Jackson's Accuser in Hot Seat

Boy Told Educator He Wasn't Touched

SANTA MARIA, Calif., March 14 -- Since he first took the stand last Wednesday, the boy who has accused Michael Jackson of molesting him has gone from being portrayed by the prosecution as pop-idol-worshiping cancer survivor to -- in the defense's tack -- a classroom menace and star-struck manipulator who got angry when Jackson stopped calling or inviting him to Neverland.

During several hours of grilling by Jackson's attorney Monday, the 15-year-old boy admitted that he twice told a dean at his middle school that Jackson "didn't do anything to me" -- an apparent breakthrough for a defense that wants jurors to distrust anything the boy says.

Jackson attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr. worked aggressively to show the accuser contradicting his own earlier testimony, getting his dates confused and adjusting his account of what happened with Jackson whenever it suits him.

Mesereau brought up disciplinary problems the accuser had at a Los Angeles middle school, where he racked up complaints and detentions from nine teachers. "I wasn't that good of a kid then," the boy said. He testified that his conversation with the dean took place after his family visited Jackson's Neverland Ranch for the last time, in March 2003.

Though there's no way to predict how the day shaped jurors' feelings, the defense seemed to have taken more control of the sensational trial. "I don't think there's anything good today for prosecutors," said CBS News analyst Andrew Cohen, hired by the network to sit in on the trial and make observations to a pool of reporters. "And it's a good day for Michael Jackson."

Chronology is so far the most elusive element of the Jackson trial and Mesereau tried to confirm a sequence of events, beginning with the U.S. broadcast in February 2003 of a British documentary about Jackson, in which the boy is seen holding hands with the singer and talking about their friendship. At some point after that, the accuser has said, he and his family were flown to Miami for a news conference that never occurred, and were also interviewed on camera for a never-aired segment of a "rebuttal" documentary that Jackson was preparing.

The prosecution alleges that Jackson abused the boy twice in that same month, even as accusations and questions about his relationship with the boy were swirling around him. The prosecution also claims that Jackson and his employees intimidated and held the boy's family against their will at the ranch, and were conspiring to send them away to Brazil. Jackson, 46, has denied all 10 charges against him.

"You expected Michael Jackson to keep helping you, your mother, your brother, your sister," Mesereau said to the boy Monday afternoon. "That's why you got very angry when certain people wanted you to leave the country. It wasn't until you realized you were not going to be in Michael Jackson's family that you ever came up with these allegations, right?" Mesereau asked.

The boy mumbled an answer, saying, "I never wanted to be in his family."

"You never called the police [about the alleged abuse] until you saw two lawyers, right?" Mesereau asked.

"Correct," the boy answered.

In going over the boy's school discipline records, Mesereau was apparently reading from an account given by Jeffrey Alpert, a dean at John Burroughs Middle School, and quoted the dean as saying: "Look at me -- I can't help you unless you tell me the truth. Did any of this happen?"

The boy answered that he told the dean "no." He also testified that he didn't like most of his teachers' classroom methods.

"When I would stand up to teachers, the other students would congratulate me," he said, and added: "I was argumentative at times. I didn't like the way they taught me. I wasn't learning anything."