SANTA MARIA, Calif. - Michael Jackson's henchmen threatened to kill her son, and her family, and tried to pack them all off to Brazil to "disappear," the accuser's mom told the jury in the singer's child molestation case yesterday.
"I was trying to negotiate my freedom and my kids' freedom," the 36-year-old mom said, explaining why she helped Jackson's aides obtain passports for her family in February 2003.
In a rambling narrative, she said Jackson aide Frank Tyson threatened the lives of her parents and then-boyfriend, Army Reserves Maj. Jay Jackson.
"I waited a lifetime to find someone I could give a Valentine to, and I didn't want to leave. ... My parents' lives. Jay's life. They were gonna be killed. Frank became the worst of all of them," she said, staring angrily at Michael Jackson.
In earlier testimony, the mom said Jackson personally promised to protect her kids from unnamed "killers" who were out to get them because they appeared in Martin Bashir's damaging documentary "Living With Michael Jackson."
The mom testified that Jackson's aides kept her and the kids' passports and refused to give them back, even after she hired a lawyer to write nasty letters to the pop star's then-lawyer, Mark Geragos. Cops found the passports during a November 2003 search of Geragos' private investigator's office.
The mom shrieked, laughed, then cried when prosecutor Ron Zonen showed her the passports she hadn't seen in more than two years.
"Finally! Finally!" she said, grasping the dark blue booklets.
But, for all her claims of being bullied and stalked by "scary" henchmen with names like "Asef," "Joe" and "Johnny," the mom never explained why Jackson's people would have wanted to get rid of her and her brood in late February 2003 when the boy's allegations of molestation didn't surface until June 2003.
Jackson's defense team has said the proposed Brazil trip, which never took place, was merely a vacation the pop star intended to treat the family to - not a bid to make them vanish. However, the defense has not yet explained why Geragos' private investigator kept the family's passports.
The mother says a vast network of alleged Jackson camp bad guys monitored her phone calls, followed her and kept her and the kids virtual hostages at the star's Neverland ranch during parts of February and March 2003.
"They were outside my door, outside my window. Everywhere we went," she said. "You know what's more scary? When you are not spoken to, just watched."
When she suspected Jackson's minions were going to ship them all off to Brazil, she said she made like the crumb-dropping fairy-tale duo Hansel and Gretel and began "to drop clues, clues, clues."
"This way people would know to where me and my children had disappeared," she told the jury. She said she slipped hints in her monitored phone calls "so this puzzle could be put together."
Yet, she did not explain why, when left alone in a Brentwood, Calif., nail salon for over an hour, she did not call cops to report the harassment or planned "abduction." Instead, she called the major, who came to the salon in his Army camouflage uniform and took her home.
Cross-examination is slated for today. Asked whether he was looking forward to defense lawyer Tom Mesereau's expected grilling of the mom, Jackson smiled and nodded "yes."
