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节选和介绍
会英语的可以先看看
More update from the author on Amazon.co.uk
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/produ ... F8&n=266239&s=books
Book Description
News of Michael Jackson's appearances in court on paedophile
charges in 2005 was broadcast to hundreds of millions of people around the
world. Everyone had opinions about the testimony and the witnesses as the
drama was played out in the small town of Santa Maria in California. This
book not only tells the story of that trial but of what was secretly going
on behind the scenes - a far more important and mysterious tale than that
unfolding in the courthouse.
'The Trials of Michael Jackson' reveals the sensational events which led to
the downfall of a megastar at the hands of the mighty Sony company and an
obsessive but compliant prosecutor. Using previously unpublished material,
personal interviews and evidence gathered during research on three
continents, Lynton Guest uncovers the truth about the bitter feud between
one of the biggest corporations in the world and pop music's greatest
legend.
For the first time, the reasons behind Martin Bashir's infamous documentary
and the strange decisions taken by the Santa Barbara prosecutor, are laid
bare. The incredible machinations of the men from Japan and their American
allies were designed to ensure nothing less than the destruction of Michael
Jackson and billions of dollars of profit for Sony.
This book takes us on a roller-coaster ride, from the ashes of a defeated
Japan in 1945 to the twenty-first century celebrity culture which now spans
the globe. It provides the most authoritative look yet at the music
business and its extreme excesses over the last forty years. But more than
anything else 'The Trials of Michael Jackson' shows how the man who gave us
'Thriller', the biggest selling record of all time, was hunted down and all
but destroyed by forces beyond even his control. As Jackson attempts to put
his life back together, those who seek to benefit from his demise have not
gone away. They remain in the shadows, watching and waiting. It's time they
were held up to the light.
Synopsis
Presents the story of the downfall of Michael Jackson at the hands of the mighty SONY Corporation and an obsessive Californian prosecutor. This book aims to uncover the truth about the bitter feud between one of the biggest corporations on the planet and pop music's greatest icon.
From the Author
This book came about as a result of a chance conversation with someone whose knowledge of, and experience in, the highest echelons of the music industry are second to none. During the course of the exchange I was given some information about Michael Jackson which was unknown to the public. With the singer on trial in California, everyone was gossiping about the case in their spare time, including me.
In the words made famous during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, I began to ‘follow the money’. As an historian, researcher and journalist I knew from the information I received that there was something being hidden or obscured that was much bigger and more important than we were being told at the time. I could just feel it. Little by little, as I ranged from London, via New York and California, all the way to Tokyo, the incredible story contained in these pages began to reveal itself.
During the course of this journey I have also plundered my own past, to try to make sense of some of the things I was discovering. By including this material, I hope to show that the events central to this book are not part of some one-off aberration, but have been woven into the fabric of the music business since its inception. Anyone who loves music or who is a fan of any artist should read on. The dark underbelly of the entertainment world is not a pretty sight. It is time to hold it up to the light.
Excerpted from The Trials of Michael Jackson by Lynton Guest. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
‘Not Guilty.’
Again and again these two little words from the voice of the jury foreman, Paul Rodriguez, reverberated around the courtroom. There was one count of conspiracy to kidnap and falsely imprison an entire family, four counts of committing lewd acts, one count of attempting to commit a lewd act, four counts of supplying alcohol to minors and a number of counts on lesser charges arising from the same crimes, allegedly committed against an underage boy, Gavin Arvizo. These last counts were offered to the jury as alternatives should they find the accused innocent of the main indictments.
Instead, they found the defendant not guilty on all charges. From the small community of Santa Maria in Southern California to the furthest corners of the world, astonishment registered. But just as OJ Simpson discovered some years previously, Michael Jackson was about to find out that a not guilty verdict does not an innocent man make in the eyes of commentators and consequently, the public. Had a blatant child molester beat the rap? If not, could the adverse reaction be yet another manifestation of the racial fault lines carving an inexorable swathe through American society? Perhaps it was simply a case of celebrity-bashing for no good reason, unlikely though that might seem to most of us. Or had something been going on that was more sinister than any of these?
Extract from Chapter 2
Smoke and Mirrors
In television, he who controls the editing equipment holds the power.This meant that Bashir was able to draw Jackson in by telling him what a wonderful father he was, saying, "It almost makes me weep". This conversation was cut out of the finished programme. Shots of Jackson holding hands with an adolescent boy, Gavin Arvizo, were there for all to see, however, along with pictures of Arvizo resting his head on the star's shoulder. It was this scene which caused such disquiet among the general public as well as the media, coming as it did a decade after the Jordan Chandler affair first raised questions about Jackson's relationships with young boys, and therefore the nature of the singer's sexuality. However, when viewing the programme as a whole the amazing thing was the paucity of anything really deleterious, in a legal sense, to Michael Jackson. Moreover, nothing Jackson said admitted any criminal wrongdoing. Indeed, while acknowledging that he shared his bedroom with children, the star was at pains to point out that no sexual element existed in these events. Jackson said the sleepovers were innocent and helped him experience the childhood he never had. "What could be more natural?" he asked Bashir. Given that Living with Michael Jackson was a production from the man whose reputation was built on getting people to talk, very little of actual substance was revealed. However, if Bashir's eight months were not to be shown up as a complete waste of time, something had to be salvaged from what was, in effect, a non-event. One of the so-called great scenes, for instance, was the revelation of Michael Jackson on a shopping spree (it has since been suggested that most of what Jackson "bought" that day was later returned).
At a stretch, by putting inferences into the spaces, the pictures could be interpreted differently and so could Jackson's words, which after all admitted he shared his bedroom with other people's children. The public relations experts at Granada were quick to brief the press in advance of the screening to garner publicity for the programme and boost its ratings. Of course, it was the hand-holding and the bedroom-sharing they wanted to publicise. And publicise it they did, big time. Before one single frame of the programme had been seen by the public, the story was out that it virtually proved Jackson was a paedophile. The marketing worked. When Living with Michael Jackson was aired in the USA, 27 million people tuned in, while an astonishing 14 million watched the British screening. These numbers were replicated all over the world.
Eighteen months later, not long before the trial, Bashir conducted a televised interview for 20/20 with the former child actor, Corey Feldman. Feldman, who starred in such movies as Stand By Me and The Goonies had been a friend of Michael Jackson's since Feldman was thirteen years-old. Over a year before his interview with Bashir, around the time when Jackson's home was raided in late 2003, Feldman appeared on the Larry King show. He told the CNN host that he had "never seen Michael act in any inappropriate way towards a child; never with me". Bashir's interview did not add anything to this statement. Indeed Feldman again said: "He never harmed me and he never harmed any children in front of me." However, this was not enough for Bashir. Now he persuaded Feldman to add the story that on one occasion when he visited Jackson's home when he was "thirteen or fourteen", Jackson had shown him a book which contained pictures of naked men and women. Feldman went on: "The book was focused on venereal diseases and the genitalia and he sat down with me and he explained it to me, showed me some pictures and discussed what those meant."
Once again the publicity hounds went to work and the interview was claimed as a new, damaging revelation. It was nothing of the sort. In fact, the way Feldman told it, it sounded like Jackson was acting quite responsibly.
It did, however, reveal the classic Bashir elements. What was in fact exculpatory to Jackson was dressed up with inferences and marketing to make it appear something it was not. But why did Bashir do this on the verge of Jackson's trial, when it could well have a prejudicial effect? Well, since when have news organisations been in the truth business? They are in the entertainment game and, in the USA in particular, have no qualms about any prejudice they might cause. The combination of celebrity, sex and crime was just too much to resist. Moreover, the timing, coming as it did when 250 police officers raided Neverland, guaranteed maximum ratings.
Strangely, having stoked the fires, Bashir was more than a little reticent when it came to telling his story to the court. He had to be served with a subpoena to get him to appear at all. He then showed up in court attended by a battery of ABC lawyers. Since he was not a witness to any actual wrongdoing (and that, in itself, speaks volumes as Bashir "lived" with Jackson for the best part of a year), the point of Bashir's appearance in the courthouse was twofold. First and most important, he was called to authenticate a video copy of Living with Michael Jackson, which was played to the jury as soon as the prosecution's and defence's opening statements had been completed. In the criminal justice system it is not enough simply to play a tape. The person responsible for the recording has to testify that it is an authentic copy of the tape that was made or broadcast and say something about the circumstances under which it was recorded. The context, if you will. The second reason for Bashir's testimony was to say more about Jackson's behaviour during the eight months of filming. This was supposed to lay the foundation for an explanation of Jackson's motives for engaging in the conspiracy to kidnap and falsely imprison the Arvizos, with which he was later charged.
Bashir was the first witness, a ploy designed by the prosecution to get the trial off to a sensational start, one from which they hoped Jackson could not recover. However, Bashir's evidence did not have the desired effect. It was sensational, certainly, but not in the way the prosecution hoped. Bashir began by taking exception to lead prosecutor Tom Sneddon's initial examination. Sneddon, having verified Bashir's identity, asked him about his career as a maker of video documentaries. Bashir was aghast. "What do you mean by video documentaries?" he asked snootily, "I call them current affairs films." Sneddon then asked Bashir which companies he had worked for in his time as a reporter. Having stated that he 'started at the BBC", Bashir looked incredulous when Sneddon followed up by asking, "What is the BBC?" It was not an auspicious opening. For the rest of Sneddon's questioning, Bashir was variously described as being irritated, perplexed or uncomfortable. The main point for Sneddon, though, was that he got the video of Living with Michael Jackson into evidence. Now he could suggest that all manner of nefarious deeds took place in its wake.
After basking in the publicity of his Jackson show, Bashir now courted even more column inches by refusing to answer questions put to him under cross-examination by Jackson's defence attorney, the silvery-maned Tom Mesereau. Mesereau was scathing in his description of Bashir. "He wanted to do a documentary on Michael Jackson," Mesereau said. "He wanted it to be scandalous and he wanted to get rich."
When a journalist refuses to answer questions in court it is usually because there is an issue about revealing a confidential source. This is a well-trodden path and an honourable course of action since a failure to preserve anonymity after having promised to do so to an informant would result in the press being unable to convince people to give information which might be in the public interest. However, in the case of Martin Bashir, no such issue existed. A refusal to answer while on the witness stand in such circumstances would normally be rewarded by a citation for contempt of court but in California there is a specific statute which can extend the grounds on which a reporter can refuse to answer certain questions in a court of law.
The California statute is known as the Shield Law and it allows a journalist
to keep confidential some facts pertaining to the methods used in compiling a story and events the reporter might have witnessed during the course of investigations. It was this law which Bashir and his ABC lawyers invoked when refusing to answer Mesereau's questions. Virtually every time the defence attorney posed a question, Bashir's lawyers objected. It got so ridiculous at one stage that it was agreed there could be a sort of running objection, so the repetition of the question-objection-ruling charade did not have to continue ad infinitum. The ultimate decision over whether a particular question falls under the protection afforded by the Shield Law is taken by the trial judge. In the Jackson case, the judge, Rodney Melville, allowed Bashir quite a large amount of latitude but there were four questions which Judge Melville ruled were admissible but which Bashir still refused to answer.
One question referred to Bashir's alleged misrepresentation. "Did you get Michael Jackson to sign two documents without a lawyer present?" It is difficult to see why Bashir should find this so offensive. If there were no such documents, why not say so? If they existed, well, Jackson is an adult and Bashir cannot be held responsible if the singer freely chose to sign documents without a lawyer present. Not only that, Jackson had been a star surrounded by managers and attorneys since he was a toddler. If anyone knew the score, Jackson did. So what possible motive could Bashir have had for refusing to answer? Perhaps it was felt that opening this can of worms might expose what really goes on when reeling in a star for a television appearance. When the documentary was broadcast, Jackson said he felt "betrayed" by Bashir. He claimed that Bashir promised to make a sympathetic film which would help turn the singer's life around. Another source supported the contention. The psychic, Uri Geller, who has been a long-time friend of Michael Jackson, said that both of them had been "betrayed by Bashir". It was like a re-run of the Diana imbroglio. For his part, Bashir denied all claims of "distortion and misrepresentation levelled at me and the programme".
The second question Bashir refused to answer was: "How many hours of footage did you omit from the documentary?" Just why ABC's lawyers thought this question could fall under the Shield Law is not known but then again, the great broadcasting organisations would rather their viewers did not know that apparently real-time footage is, in fact, carefully edited. Mesereau then asked: "Are you covering this case as a correspondent who is paid?" Again, there seems no obvious reason for Bashir to decline to respond. If he was not a working correspondent he could say so and in the process dismiss Mesereau's implication of a conflict of interest. If he was indeed covering the trial for ABC or anyone else, surely the jury had a right to know.
The strangest of all the refusals, though, was when Mesereau asked: "Before this film was shown (to the court) and I am talking about the actual film shown by the prosecution today, did you watch the trial reel?" That question seems, at first glance, innocuous. Yet Bashir refused to tell the jury whether or not he had seen the film, despite Judge Melville's decision that the question did not fall under the Shield Law. Why would he do that? Only Bashir can actually say but it could be that the truthful response was "no". Bashir had either seen the reel or he hadn"t. If he had, it seems inconceivable that he would not have let the court know. If he hadn"t, that presented a serious problem for the prosecution. If Bashir had not seen the reel, then either the video screened in the court could not be proved to be exactly the same as the programme that was broadcast or it was the same but Bashir had never watched his own show, which was so unlikely as to be almost beyond mention. A "current affairs film-maker", like any film-maker in any genre, would be derelict in his duty if he did not bother to watch the cut of his own programme. To my knowledge, no one has ever accused Bashir of that particular offence.
So can we safely assume that Bashir did watch his own programme? It would be extremely risky for Tom Sneddon and his team to have procured a video that was in any way different to that broadcast. It would be bound to be spotted by someone. And anyway, there was no point. The whole world had seen the programme and knew what was in it. A change, even a subtle one, would be spotted by the eagle-eyed defence team.
The scenario that emerges from these considerations points to something else. In the prosecution's rush to get everything prepared for the opening of the trial and because Martin Bashir is an extremely busy person, he did not personally review the tape that was provided to the prosecution. If he had said this on the witness stand, the tape would not be authenticated and could not be used in evidence. Bashir was not about to lie on oath but if he admitted to not reviewing the tape, the prosecution's case would be in tatters. So, submerged in his other non-answers, he refused to answer this one. Bashir had given the impression publicly that he had no interest in Jackson being prosecuted. But in that case, why not just answer the question and allow the case to collapse? Perhaps Bashir was double-bluffing. On the one hand he wanted to be seen to be playing the role of good reporter by refusing to co-operate with the prosecution but actually he really wanted the prosecution to succeed. He certainly seemed annoyed and in bad temper with Tom Sneddon. Had something gone on behind the scenes which could have exonerated Michael Jackson but some deal had been hastily cobbled together to avert the collapse of the trial on its first day? To this day, that remains unanswered.
Judge Melville now had to decide what to do. Mesereau was on his feet, asking for all Bashir's evidence to be excluded but particularly the tape of Living with Michael Jackson. Although everyone knew the tape played was the actual programme, technically, it remained in part unauthenticated. It should have been thrown out. But it wasn"t. If it had been the case might well have ended there and then. Instead, the learned judge said that he would rule on the matter later in the proceedings. For the moment, the tape was in. Although Mesereau continued throughout the trial to protest at the tape's inclusion, Judge Melville had no intention of ruling it out, and he didn"t.
There still remained the question of what to do with the recalcitrant witness. Judge Melville had allowed Martin Bashir a certain amount of room to manoeuvre, ruling that the journalist need not answer a series of Mesereau's questions. However, Bashir had also refused to respond to some questions which the judge directed him to answer. This is contempt of court, pure and simple. Once again, Melville bottled it. Instead of citing Bashir for the obvious contempt, he again said he would rule on the matter later. So there was now the situation where two issues central to the case were in total confusion. Meanwhile, the trial continued as if the altercation had never happened. In the event no action was taken against Bashir. It was like the BBC all over again. If anyone "got away with it" it wasn"t Michael Jackson, it was Martin Bashir.
What are we to make of Martin Bashir in the trial of Michael Jackson? Although the vast majority of his actions can be seen in terms of journalistic endeavour, this does not entirely explain his contribution. Bashir's is a world where nothing can be taken at face value. It's a miasma of smoke and mirrors, a parallel universe where very little is real and image is all. The Jackson programme was undoubtedly helpful to the journalist's career. A few months after the trial, Bashir was made co-anchor of one of ABC News" most important current affairs shows, Nightline, taking over from the revered broadcaster, Ted Koppel, who was retiring. Fox News, not noted for its sympathy towards defendants in criminal trials, nevertheless was one of the few voices to question the appointment. Fox News reporter, Roger Friedman, was withering in his condemnation, saying:
"Congratulations, David Westin (the head of ABC News), you"ve replaced serious, competent, respected Ted Koppel with the oily, obsequious
Martin Bashir on Nightline. My question is, was Jerry Springer not available?" Friedman then went even further, with the claim that "His (Bashir's) method of getting headline-making answers is as dishonest as it could possibly be." This last comment referred to the outtakes of Living with Michael Jackson which were shown to the court. According to Friedman's analysis, Bashir "baits Jackson, praising his strangest qualities during breaks in filming. Jackson is flattered and pleased but when filming resumes Bashir then attacks the singer for the traits he, only seconds earlier, complimented."
While there was nothing in Living with Michael Jackson to prove criminality on the part of the singer, just like Bashir's programme on Terry Venables, there was just enough ammunition to entice others into the fray, some far more sinister than Martin Bashir.
END OF EXTRACT |
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