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Was There an Unknown Jackson Accuser?
Friday, March 25, 2005
By Roger Friedman
Was There an Unknown Jackson Accuser?
Was there a kid who made a deal with Michael Jackson before the 1993 accuser settled with the pop star for $20 million? Tape recordings left behind by a deceased National Enquirer reporter would suggest there was, but on closer inspection it turns out there probably wasn't.
In fact, the tapes show that there was a zealous push on the part of the supermarket tabloids 12 years ago to find any boy who might have been abused by Jackson.
This will be a disappointment for Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon, who has not been able to produce any other of Jackson's "victims" so far.
On Monday, Judge Rodney Melville will conduct a hearing in that will determine whether or not Jackson's "prior" acts can be brought into this trial. If they are allowed, what could they be and where did they come from? And are they real?
If he has to prove his case, Sneddon is prepared to bring back every ex-Jackson employee and every cops whom worked on the 1993 Chandler case — even if they've sold their stories to the tabloids. The result could be a veritable index of the supermarket tabs' sources and leakers from a dozen years ago.
Enquirer and Globe writer Jim Mitteager, like a tabloid Richard Nixon, taped most of his conversations about Jackson when he covered the story in 1993-94. Mitteager, who was dismissed from the papers for sexual harassment, talks to his sources and his editors very candidly. The result is a revealing look at how the tabs salivated to get the most salacious story about Michael Jackson, often disregarding the exact truth for kernels of plausible items that could be inflated into screaming front-page headlines.
Mitteager bequeathed the tapes to Paul Barresi, a self-styled investigator. Barresi says Mitteager trusted him to "do the right thing with them." Barresi thought the tapes had value, but could not have guessed what historical importance they would have.
Mitteager inadvertently kept a record of much of what is in the news today concerning the underbelly of Hollywood. The tapes include anecdotes about many celebrities and lawyers as well as incarcerated private eye Anthony Pellicano, who once worked for Jackson.
Barresi had a long history with the Jackson story. In 1993, the pop star's former cook and housekeeper, Philip and Stella LeMarque, asked him to sell their story about sexual abuse at Neverland. The LeMarques, who were slight acquaintances of Barresi, had only worked at Neverland for about 10 months and ended after the Chandler case broke.
Like many disgruntled former employees, the LeMarques are now on the prosecution's witness list. Another couple that also sold their story, the Quindoys, are ready to testify as well.
But Barresi realized the LeMarques were probably not telling the truth early on.
"I concluded that it was all about the money and not about protecting a child from a predator," he told me.
The couple, he said, began embellishing their story when they thought they could get $500,000 for it. In the end, they received nothing.
Barresi wound up turning over his taped interviews with the couple to Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti. They are now in the hands of Jackson's prosecutor.
The coup de grace, Barresi says, happened later when he listened to Mitteager's tapes. On one of them it's noted that the LeMarques had tried to sell their story long before the Chandler case in 1991.
"They couldn't get any takers," recalls Barresi. "But why didn't they just go to the police?"
Often the Globe printed stories from Mitteager based on the flimsiest evidence. Mitteager, at least in the case of Jackson, relied heavily on a sketchy stringer named Taylea Shea. Her veracity consequently became integral to a lot of tabloid reporting at the time. Shea, who seems to have a number of aliases and a long list of addresses and phone numbers, could not be contacted for this story despite many tries. Neighbors at her longest-lived Los Angeles address do not remember her fondly. They recall a hustler and con woman who was always on the take.
"She should be in jail if she hasn't been already," one former friend and neighbor said.
On one tape, Shea reads what sounds convincingly like a legal document drawn up between Michael Jackson and a 12-year-old boy named Brandon P. Richmond, who is represented by his mother, Eva Richmond. Brandon, according to the document, received $600,000 from Jackson. He and Jackson would no longer have any contact with each other.
Shea read the document, which is dated July 1992, to Mitteager in 1993. This would have been a blockbuster if true because it would make Brandon, not the boy from the 1993 case, the first of Jackson's accusers.
Shea also says on the tape that the document is from the law offices of Bert Fields, who was Jackson's attorney at the time. No reason is given, though, why Jackson and Brandon Richmond should be parted. The implication, however, is clear.
The Globe published the story without using names. Over time, it was assumed that Brandon P. Richmond was in fact Brandon Adams, the boy who had appeared in Jackson's "Moonwalker" video. Discussions on the tapes indicate that the tabloids believed the two Brandons were one in the same. But looking into the situation now shows there's a problem with Shea's story: Nothing adds up.
For one thing, a source close to Fields says the document uses language uncommon to their usual agreements.
And then there's the actual family: According to the Adamses, whom I met in January, they don't know an Eva Richmond. Brandon Adams's mother is named Marquita Woods. And Brandon's grandmother assures me she knows nothing of a $600,000 payment. The family has lived in a modest home in Baldwin Hills, Calif., for 30 years.
Brandon Adams, who is now 25, is a struggling actor. He appeared in "Mighty Ducks 2," the indie film "MacArthur Park" and is currently working on building a music career.
"I wish I had $600,000," he said. "I'm broke."
The Adamses pointed out that Brandon never visited Neverland, just the Jackson family home in Encino. For a short time they were friendly not only with the Jacksons, but with Sean Lennon and his mother Yoko Ono, who were also part of "Moonwalker." But the relationship seems to have ended well before Taylea Shea's big scoop.
Was Shea simply lying to Mitteager to collect a big fee? It would seem so.
On the tapes, Mitteager tells an editor that Shea also has "shocking" material about David Geffen and Keanu Reeves, among others. None of it would turn out to be true, but all of it was tabloid fodder that spread to some more mainstream publications for a short time.
Curiously, nobody I spoke with who worked at the tabloids could remember Taylea Shea. And her own alleged main source — an attorney then associated with the office of Larry Feldman, the Chandlers' lawyer — insists vehemently that she did not know Shea and had little knowledge of the case anyway.
Suddenly, the value of the Mitteager tapes takes on a new meaning. Barresi, a sometime investigator and tabloid source in the past, is aware that he's in possession of materials that demonstrate how the supermarket tabloids operated in their heyday: the era of O.J. Simpson, Jackson and other scandals.
But one tabloid editor still in the business cautioned, "Don't paint all of us with the same brush. We did a lot of excellent work on Simpson."
Indeed, though it's hard to separate them in our minds, the Globe — under a different owner — had a much lower standard than the Enquirer in the early 1990s. And Mitteager, came from that mentality, according to sources with whom I have spoken.
At one point, in running down lists of kids who'd spent time with Jackson, Mitteager rattles off the name of a boy with the conviction that Jackson, who had befriended him, must have also acted inappropriately with him.
But it was only wishful thinking on the part of a tabloid reporter. It turns out, that the boy was 9 years old in 1993 and died shortly thereafter from leukemia. He'd met Jackson through the Make a Wish Foundation. Even Jackson's staunchest critics would agree that it is hard to fathom how this boy could have been the object of the singer’s romantic interests. |
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