Sobs, Silence from Accuser's Mom

Head-licking, yes; welfare checks, no.

The mother of Michael Jackson's accuser testified, cried and rambled in the pop star's molestation trial Wednesday. But first she pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

With the jurors cleared from the courtroom, the woman short-circuited questions about her checkered welfare status, invoking her Constitutional right against self-incrimination.

Allegations of being bullied by Jackson and his staff and of seeing the pop star lick her eldest son's head were fair game, though, and duly offered by a witness who implored jurors not to condemn her.

"Please don't judge me," the mother begged. "Please don't judge me."

The woman's plea prefaced her account of watching Jackson lick her son's head "over and over" on a February 2003 flight from Miami to Neverland. But it could have referenced her reluctance to talk about alleged welfare fraud.

"My understanding is that [the mother] will answer all questions put to her other than questions of her welfare application, questions that she answered in her welfare applications or in receipt of welfare benefits," prosecutor Ronald Zonen said.

The defense, predictably, wasn't pleased, asking for a mistrial if the mother was allowed to "pick and choose" cross-examination topics.

In the end, Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville denied the mistrial request, declared the woman's welfare status off-limits and allowed the woman to take the stand.

With the jury returned to the courtroom, the woman offered testimony described as "bizarre," "disjointed," "jumbled" and even "canned" by media types on hand for the proceedings.

By any account, the woman needed a tight reign to stay on topic. Once, Zonen asked her if she ever left Neverland's grounds during her first stay there in February 2003. The woman said, yes, she did. Zonen asked where she went. The woman detoured into a diatribe against "the Germans"--Ronald Konitzer and Dieter Wiesner--two of Jackson's unindicted coconspirators.

"Miss [Doe]?" Zonen interrupted.

"Yes," the mother said.

"Where did you go?" the prosecutor asked again.

"I went to, like, a beauty place," the woman said. "And, oh, but get this..."

"Miss [Doe]?" Zonen interrupted again.

"I'm paying for it," she continued.

"Miss [Doe]?"

"That's right," she said.

Zonen tried one more time: "Where did you go?"

Replied the woman finally and succinctly: "I went and got my legs waxed."

At one point in her sworn testimony, the woman asked the court, "Please don't quote me on this." (She was trying to recall what she ate for breakfast one morning in February 2003.)

The accuser's mother is no mere prosecution witness--by the defense's own words she is "the kingpin" in the government's conspiracy case against Jackson.

Earlier in her testimony, the woman recounted how the pop star befriended her son when the boy was ill with cancer in 2000.

The two would talk on the telephone for "hours," the mother said. After a visit to Neverland in 2000, the woman said she became "uneasy" over the relationship and kept her children away from Jackson's ranch for nearly two years.

"He [Jackson] didn't do nothing, you know," the mother said. "It just felt--it just felt uneasy."

In 2002, the children returned to Neverland. During one visit in September 2002, the boy participated in Martin Bashir's infamous Jackson documentary. In that program, the boy is seen holding Jackson's hand as the pop star talks about snuggling with children in bed.

On the stand, the mother said she was unaware her children had been filmed, and clueless about the documentary until Jackson, whom she hadn't heard from or seen in months, called her in February 2003.

"He had told me that [my son] was in danger, and that there had to be a press conference because of this Bashir man," the woman testified.

In the wake of that documentary, the prosecution alleges, Jackson's team became obsessed with containing the PR "disaster," and, in turn, containing the boy and his family.

For her children's safety, the woman said, she agreed that she and hers be whisked off to Miami, just as the Bashir show was to debut on ABC. There, she said, Jackson gathered the family, and in a "very normal, very male voice," told them he'd read many psychology books and knew exactly how to protect them from "the killers."

"I just thought, you know, what a nice guy," the mother said.

According to the woman, Jackson told her to do whatever "the Germans" asked her to do. For their part, one of "the Germans" told her he could have the woman "erased" if she made him angry, the mother testified.

Jackson, 46, is accused of liquoring up and molesting the woman's eldest son, then 13, at Neverland. Additionally, the singer is alleged to have conspired to hold the boy, his mother and two siblings captive at Neverland, and plotted to ship the brood off to Brazil. On the stand, the mother said Team Jackson originally considered sending them to Austria but settled on the South American republic because she was fluent in Spanish.

In any geographic case, Jackson has pleaded innocent to all charges.

Though not billed as a witness to the alleged molestation, the mother's in-flight head-licking tale backed up earlier testimony from her middle son.

"When everybody had fallen asleep [on the plane]...I figured this was my chance to look and see what was going on back there," the woman said. "And that's when I saw Michael licking [my eldest son's] head."

At that point, the woman unleashed a sob-wracked, chest-thumping outburst.

"I thought I was seeing things," the woman said. "I thought it was me."

After the flight, the woman said she asked her son if he was okay. He said he was. "And that was it," the woman said--the family was off to Neverland where her sons spent the night in the main house with Jackson.

During that Neverland visit, the woman said, "the Germans" told her she couldn't leave until she and her children starred in a rebuttal video. Still, with the help of the ranch's grounds supervisor and the estate's Rolls-Royce, the family hitched a ride home without having made the tape.

Echoing what her current husband told jurors Tuesday, the woman said she received numerous phone calls in those frantic post-Bashir days from Jackson associate Frank Tyson. In those calls, the staffer urged her to come to back Neverland Ranch. She said she only agreed after Tyson told her "the Germans" had been fired. (She said she later learned that wasn't true.)

A tape recording of some of the phone conversations between the mother and Tyson, another of Jackson's unindicted coconspirators, was played for jurors.

The mother's appearance came in the wake of an ABC News report that had the woman, portrayed as the villain of the case by the defense, ready to bail on the trial all together.

While the prosecution likes to paint the woman as a long-suffering victim, it has long acknowledged that she is no saint.

In his opening argument, prosecutor Tom Sneddon warned jurors that the woman "obtained welfare funds when she wasn't entitled to them."

"She's going to tell you that, and she's going to admit that," Sneddon said in January.

With the mother ultimately unwilling to talk or admit to welfare troubles herself, the defense moved in on the woman's current husband.

In his second day on the stand Wednesday, the Army reservist was peppered with questions about the depositing of several of the woman's welfare checks into his bank account in 2003.

"I don't know any rules with regards to welfare," the man testified. "I wasn't concerned about that. She was my girlfriend, they were her children. If I gave them any money [outside of the amount in the welfare checks], it was because it was out of goodness of my heart."

Elsewhere, the man, who wed the accuser's mother last year, talked about how the woman's family was stalked at their home and at the children's school by a Jackson associate identified in testimony only as "Johnny." Later, defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. suggested "Johnny" was a P.I. hired by then-Jackson attorney Mark Geragos to see if the woman's family was trying to extort money from the pop star.

Mesereau, who won't get a crack at the mother until at least Thursday, contented himself on this day by walking the stepfather through the family's repeated escapes and re-escapes from Neverland in February and March of 2003.

"[The mother] left Neverland, went to El Monte. All right, so that's leaving Neverland once," the man testified.

"Right," Mesereau agreed.

"She came to my apartment," the man continued.

"Right," Mesereau agreed again.

"Lots of phone calls [from Tyson], [then she] went back to Neverland, came back that night. Again, a bunch of phone calls and [then] she returned back to Neverland," the man recounted. "So, that would be three times."