Former chef says he saw Jackson improperly touch Culkin
Friday, April 8, 2005 Posted: 2:44 PM EDT (1844 GMT)
SANTA MARIA, California (CNN) -- A former chef at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch testified Friday that he saw the pop star improperly touch then-child movie star Macaulay Culkin in the early 1990s.
"I was shocked," said Phillip LeMarque, who said the incident happened about 3 in the morning, after he was summoned to cook and deliver french fries to Jackson and Culkin. "I almost dropped the french fries."
Testifying in Jackson's child molestation trial, LeMarque said Jackson was holding Culkin up so he could reach the controls of the video game. One hand was holding the boy by the waist, and the other hand was coming up through the leg of Culkin's shorts and was on his crotch, LeMarque said.
Culkin, who has denied that Jackson ever touched him sexually, would have been 10 or 11 at the time of the alleged incident in 1991.
LeMarque's testimony came Friday morning after the defense lost a bid to try to impeach his credibility by introducing evidence that he operated an explicit adult Web site from 1997 until recently.
"We can prove this witness tried to use tabloid stories about Mr. Jackson to get into this business," defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. said.
But Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney Melville ruled that the evidence could not be admitted because it concerned events that happened years after the events about which LeMarque was testifying.
Also Friday, the defense sought to discredit the testimony of Adrian McManus, a former maid at Neverland, by suggesting to jurors that she tried, and failed, to win millions of dollars in a wrongful termination suit against the pop star.
On the stand Thursday, McManus testified about an incident she says she saw between Jackson and a boy whose family reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with Jackson in 1994 after alleging molestation. She said she saw Jackson kiss the boy on the mouth and put a hand on his crotch, over his pants, in Jackson's bedroom.
McManus also said she saw Jackson put his hands on the leg and buttocks of Culkin, while kissing him on the cheek, and witnessed a similar episode with another young boy.
She said she left Neverland in 1994 after being harassed and receiving "death threats" from members of an armed security detail, dubbed the Office of Special Services, that arrived at Neverland after the settlement.
McManus and four other employees sued Jackson for wrongful termination, seeking $16 million. But the suit backfired when Jackson countersued and the jury found in his favor in 1995, leaving the employees on the hook for nearly $1.5 million in legal fees.
Pressed by Mesereau on Friday on how much money she wanted from Jackson, McManus replied, "I wanted justice." She also said that if she had gotten an apology for the way she had been treated by Jackson's security staff, "that would have been enough."
Asked if she had ever called Jackson to ask him for that apology, she said, "I didn't have a phone number to call Mr. Jackson."
McManus admitted that she had accepted money from tabloids to provide information about Jackson and his ex-wife, Lisa Marie Presley, including participating in an article about their "kinky sex secrets." But she insisted that the bulk of the money went toward financing the employees' legal action.
"We tried to get money to help with our lawsuit to fight Mr. Jackson," she said.
While she was quoted in the article about "kinky sex secrets," McManus said she had no such information about Jackson and Presley, who were married in 1994 and divorced in 1996.
McManus said that during her time at Neverland, she never saw a woman spend the night in Jackson's bedroom suite. She said actress Brooke Shields, who had been romantically linked to Jackson in the media prior to his marriage, stayed in a guest cottage when she came to Neverland.
The 46-year-old singer is accused of molesting a boy -- now 15 years old -- at Neverland Ranch, giving him alcohol and conspiring to hold the boy's family captive in 2003.
Jackson has pleaded not guilty to the charges
CNN's Dree De Clamecy contributed to this report.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/04/08/jackson....rial/index.html