Former Maid Tells of Seeing Jackson in Shower With Boy

Michael Jackson arrives at court for another day of his trial on child molestation charges. (Pool Photo Carlo Allegri)

SANTA MARIA, Calif., April 5 -- On the heels of her son's emotional testimony that he was molested by Michael Jackson, the pop star's former maid testified Tuesday that she once witnessed Jackson showering with another boy at his Neverland ranch and that Jackson shared his bedroom with several boys, including former child star Macaulay Culkin.

"I came one time into the bedroom and first I thought they were playing," the woman said. As she neared the doorway to the bathroom in Jackson's suite, she said, she saw that "they were in the shower." On the floor outside the shower she saw Jackson's white briefs and the boy's "little green underwear."

On another occasion, she testified, she saw the same boy, who was about 8 years old, in bed with Jackson, watching television. They were visible only from the waist up, she said, and their torsos were bare.

The woman revealed that while working at Neverland, she made less than $20,000 a year. During cross-examination, defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. repeatedly returned to the implication that her motivation for making allegations over the years was money. He asked her about a 1993 interview she did with the television show "Hard Copy," in which she discussed Jackson sleeping with boys. She received $20,000 for that interview. Mesereau also questioned her about meetings she had around that time with attorneys. The mother received a $2.4 million out-of-court settlement from Jackson in 1994 after the alleged incidents involving her son.

The woman said that she worked for Jackson for five years, beginning in the Los Angeles area in 1986 and then moving to Neverland before quitting abruptly in 1991. (She didn't say why she quit, but her son testified Monday that it wasn't until 1993 that he told anyone about Jackson's alleged abuse.) At Jackson's ranch she was the only maid authorized to clean Jackson's private, two-level suite, she said, and there were three boys who stayed in Jackson's bedroom at various times. Often the boys seemed to be sharing his bed, she said, and she picked up their dirty clothes off the floor.

She said one of the boys was Culkin, when he was 8 or 9 years old. Culkin said in an interview with Larry King last year that he did sleep in Jackson's suite but that "nothing happened." His publicist, Michelle Bega, yesterday reiterated that Culkin is "not involved in the proceedings" and that she doesn't expect he will be.

Unlike her son, who was alternately chatty and tearful on the stand, the mother was hesitant, sometimes mumbling monosyllabic answers and sighing. She appeared to have difficulty understanding a few of the questions posed to her. The woman, a Santa Barbara County resident who now works as a caregiver for the elderly, testified that she came to the United States from El Salvador in 1975 and for a time lived here illegally.

The single mother testified that when she first went to work for Jackson in the Los Angeles area, she didn't know she was permitted to bring her son with her while she cleaned, but "Mr. Jackson asked me to bring him." She testified that she brought him frequently on weekends after that and that on one occasion she saw her son sitting on Jackson's lap. This made her uncomfortable, she said.

On Monday, the woman's 24-year-old son said that Jackson molested him three times when he was between the ages of 7 and 10. He was the first of a series of witnesses that the prosecution hopes will show a pattern of inappropriate activity with five boys other than the now-15-year-old accuser at the center of this trial. The man's testimony concluded early Tuesday after tough questioning from Mesereau. Under cross-examination, the man had difficulty remembering what he'd said in multiple interviews over the past 12 years, saying at one point, "It's all kind of blending in together." Reading from a transcript, Mesereau asked the man if he remembered saying in 1994: "They made me come up with a lot more stuff. They kept pushing. I wanted to hit them in the head." The man said he did not remember.

Later in the day, his mother said that a friend of hers, another former employee at Neverland, made the initial contact with "Hard Copy" and arranged for the former maid to be paid the $20,000. In response to Mesereau's questioning, she said she later split the money with the friend. She acknowledged that she sometimes asked Jackson if she could take "knickknacks and clothes" from the house and that he usually said yes. And she admitted -- again in response to Mesereau's probing -- that she once went through the purse of another co-worker to take a look at the woman's paycheck.

At one point, Mesereau appeared to return to a theme he has been trying to demonstrate to the jury: that Jackson is like a kid at times and that his romps with boys are as innocent as any two children playing with one another.

"Do you remember stating that you thought Michael Jackson was very childlike?" the defense attorney asked, alluding to statements she'd apparently made years before.

"Yes," she said in her soft voice.

"Do you remember saying that he would let his chimpanzee sleep in his bedroom?"