Word: neverland
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...Without their parents there this became like Pinocchio's Pleasure Island." KIKI FOURNIER, a former housekeeper for Michael Jackson, testifying at the singer's sexual-abuse trial that she saw boys staying at his Neverland ranch who appeared to be drunk
Jackson has treated the trial as an occasion for performance art--arriving fashionably late, as if to his own concert, doling out gallery seats to his family and the lingering faithful, some of whom are sleeping over at the Gloved One's Neverland estate, where the crimes are alleged to have occurred. But he should have been jolted into reality when he listened to last week's sobering, detailed testimony by the star witness: a boy, 15, who related a catalog of sexual abuse at the hands of the man he had thought of as "my best friend...
During one of the first visits to Neverland, Jackson invited the boy and his brother to stay in his room but insisted they first get permission from their parents. The boy says his parents agreed. Did they believe that Jackson was the sinless benefactor he has always proclaimed himself to be, or were other forces--ignorance, celebrity fever, avarice--at play? Over the next two years, the boy, his mother and his younger brother and older sister were stay-over guests at Neverland. Jackson lavished gifts and attention on them and provided them an SUV and rides in limousines. Gradually...
...Living with Michael Jackson aired in the U.S. in February 2003, with the boy prominently on view, the Jackson camp, apparently worried that it showed the singer as child-obsessed, if not a child molester, quickly planned a rebuttal video. That brought the boy and his family back to Neverland, where again the boy and his brother slept in Jackson's bedroom...
...center, Melinda can boast a charismatic actress. Mitchell has often been cast as the excess-baggage wife (Phone Booth, Man on Fire, Finding Neverland). Here, channeling the neuroses of all preceding Allen heroines, she exudes a hurt and danger, an intensely sexual intelligence that plays off her patrician beauty. In her care, Melinda is part comic, part tragic, all magic. --By Richard Corliss