4th. March 2004
Attorney from shoplifting case 6-years-ago says family is trying to scam King of Pop for money
The following comes from the MSNBC website.
New questions are emerging about the family of the boy accusing Michael Jackson of molestation. Are they money hungry? NBC News has obtained documents that critics say raise some serious red flags. NBC Newscorrespondent Mike Taibbi reports.
It was a simple case of alleged shoplifting at a J.C. Penny's store, followed by a brief scuffle, in August of 1998 except that it involved the family of the boy who 5 years later would accuse pop star Michael Jackson of molesting him.
In this case, though the shoplifting charges were dropped, the boy, his brother and mother accused security guards of viciously beating them without provocation.
?It became readily apparent that this was an incident, in my opinion, a scam, to extract money from J.C. Penny," says attorney Tom Griffin.
Griffin represented Penny's, which ultimately paid a $137,500 settlement to the family days before the scheduled trial in 2001. The family had sued for $3 million.
"If it was a cooked-up scam? why pay anything? The worst case scenario is that a jury's going to believe what she said and that they're going to tee off on you," says Griffin.
The public record of the case only briefly describes the stories told by the opposing sides. J.C. Penny's claims that the boy was sent out of the store by his father with an armful of shoplifted clothes and that the whole family was quickly detained with the mother starting that brief scuffle.
The family claims that both boys were modeling clothes for J.C. Penny's, not stealing them and that they'd all been brutally beaten by store security guards for no reason.
But NBC Newshas obtained more than 100 pages of documents not in the public record, including defense deposition excerpts and psychiatric reports and the documents give a far more detailed version of J.C. Penny's case.
The psychiatrist hired by Penny's found the mother to be schizophrenic, delusional and severely depressed, "sad over being a nobody," she'd said, "a sad housewife getting fat."
Her own therapist found her to be anxious and depressed after the incident, but not delusional.
Penny's says that more than 2 years after the incident the mother added on the charge that one security guard had also sexually fondled her breasts and pelvic area for up to 7 minutes.
The Penny's psychiatrist says she "rehearsed" her two sons to back up her "farfetched" story -- in what "sounded like scripted copies of (her) testimony" -- that they and she had all suffered broken bones, in addition to her sexual assault. Penny's insists there was no evidence to back up any of the allegations.
Griffin says, "She just came up with this fairy tale, not a fairy tale, a horror story, and ran with it."
Because of the gag order in the Michael Jackson molestation case none of the principals in that case would comment for this story. Two people who remain close to the family did tell NBC News they still absolutely believe the family's story of what happened at Neverland.
Some might wonder what a 6-year-old shoplifting case has to do with the molestation charges against Michael Jackson: Griffin, J.C. Penny's lawyer, says that based on his experience with the family he can guess about a possible connection.
?They're going for a home run this time, this is a shakedown, shakedown, part 2."