Mac Backs Michael

Tag, water balloons, videogames--Michael Jackson liked to play with Macaulay Culkin.

Taking the stand Wednesday in Jackson's child-molestation trial, Culkin insisted the pop star was a "very childlike"--and very innocent--kindred spirit.

Speaking in his own defense, via a two-year-old videotaped interview, Jackson said he was "not a nut."

While the Jackson video--alternative footage shot during the making of Martin Bashir's Living with Michael Jackson--perhaps gave jurors insight into the oddball celebrity seated at the defendant's table, Culkin's testimony gave them something to mull during deliberations.

"Did Mr. Jackson ever molest you?" defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. asked the former child star.

"Never," Culkin said.

"Did Mr. Jackson ever improperly touch you?" Mesereau continued.

"No," Culkin said.

"Has he ever touched you in any offensive way?" Mesereau asked.

"No," said Culkin again.

"What do you think of these allegations?" Mesereau offered.

Replied Culkin: "I think they're absolutely ridiculous."

Jackson is on trial for allegedly molesting one boy, then 13, in 2003. While the entertainer has never been formally accused of taking advantage of Culkin, jurors last month heard ex-Neverland staffers allege Jackson did just that.

Adrian McManus, a former Neverland housekeeper, said she saw Jackson kiss a young Culkin while touching the boy's bottom. Phillip LeMarque, once Neverland's majordomo, said he saw Jackson's left hand inside Culkin's pants--a sight so shocking that the kitchen worker almost dropped a plate of french fries, he testified.

Both incidents were said to have occurred in the early 1990s when Jackson was a thirtysomething hit-maker in his Dangerous period, and Culkin was a prepubescent box-office titan in his Home Alone heyday.

Now 24, Culkin testified that he only recently heard of his alleged victimhood.

"Somebody called me up and said, 'You should probably check out CNN because they're saying something about you,' " Culkin said.

Culkin said he was shocked by McManus' and LeMarque's allegations.

"I just couldn't believe that, first of all, these people were saying these things, or let alone that it was out there and people were thinking that kind of thing about me," Culkin said.

Culkin testified that no Santa Barbara County, California, investigator--neither prosecutor nor law enforcement official--ever checked with him to vet the stories. Prosecutor Ronald J. Zonen charged that Culkin's reps had been contacted during the Jackson probes from both 1993 and 2003. Culkin said he was unaware of such overtures.

In all, Culkin was on the stand for about 90 minutes.

Culled from a star-studded defense witness list, Culkin is the biggest name yet to testify on behalf of Jackson. He is the third alleged Jackson victim of the 1990s, after choreographer Wade Robson and Brett Barnes, to tell jurors that he is no victim.

Modestly identified by Mesereau as "an actor from New York," Culkin even more modestly described his own career.

"I started working at the age of four doing stage and things like that. And [I've] done a number of things--films, like that," Culkin told jurors.

Chief among Culkin's dozen-plus films is 1990's Home Alone, still the top-grossing, live-action comedy of all-time, with $285.8 million in box-office receipts, per BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Culkin said he "kind of worked till [he] was about 14, took a break there for a while"--following busts such as Richie Rich and Getting Even with Dad--"and just started working again recently."

Culkin described meeting Jackson shortly after Home Alone hit theaters.

"He kind of called me out of the blue one time [and] just said, 'Hey, this is Michael Jackson,' " Culkin said.

Culkin said Jackson's interest in him was that of a friend--a friend who also had happened to have grown up in the spotlight.

"One day I was essentially a normal kid who happened to be an actor, and the next thing I know, I'm this thing where people are hiding in the bushes and trying to take your picture. People are kind of trying to profit from you, [and] next thing you know, you have a million acquaintances and no more friends," Culkin said.

"And [Jackson] understood that."

Culkin, a bankable star at age 10, and Jackson, a chart-topping singer at age 11, belong to "a unique group of people," the younger man said.

"It's not like a child-performer self-help group or something like that," Culkin said. "[But] when it goes to any person who is a child performer, I kind of keep an eye out for them."

In the video footage, played for jurors over objections from the prosecution, Jackson opened up about his difficult childhood.

"I haven't been betrayed or deceived by children," Jackson said, per reports. "Adults have let me down."

Being Jackson, the self-proclaimed King of Pop also talked about how he was not unlike Mother Teresa and Gandhi--"a voice for the voiceless."

In another passage, Jackson is heard defending his role in the infamous baby-dangling episode. In another, he defended his reputation.

"I'm not a nut," Jackson said. "I'm very smart. You can't come this far and be a nut."

In the end, the video essentially allowed Jackson to testify without testifying--at least on this day. Mesereau suggested in his opening argument that the singer would take the stand.

Taking the stand in real, not virtual, form, Culkin withstood Zonen's cross-examination.

As the prosecutor did with Robson, Zonen suggested to Culkin that the actor only thinks he wasn't molested because Jackson got to him in his slumber.

Like Robson, Culkin rejected the notion--"I think I'd realize if something like that was happening to me."

Zonen's while-you-were-sleeping questions were curious given that both of the prosecution's reputed eyewitnesses to Jackson's alleged bad behavior described incidents in which Culkin was awake.

But Zonen had to try something--Culkin wasn't giving him much. The prosecutor couldn't even rattle the actor with questions about Jackson's well-documented proclivity for pornography.

Zonen asked Culkin if he thought Jackson's vast collection of adult reading materials was inconsistent with the entertainer being "childlike."

"When I was 12 or 13 years old, I had a couple of Playboys under my bed," Culkin said.

Elsewhere, the prosecutor seized on a vacation to the Bahamas from the early 1990s that Culkin took with family friends and Jackson. Zonen asked Culkin about sleeping arrangements during the island stay and about a Rolex watch with which he was gifted by Jackson--shades of a watch Jackson's current accuser said he was awarded.

Culkin said the engraved watch was "a very nice gift" and the sort of "very sweet" thing Jackson was always doing. As for sleeping arrangements, Culkin said he might have fallen asleep in the same bed with Jackson but that it was just as likely he fell asleep watching TV on a couch.

"I don't remember it [the bed assignments] being like an expectation," Culkin said.

Culkin estimated he visited Neverland "more than a dozen times" from the ages of 10-14, sleeping in Jackson's bedroom "a handful of times." During that same period, the actor said he bedded down with Jackson by himself, with no other accompanying children or siblings, four or five times.

Culkin's testimony flew in the face of the prosecution's logic when he said his longest Neverland stay--nearly two weeks in duration--came when he was 20, long past the age of Jackson's alleged prurient interest.

Like Robson and Barnes, Culkin expressed only fond memories of Jackson's estate--the prosecution's idea of a kid trap. Culkin said he'd play games, watch movies, walk into any room (owing to Neverland's open-door policy) and conk out just about everywhere and anywhere.

"Sometimes I fell asleep in the arcade, and I'd wake up and start playing [again]," Culkin said.

The arcade was where LeMarque said he saw Jackson fondle Culkin. But the prosecution never asked Culkin specifically about LeMarque and McManus' allegations.

Zonen, however, did get to the bottom of Culkin's evening wear.

"Mr. Culkin, as a nine-year-old child, what did you wear to bed?" Zonen asked.

"I wore my clothes," Culkin said.

"You would just wear whatever you were wearing during the day?" Zonen asked.

"Yeah," Culkin said, later adding, "up until I was about 17 years old. That's when I kind of discovered what pajamas were."

Late of the evangelical satire Saved!, Culkin soon will appear in another courtroom drama--a June 8 hearing in Oklahoma City where the actor was rung up on misdemeanor drug charges last summer.

Jackson, meanwhile, is expected to star in his ongoing saga for at least several more weeks. The 46-year-old pop star has pleaded innocent to all charges.