry into Neverland with a search warrant, moving towards an arrest. It was 8.30am on 18 November 2003 – the same day that Michael’s penultimate album,
Michael Jackson Number Ones
, was launched. There was a horrible synchronicity to everything, and one inevitability: there was no way his album would be a success now.

When Michael heard that around 70 officers were at the ranch, he exploded. In his hotel suite, he picked up plates of food from the room service trolley and hurled them at the walls, swiped two lamps, pushed over a sculpture, turned over a coffee table and sent all sorts of objects flying from table tops.

Meanwhile, in Santa Ynez Valley, the police were searching high and low, using knives to slit the backs of valuable paintings and his
mattress during a
14-hour
raid that turned up nothing. I know the damage they caused because Michael later showed the brothers, and he vowed never to sleep in the main house again (and he didn’t – he always stayed in the ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ guest quarters). They had seemingly waited for him and the children to leave for Vegas for a video shoot before carrying out the raid while he stayed at the Mirage hotel, taking over an entire floor.

I was heading for Las Vegas too – the MGM hotel – with family friend Steve Manning to discuss a deal with the CMX entertainment group for a Jacksons’ album featuring Michael. He’d said he was willing to ‘record two or three songs’ with us ‘as long as the brothers get in the studio and do what they need to do without no messing around.’ That meant no politics, no attorneys bickering, no voting systems.

I was at Burbank airport, soon to depart, when Mother called about the raid. She was understandably frantic. All I could think about was the state Michael would be in and how quickly I could get to Nevada. When I finally got to Michael’s hotel and walked through the door into the hallway of his suite, the remnants of his rare fury were littered all over the floor. ‘What the …??! Michael? … MICHAEL?’

His room looked like a typhoon had hit it and my immediate thought was that the cops had been there, too. I don’t remember seeing the kids, so I guess Nanny Grace had them out of there by the time I arrived. Randy and Rebbie were also on their way. As I trod among the debris, I walked into a back room, where I found Michael sitting in a chair, calmer but still simmering, trying to distract his agitation with an animation project he’d been working on.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

Head down, he didn’t say anything.

‘We’re going to get you through this,’ I said.

His eyes looked up at me and all I saw was my kid brother again, hiding in a hotel room, not wanting to fly through turbulence. Scared and lost, and as Rebbie said later, looking ‘deranged’
by the insanity of the situation now encircling him. He looked up at me. ‘I haven’t done anything – I haven’t done
anything!
’

‘We know,’ I said, ‘We know.’

‘So why? Are they going to arrest me? For what? They can’t do this to me! I haven’t done ANYTHING …’ He was pacing now.

Rebbie and Randy had arrived, with Mother not far behind. Rebbie was bent down, clearing up the mess, saying nothing in the awkward silence. The phone was ringing off the hook. Outside, the paparazzi had descended. In the air, the ‘eyes in the sky’ were hovering. Then, hotel management told us the activity was invasive for other guests and asked if we ‘would consider vacating the hotel.’ We decamped to the Green Valley Ranch, but everything was happening so fast and the pressure felt overwhelming.

After blowing up and venting, it was amazing how Michael restored his composure for the sake of the kids. Children are intuitive and they kept asking questions but their father reassured them that everything was going to be okay, even if he couldn’t tell himself that. I saw him hold and hug Paris; she squeezed him tight. He closed his eyes and gulped it down.

Time to be courageous now, little brother. Your reason to fight is here and all around you.

THE DAY AFTER THE RAID, DA
Tom Sneddon held a press conference, announcing that he had issued a warrant for Michael’s arrest on ‘multiple counts of child molestation.’ He called on my brother to turn himself in and surrender his passport. Giving it the whole, unnecessary fugitive vibe.

He didn’t reveal the accuser’s name but everyone knew it was Gavin Arvizo and his allegation would be that he was abused and held against his will to make him co-operate with the damage limitation PR
after
the Bashir documentary. Sneddon would ask a jury to believe that Michael and his associates had done this when his friendship with Gavin was under the media’s scrutiny, rather than before the documentary when no one had known the boy. Standing before a cluster of microphones, he said bail was set at $3 million
and the maximum prison sentence per count was eight years. His presidential-length speech went on and on to justify why this case was very different to the 1993 allegations, and then he fielded questions.

‘Could Michael Jackson’s children be taken away from him?’ shouted one reporter.

‘That’s a decision that would be made by a juvenile court,’ he said.

You mother-f*****. Go on, add to Michael’s torment. Make him think about the loss of all that is precious to him
, I thought.

‘Is there a possibility of any more victims?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘We would encourage the public to come forward if they have any information about other victims in the community.’

You’ve got nothing. That’s why you’re inviting more onto the bandwagon.

‘If Michael Jackson’s watching this right now, or his people, what’s your message?’

‘Get over here and get checked in!’ said Sneddon. The press conference burst out laughing, but the humour wasn’t over as another reporter waded in with another vital point: ‘Excuse me, I haven’t asked a question yet. Sheriff, are you going to be serving us members of the media lunch after this press conference?’

‘You obviously don’t know we have a budget problem!’ said Sneddon. More laughter.

‘What do you say to parents who let their children go to Neverland?’

‘My advice is don’t do it,’ said Sheriff Jim Anderson. More laughter. It was a double-act now.

They say fame dehumanises people, but I think authority does a much worse job.

As everyone laughed, all I could think about was Michael wrecking his suite, curled up in his chair, pacing the rooms, going out of his mind. Holding Paris. I thought about Mother crying and praying. I saw Rebbie picking up the pieces of Sneddon’s work.
And I felt this anger bubbling. Then, to drive it home, the DA reminded reporters that he hoped, ‘you all stay long and spend lots of money because we need your sales to support our offices’. Presumably, that was a joke, too.

But he underestimated Michael. By now, my brother had gone through 24 hours of every possible emotion and, as hesitant as he was about co-operating with authorities he didn’t trust, he started talking about wanting his day in court. He knew he’d left the door ajar for trouble with that civil settlement in 1994. ‘It was bad advice,’ he said, ‘and I knew it then. Now I’ll show them what I wanted to show them before – that I am innocent.’

Sneddon had presumably forgotten that Michael had requested a criminal trial in 1993, but a judge hadn’t permitted it. But, as Michael would say: ‘Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons. The truth will run this marathon in court.’ And that truth had been running now, gathering pace for 10 years.

MICHAEL FLEW BY PRIVATE JET INTO
Santa Barbara, where the police were waiting by arrangement in an airport hangar. Every move was played out on television: his take-off, his landing, his transfer to the police station, and his arrival there in handcuffs. As he got out of the police car, he bounced his bound arms behind his back – a gesture to the news helicopters, as if to say, ‘See! See what they’re doing to me?!’ He wanted the world to know.

Afterwards, I wanted to know what that world was being told. Some in the family couldn’t bear to watch the television coverage, but I couldn’t stop myself from tuning in to CNN. Its anchor, Kyra Phillips, was with a blonde girl from
Entertainment Tonight
and a court expert, both of whom were making disparaging comments about Michael and condemning him. First, the Sneddon side-show. Then, the handcuffing, and now two rent-a-quotes pretending to sound informed. I might have been extra-sensitive at this time, but this kind of speculative opinion is a media game that the public takes seriously and it left me fuming.

The final straw was when the blonde said something derogatory about the family and I flipped, smashing my fist into the television screen, shattering it. I then dialled CNN and demanded to be put on air, because it’s very simple in our family: if you hurt one of us, you hurt all of us.

I don’t think Kyra Phillips believed it could be me with everything going on, but I wasn’t there for a friendly one-on-one and my voice was shaking with anger. I’ve never gone on radio, television or stage so spontaneously or furious but I’d heard enough. ‘Michael is a thousand per cent innocent,’ I said, building up to my rant, ‘and we’re tired of people – I’M SICK AND F****** TIRED of people – speaking on my brother’s behalf and my family’s behalf, who do not know us. You put these people on national TV, international TV, and they say these things and the public is saying, “Oh, wow, is he really like this?” My brother is NOT an eccentric. My brother is about peace. At the end of the day, this is nothing but A MODERN-DAY LYNCHING. THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT TO SEE – HIM IN HANDCUFFS. YOU GOT IT! BUT IT WON’T BE FOR LONG, I PROMISE YOU!’

She said she had no idea what we were going through.

‘NO, YOU DON’T! You don’t walk in my shoes or my family’s shoes, but you put these people on television to say things. We are family, and we will continue to be family. That’s my love right there. And we support him one thousand per cent. I have nothing else to say. Goodbye.’

When I slammed down the receiver, my hand was shaking. I sat down, looked at the shattered TV screen, put my head in my hands and just wept.

ONCE THE FIRST PHASE OF INDIGNITY
was out of the way and we had all released our pressure valves, Michael returned to Vegas and started to talk. It was less an opening up and more of an unloading of concern about a group which I’ll call ‘The Men’s Club of Beverly Hills’ – a group of well-connected power brokers from the music industry who, he said, were behind everything and
‘trying to bring me down’ and he added: ‘They don’t want me around … They want me in jail … They want to finish me.’

When he said this – to Mother, to me, and several others, inside and outside the family – his fears were calmly expressed, like someone who could see clearly once the dust had settled. He would also hint about his suspicions later during a radio show hosted by Jesse Jackson, saying there was ‘a big fight going on … and there’s a lot of conspiracy.’ That fight he referred to centred on his music catalogue.

When he spoke about this, it was the sincerity of his tone that got me thinking because – whether true or not – we as a family could see the financial rationale in where he was pointing us: that if he went to prison, what control would he have over the catalogue as a convicted criminal? And with countless lawsuits against him lining up like planes from certain business dealings, he’d likely lose them all from prison. This outcome would have ultimately led to big losses and him defaulting on his bank loan – and his share of the catalogue would revert to Sony. That wasn’t some theory; that was a distinct probability in the event of a conviction.

In my opinion, his fears were legitimate: he held the music industry equivalent of the Koh-i-Noor diamond. But it was more than that: he had been talking about a ‘conspiracy’ long before events turned against him and his suspicions now seemed to be increasingly valid.

THE POLICE INVESTIGATION STARTED TO STINK
when we learned of an official letter from the Department of Child and Family Services and discovered that its social workers had been
the first
to speak with Gavin Arvizo and they closed their file within
13 days because there was no case to answer
.

The letter, ‘a brief summary of a child abuse investigation completed by the Sensitive Case Unit’, explained that ‘the child was interviewed … and denied any form of sexual abuse.’ The mother, Janet Arvizo, had said Michael was ‘a father figure’ and
had never shared a bed with her son. The Department had ‘concluded the allegations of sexual abuse to be unfounded’ – a view shared by the LAPD, it added.

That letter vindicated Michael, and was dated 26 November 2003 – five days
after
his arrest. But, of course, Sneddon would dismiss its significance, saying that to call the DCFS case ‘an investigation is a misnomer – it was an interview.’ I don’t what know he thought there was left to investigate when the boy, backed by his mother, had categorically said Michael hadn’t touched him, let alone sexually abused him. He had said the same to the Dean at his school, but none of this would matter. All we knew was that in February 2003, the Arvizo family was adamant about my brother’s innocence, as were the authorities, but by the June, Gavin was saying he had been molested and he said it took place
after
that interview with social workers. What he did not say was that his family had also consulted an attorney about a civil lawsuit – an attorney who had advised on the 1993 Jordie Chandler case. And with that about-turn accepted in law, Sneddon convened a Grand Jury and decided the case should go to trial.

AFTER HIS ARREST, AND BEFORE WE
left Vegas, Michael wanted to discuss his security arrangements and he said, ‘I don’t feel as secure as I should, and that feeling imprisons me.’