SANTA MARIA, Calif. – The adult son of an ex-Neverland maid cried on the witness stand yesterday as he swore that Michael Jackson molested him more than a decade ago after playful bouts of “tickling.”

“This took a lot of counseling to get over, just so you know,” said the 24-year-old man, his eyes casting daggers right at Jackson, 46, who he said slipped him $100 bills after two of the three groping incidents.

“This is so much harder than I thought,” the witness said as his eyes filled with tears and his voice began cracking.

The singer, who paid the witness and his family $2 million in 1994, stared straight back, with his head held high.

The 24-year-old man’s testimony was decidedly different from Jackson’s current accuser, a 15-year-old cancer survivor who never choked up or shed a tear during his testimony.

Jackson isn’t charged with molesting the 24-year-old, but prosecutors were allowed to present his testimony to show the singer has an alleged “propensity” to molest kids.

Judge Rodney Melville halted the action for about two minutes while the man mopped his tears with a white tissue brought to him by the prosecutor.

The now-married auto parts salesman and youth pastor said Jackson twice touched his private parts over his clothes during giggle-filled tickling fights while watching cartoons in the singer’s Los Angeles high-rise apartment in the late ’80s.

Both times, the singer gave him a $100 bill.

“Every tickle thing there was money – always money given after. Kind of a ‘don’t tell your mom,'” the man said.

The first time “I was sitting on his lap watching TV … cartoons. He started tickling me and I tickled him back. It eventually moved down to my little private region,” the man said.

The man said he was likely wearing little orange shorts his mother sewed for him. “We were poor. My mom made my clothes,” he said, again looking disdainfully at Jackson.

The man said that between the ages of 7 and 9, he wound up killing time in Jackson’s apartment several times while his mother scrubbed and cleaned. He said he didn’t know where his mother was when he allegedly was molested.

A second incident happened about a year later as he watched cartoons while lying on a sleeping bag on the floor.

Suddenly, he said, “Michael Jackson was behind me, spooning. Again with the tickling.” The man said Jackson tickled his genital area over his clothes for “two cartoons worth, maybe a cartoon and a half. … How long is Woody Woodpecker?”

Prosecutor Ron Zonen asked him to describe spooning.

“Something you do with your wife,” he replied.

The man choked up when he got to the third alleged incident, which occurred when he was about 10-1/2. This time, he said, Jackson came after him while he was playing Sega Genesis, a popular video game at the time, in Neverland Ranch’s arcade.

“He started tickling me and somehow we ended up on the couch. I was wearing shorts. He reached on my leg … he reached up to my privates. I think I was still laughing,” he testified. This time, Jackson touched his skin, he said.

The man said he never told anyone until cops came and talked to him in 1993 when another boy made allegations against the pop star. A year later, Jackson paid him $2 million.

But during cross-examination, the man admitted he initially denied he was molested and told cops it was just “tickling” and “no more than a 30-second thing.”

Jackson’s legal team get their crack at the witness today.