Saying how one Jackson advisor had described the documentary as “a train wreck,” Sneddon said: “In February 2003, Michael Jackson’s world was rocked, not in a musical sense but in a real-life sense, and it was rocked by the broadcast of the Bashir documentary.” In the documentary the star is seen holding hands with the boy and saying he allows children to sleep in his bed.

But defense attorney Thomas Mesereau, in his opening statement, accused Bashir, who is expected to be called as the first prosecution witness, of exploiting Jackson. “He wanted to do a documentary on Michael Jackson. He wanted it to be scandalous, and he wanted to get rich,” he said. Mesereau went on to detail what he said was the duplicitous treatment Bashir gave Jackson, gaining access to the star through flattery, and then reneging on a promise to let him see the final cut.

The singer faces charges that he sexually molested the 13-year-old boy. He also faces charges of administering alcohol to a child and of entering into a conspiracy to hold him and his family. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

Sneddon portrayed the entertainer as a resourceful predator who abused his position of trust to molest a minor: “The private world of Michael Jackson was quite different to what he said in that video.” The intention, he alleged, was “to desensitize the boy, to convince him that what was being done was all right in an adult world.” The world portrayed by Sneddon was one in which children were regularly given alcohol by Jackson and regularly shared his bed.

“What is there about Neverland that creates a no-rules, no-manners environment?” he asked. “What is there about Neverland that can do that to somebody?” The climate at Neverland, he suggested, was conducive to the eventual sexual molestation that allegedly occurred.

Outlining the evidence from the alleged victim and his younger brother, Sneddon said that on two occasions the younger brother, then 9, discovered a partially clothed Jackson lying on his bed in his private suite in Neverland masturbating the 13-year-old boy. At the same time, alleged the lead prosecutor, Jackson had his hand inside his underpants and was masturbating himself.

On another occasion, Sneddon said, both brothers were in Jackson’s private quarters when the star entered the room naked and with an erection. When the younger brother said he was “grossed out,” Jackson allegedly said: “It’s OK, it’s natural, why don’t you do the same thing.” The two also allegedly saw Jackson simulating sex with a female mannequin the singer kept by his bed.

But Mesereau attacked the credibility of the accusers, reserving most of his scorn for the boys’ mother. She had, he suggested, tried to extort money from celebrities on many occasions.

Sneddon, who tried unsuccessfully to bring a child molestation case against Jackson in 1993, revealed that prosecutors had found stashes of sexually explicit material in his private bedroom and around the Jacuzzi in the private bathroom. They also found alcohol. He said an assistant would tell the court that on one occasion she had been told to bring a bottle of wine, a bottle of vodka and four glasses to Jackson’s quarters. When she entered, said Sneddon, Jackson was alone with three children. The next morning when she went to tidy the room, the two bottles were empty. Sneddon also said Jackson had showed the boy adult material on the Internet from the first time he stayed at Neverland in 2000, when the boy was 10 years old. He is now 15.

A gaggle of fans were waiting to greet Jackson and to claim seats in the public gallery of the small courthouse in this town three hours north of Los Angeles. Whether the star’s support is waning, whether public interest in the case is falling or whether the wet weather had dictated that people stay at home, the turnout — and the media clamor over the event — was smaller than expected.

Inside the courtroom, Judge Rodney Melville read the entire multiple-count indictment to the jury. Although the details had been widely leaked, this was the first time the document had been officially presented. It included a list of counts including administering alcohol to a minor, false imprisonment and child molestation. As the judge read the indictment, Jackson looked straight ahead, occasionally talking with his attorney.

The indictment revealed that, among other counts, Jackson’s advisors had procured passports and Brazilian visas for the alleged victim and his family.

The judge gave both defense and prosecution two hours each to make their opening statements. The prosecution’s case consistently came back to the Bashir film. Sneddon quoted Jackson’s words from the program and suggested the alleged abuse occurred when Jackson and his advisors decided to use the testimony of a 13-year-old cancer survivor to rebut the claims and salvage his career. “It was a landslide that threatened to destroy everything in its path,” Sneddon quoted one Jackson advisor as saying.

For Sites, it posed other questions: of how to reconcile the need for truth and honesty with the sense of responsibility to the troops around him, of how to honor his duty to minimize harm through his reporting.

Assailed by all sides, Sites wrote a memorable explanation of his actions in releasing the video on his blog, “Dispatches From a Life in Conflict.” Titled “To Devil Dogs of the 3.1,” the text, in turn, was reprinted by media around the world, including this newspaper. Sites, it seemed, had inadvertently become the conduit for debate about the war. Earlier this month, a military tribunal ruled that the corporal involved in the incident should not face charges.

On Sites’ laptop, the 12-minute video he shot in the dust of Fallujah plays out its story. Working as an embedded “sojo” — a solo journalist — employed by NBC to cover the offensive in Fallujah, Sites arrives outside a mosque with a squad of six Marines. Shooting is heard from inside the mosque, even though the site had been cleared the day before. Another squad enters the building from the rear. Three shots ring out, and a Marine emerges to say that they have found five insurgents and have shot them. “Were they armed?” asks the lieutenant with Sites’ squad. The Marine shrugs and wanders off.

Sites enters the mosque. His camera pans around a small room, settling on two bodies lying together, one wearing a red kaffiyeh on his head. Blood bubbles from the man’s nose. Off-screen a voice says, “He’s fucking faking he’s dead. He’s faking he’s fucking dead.” Sites’ camera slowly pans across the room until it stops at the image of a Marine, his body made bulky by equipment, standing before two figures lying on the floor. The camera’s movement is matched by the barrel of the Marine’s M-16 being raised.

As the camera stops moving, so does the gun. A shot rings out. One of the figures is thrown back. The Marine fires a second shot and abruptly turns and walks away. The camera pauses for a moment on the figure lying on the ground. In an almost balletic movement, the figure’s leg drops gracefully to the floor. The camera, echoing the stillness of the scene, slowly moves back to the dying man with the bleeding nose. The video ends a few moments later.

Six months later, Sites is still reeling from the effects of the video he shot that day. Tanned and muscled, he exudes the genial, unreserved charm that can seem almost de rigueur in Southern California. Dressed in black T-shirt and jeans, black hair swept back, the 42-year-old talks quickly and confidently about his experiences. He is clear now, he says, about his actions and what happened in Fallujah. But underlying his resolve, there is a sense of anxiety. Did he favor one side over the other? Did he become a pawn for the antiwar movement? Was he swayed by his allegiance to the troops he was embedded with? In trying to present every side of the story, did he lose sight of the story?

Sites, who had been to Iraq many times and had been held captive by Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen outside Tikrit, was embedded with the U.S. Marines for three weeks prior to the onset of the offensive against Fallujah.

“I would sleep in the dirt,” he says. “I would do whatever [the Marines] did, and they liked that. We ended up developing this incredible relationship. To the point where people started to criticize me on my blog, [saying] that I was becoming too sympathetic. I was taking pictures of them holding up pictures of their kids. My whole idea was to humanize them.”

When his employer, NBC News, tried to replace him with a more traditionally telegenic frontman, the Marines came to Sites’ rescue, saying that it was Sites or nobody. So Sites, with his video camera, went to Fallujah and the mosque and one of the biggest stories of the war.

“I knew what I had right away,” Sites says. “I called the top bosses at the network, the three news officials that are responsible for foreign news. Got them out of bed. I said, ‘I’ve got something that is potentially bigger than Abu Ghraib. I need you to know that I have it.’  I watched the videotape on playback as I talked to them, and I remember my words. I go, ‘Fuck, I have it.’”

But even though he knew what he had, and he had made sure that his superiors in the United States knew of its existence, he didn’t immediately know what to do with it. His journalistic instincts were tempered by his comradeship with those around him.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly as a journalist,” he says. “I was still feeling part of a unit, part of some people who have just been embroiled in some serious conflict. I was heartsick, because I just knew that this wasn’t good for anybody, not for the guy who got shot, not for that Marine, not for me. I’ve seen plenty of people get killed. I’ve never seen anybody get killed like that. I’d never seen what looked like an execution point-blank. I hoped at that moment that it had been anybody else other than me shooting that videotape.”

NBC waited 48 hours before broadcasting Sites’ report from the mosque. Instead of broadcasting a story about a Marine shooting an apparently unarmed insurgent inside a mosque, NBC and Sites constructed a story about the dangers Marines faced in fighting an enemy that used mosques as cover and was not afraid to booby-trap bodies.

“We backed into it,” says Sites, with considerable disbelief. “We didn’t get to the shooting until a third into the story.” He mimics a pompous TV announcer’s voice: “‘There was a terrifying new technique being used by insurgents: booby-trapping bodies blah blah blah.’ We highlighted all the mitigating circumstances to set this up. We made it seem that there was no question that this guy was probably justified.”

But, as Sites knew at the time, some of the mitigating circumstances did not apply. The Marine who shot the insurgent had himself been shot in the face the day before, a fact reported in Sites’ original story. What he did not say was that the shooting was probably an accident by U.S. forces. Similarly, although Marines were aware of the dangers of booby traps in general, the only specific instance of a booby-trapped body in Fallujah came at the same time as the mosque shooting.

“If he felt so strongly that this guy was a threat,” says Sites, “he knew there were two other guys by me still alive; he never checked them after he shot him; he just spun on his heels. I don’t know what was on his mind: The fog of war does strange things to people.”

Sites also points out that as the Marine left, a fifth Iraqi inside the mosque, who had been hiding under a blanket, popped his head up. The Marine ignored him too.

The reaction to the video was immediate. Sites began to get 500 “hate mails” a day, including a dozen or so death threats — every day. The networks outdid themselves: Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, with cheerleaders such as Oliver North and Bill O’Reilly, took it upon itself to attack Sites, while his employer, NBC, tried to have its scoop while denying any responsibility, choosing to describe Sites as a “freelance cameraman.”

So Sites wrote his open letter to the Marines, explaining what he had filmed and why he had decided to broadcast it.

“If the truth is known, then people will be able to make the responsible decisions that they need to make in a democracy,” he says. “And if you’re burying it you’re not trusting them with that responsibility; you’re saying that democracy doesn’t work. And to me that was a betrayal of everything I’d spent my whole adult life doing, as well as a betrayal of those very principles of democracy that those soldiers and those Marines believe that they’re fighting for.”

With the appearance of his letter to the Devil Dogs, the hate mail eased off. Sites returned to the United States and decided to take a holiday. He went scuba diving in Southeast Asia, eventually ending up in Cambodia. He even sent his video camera home, vowing to take a rest from journalism. Then the tsunami hit and Sites was back at work, blogging and filming.

The experience, he says, helped him gain a fresh perspective on the events that had buffeted him in Iraq. He was persuaded again of the usefulness of the media in informing and involving the public. He was also inspired again to use his talents to make a difference.

Does he think that he will always be identified with the video? “In a way that’s going to be my burden to bear,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of death, especially in the last five years. And I have to live with those consequences. They come out, I have nightmares, and I’ve experienced a lot of personal attrition in my life, failed relationships. But you want your life to have purpose, and you want it to have meaning.”

The decision to broadcast the video, he says, “was the hardest decision I’d made in my life. I know passionately now that it was the right thing to do, that I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had buried that tape.”

The play recounts a day in the life of the hard-drinking, drug-fueled life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac’s alter ego. “Kerouac wrote the play in one night when he returned to his home in Florida after the publication of ‘On the Road,’” said Kerouac’s biographer and family friend, Gerald Nicosia. “He was getting a lot of attention, being put on TV talk shows after ‘On the Road,’ and an off-Broadway theater producer named Leo Gavin said he wanted a play from him.”

Although the play was never published or performed, the third act became the basis for a film, “Pull My Daisy,” starring Allen Ginsberg.

Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, said Kerouac had sent it to several producers but they turned it down. “It conveys the mood of the time extraordinarily well, and also the characters are authentically drawn,” Lord told the Press Association.

Kerouac even sent the play to Marlon Brando, Lord said. Kerouac was desperate to collaborate with the actor, and wrote a letter to him in 1957 urging Brando to appear in a play adaptation of “On the Road.” Brando never responded, and the two met only once, in 1960, when Kerouac enrolled in the Actors Studio. But his foray into acting was short-lived. After 15 minutes he asked, “Don’t they give you any drinks in this place?” Spotting Brando, he invited him for a drink. Brando refused.

After the rejections for “Beat Generation,” said Lord, Kerouac asked him to shelve the play. It stayed in a warehouse for almost 50 years, he added.

“It’s Kerouac, so it’s offbeat,” said Betsy Steve from Thunders Mouth Press, which will publish the full play in October. “It reads like a jazz song, with switching rhythms. It might not be Jack’s best, but it definitely highlights something of his work; it’s part of the canon.”

Although there are no firm plans to produce the play, a staged reading is scheduled for New York in January.

Nicosia said that it was not unusual for a work by Kerouac to remain unpublished. “A lot of Jack’s greatest works were never published in his lifetime,” he said. “The Kerouac estate has been releasing stuff from the archives over the last 10 years. We all knew there was a ton of stuff.

Despite the success of “On the Road,” Kerouac died with just $91 in his pocket. “He had a brief moment in the sun,” said Nicosia, “but the right wing launched a major attack on him. They saw him as a major threat to society. They really succeeded in knocking him down.”

The strangers were led by John Gertz. In 1920, Gertz’s father had bought the rights to the Zorro character from the author of the original dime novel. Together with Disney, he had developed the multiple incarnations of the masked man — TV series, comic book, feature film — before Gertz Jr. bought back the rights.

It had occurred to Gertz that Zorro had appeared in films, TV shows, comics — everything except serious literature. So the search began for a writer for hire, someone to fill in the back story of Zorro, the early years; someone who, like Zorro, knew California well and could think in Spanish; someone with a track record in historical research; someone who could bring a Latin sensibility to the myth of the Mexican-American do-gooder. And so they knocked on Allende’s door.

“I said, ‘What are you talking about? I’m a serious writer,’” the serious writer explains, sitting in her living room, a picture window providing a backdrop of clouds scudding across the bay. Rather than taking no for an answer, however, the visitors left a box full of Zorro artifacts — tapes of old movies, comics, recordings of the TV series. “And so I fell in love again with Zorro,” she says, in her lilting English, “because I had been in love with him when I was a child. He’s the father of Batman and Superman. He’s the father of all the action heroes with the double personality. Most of those guys have magic tricks. Zorro has only his own skills.”

She prefers not to refer to the job as a commission. “It was a proposition. They said, ‘We have the character and you have the talent to write the book. Are you interested?’ I said, ‘OK, we’ll go 50-50.’ And that was it.”

The decision to become a writer for hire was something Allende had previously resisted. Even the prospect of writing the story of her uncle, Salvador Allende, the former president of Chile who was assassinated in the 1973 coup, had not persuaded her. “I could not be objective,” she says. “I don’t think I could write a novel about it; it would have to be biography and I am not good at that. I’m not the right person. I’m a lousy journalist because I can’t stick to the plain truth; I have to embellish it.”

Pablo Neruda put it more plainly. “You must be the worst journalist in the country,” the great poet told the young writer. “You’re incapable of being objective; you put yourself at the center of everything. I suspect that you lie a lot, and when there is no news, you invent it. Wouldn’t it be better to turn to writing novels? In literature, these defects are virtues.”

She took the poet’s advice. In 1974, she fled her native Chile with her family. They arrived in Venezuela, where Allende’s eyes, she says, were opened. “Venezuela is a wild place. It’s green, generous; there is something so different from Chile. It’s a tropical country, so it has that energy we don’t have in Chile. Chile is so restrained, restricted. I found a voice there that I wouldn’t have had if I’d stayed in Chile.”

A letter written to her ailing grandfather became her first novel, “The House of the Spirits.” It established her as a significant voice in the exclusive male pantheon of Latin American fiction. She was, perhaps inevitably, tagged as a proponent of “magical realism,” and mention of her name would invariably be followed by that of Gabriel García Márquez. Together with “Of Love and Shadows” and “Portrait in Sepia,” the novel eventually became a trilogy. Her other novels, including “Eva Luna” and “Daughter of Fortune,” have been notable for the same collision between personal and public histories that so marked out her debut. They are also notable for being bestsellers.

To Allende’s delight, the job of writing “Zorro” suited her. “This is totally out of the blue,” she says. “I had so much fun writing this. There was no stress involved. My agent was horrified. Everybody was. Why would I do this? For the same reason I would wear the mask and the costume and take fencing classes.”

Her account of Zorro’s beginnings as a mestizo child in a California of missionaries and Indians is masterly, a page-turning, bodice-ripping tale of improbable duels, unlikely adventures and dastardly foes set against the grand currents of 18th century European history and the emerging riches of the new world. The story, as she tells it, remains a fantastical romp. “Sometimes people interview me about Zorro with this intensity, this seriousness, and I say, look, we’re talking about Zorro, not Che Guevara. Calm down.”

The story of Zorro was hers to invent, and she applied the techniques she uses for her most intimate memoirs. There is even some magic, although mention of magical realism earns a rebuke. “Magic realism is not like salt that you can sprinkle on everything,” she says, hinting at ice beneath the polite charm. “I have written more than 15 books and there are elements of magic realism only in a few of them. But for some reason, Latin American writers who have used this end up being labeled with magic realism. But really, magic realism is just an acceptance that the world is a very mysterious place and we don’t know all the answers.”

Like Zorro, Allende has led a nomadic life. And like him, she is an outsider. “I have been a traveler, the daughter of diplomats, a political exile, an immigrant. So I don’t think I have roots anymore. I have them in books, in language, but not in a place. I think I am a good example of what California is all about. It’s about immigration and diversity. And I’m very lucky because I’m legal in this country and I am my own boss — I don’t have to be cleaning bathrooms. It’s a nation within the nation. It’s like slavery with a better name.”

Does she experience the discrimination directed against California’s Latino underclass, derisively labeled as Mexicans regardless of origin? “When I walk in the streets or buy something in Macy’s, I’m a Mexican,” she says. “Who would know that I’m from Chile? Of course, when I’m driving on the freeway in a Lexus it’s different. But when I get out of the car and am in the streets, I’m just another Latina woman.”

Allende is a writer steeped in superstition and method. She always starts a new book on Jan. 8, the date she started “The House of the Spirits.” She works long hours alone in her office, an outhouse alongside the pool in her back garden. The main room in the office is dominated by her tidy desk, research meticulously laid out in neat piles. To one side is a prayer room, with cushions placed on the floor. Pride of place on her desk is taken by a photograph of her daughter, Paula, at the age of 27. Two years later, in 1992, she died of porphyria after a year in a coma. Her bereaved son-in-law, she tells me, eventually married a woman who shares her daughter’s birth date.

When Paula and her brother, Nicolas, had grown up, Allende separated from their father. Within weeks she had met her current husband, a San Francisco lawyer named Willie Gordon.

Allende wrote a book about her daughter in part to record her life and in part to heal the pain of her loss, but the wounds remain. “You never give up,” she says. “I was clinging to her. But the truth is that the brain was dead. She had a tube and we had to feed her. The doctors said that they don’t suffer, but how can you tell? There was a moment when the doctors said we should remove the tube, but I couldn’t do it, because as a mother you nurture.”

Two other photographs occupy her desk, portraits of her grandparents, the subjects of “The House of the Spirits.” “I really grew up in a house of the spirits,” she says, “or really, the spirits that my grandmother thought that she was calling. Who knows if they came? It doesn’t matter. Without the success of ‘The House of the Spirits’ I probably wouldn’t be a writer today. I’d be still working trying to make a living [she worked as a schoolteacher] and support a family, which I did all my life. But the fact that the book was successful allowed me to write a second book, and then by the third book I could give up my day job and become a writer.”

The treadmill of the successful writer can leave her bemused, she says. “Things overlap. Right now I am promoting ‘Zorro’ but I am writing another book, and supervising the translation for another book. Also, the fact that my books are translated into more than 27 languages means that there is always an old book that is being published for the first time in places like Turkey. So I have journalists who come here to interview me for ‘Eva Luna,’ which I wrote more than 20 years ago. And then I realized how much I had repeated myself. The characters may have different names, but they’re all the same.”

She laughs at herself, an easy laugh. One imagines that she spends a lot of time laughing, even when the serious writer is at work. “I think I live very much with the memory of some people that are now dead, or absent, so there’s a lot of memories around my life.”

Then she returns to family. “My granddaughter once said I have a big imagination. And I said, ‘What’s a big imagination?’ and she said, ‘You remember what never happened.’” And then, again, the laugh. “I think that defines my life.”

Each day the jury has heard allegations that the defendant was a classic predatory pedophile, grooming, abusing and abandoning his victims. At least that was the prosecution’s plan when the court case started on Feb. 28. But several of its 80-plus witnesses have been turned by a skillful defense into aiding the 46-year-old singer, while others have needed little help to compromise the prosecution’s case.

Debbie Rowe, Jackson’s ex-wife and the mother of his two eldest children, epitomized those failings: She praised his parenting skills and attacked those around him as “vultures.” Called by the prosecution as its star closing witness, she became the defense’s most prized asset.

The prosecution hit problems almost as soon as it began. Choosing to put the accuser and his siblings on the stand at the beginning of the case left it cruelly exposed to attack from Jackson’s lead attorney, Thomas Mesereau. The accuser, his elder sister and his younger brother dissembled, mumbled, confused events and contradicted themselves. The accuser was calmer and clearer than his siblings, but under cross-examination the boy became argumentative, and was easily goaded by Mesereau.

The prosecution’s case was also stymied by its decision to charge Jackson with conspiracy, including kidnapping, extortion and false imprisonment. The allegation is that in the days after the broadcast of the Martin Bashir documentary “Living With Michael Jackson,” in which the singer defended his practice of sleeping with children and was shown holding hands with the then 13-year-old boy, Jackson’s team embarked on a strategy of damage limitation. That included, it is alleged, compelling the boy’s family to record an interview praising Jackson as a father figure. It was during this period, more than a year after Bashir had filmed the pair holding hands, that the alleged molestation took place.

But although the prosecution has shown that a conspiracy of sorts did take place, the motive remains unclear and, most important, the link to Jackson has not been established. A cast of alleged Jackson associates were involved in persuading the family to record the interview and were around the singer’s Neverland ranch at the time. But their relationship to Jackson, and the extent of his knowledge and direction of the conspiracy, remain unclear.

The decision by the prosecution to proceed with the conspiracy charge against Jackson alone has almost proved its downfall. The suggestion from the defense is that the conspiracy charge is part of the personal vendetta pursued by the district attorney, Tom Sneddon, against Jackson ever since the singer settled out of court against a different child accuser in 1994 in a case also prosecuted by Sneddon.

The conspiracy charge also led to a rambling and eccentric appearance on the witness stand by the accuser’s mother. While the truth of her testimony has yet to be determined, her manner before the jury surprised most observers. “It was a bizarre charge, and now it’s a bizarre charge supported by a bizarre witness,” said Laurie Leveson, a professor at the Loyola law school in Los Angeles who has attended court on several occasions.

The prosecution was more successful with its introduction of “prior acts.” Californian law sometimes allows for evidence of previous allegations to be introduced in trials involving sex offenses, even if those allegations never came to trial. This has produced some of the trial’s most contentious moments: a succession of former Neverland employees has taken the stand to describe inappropriate behavior by Jackson with young boys, from giving them alcohol to sharing a shower or bed with them. Two have described instances of seeing Jackson fondling or masturbating the children; one alleged victim described how Jackson masturbated him when he was 11.

While the defense has sought to assail the integrity of all witnesses — several took part in an unsuccessful attempt to sue the singer for unfair dismissal — it has not succeeded in dispelling the impression that Sneddon promised to convey in his opening statement on the first day of the trial: that Jackson exposed children to “strange sexual behavior,” that there was “a no-rules, no-manners environment” at Neverland and that Jackson’s strategy was “to desensitize the boy, to convince him that what was being done was all right in an adult world.”

The prosecution has also been successful in its attempt to portray Neverland under Jackson as a place where children were encouraged to act beyond their years. It has also shown that Jackson has made a habit of befriending preadolescent boys from homes where the father is absent. Furthermore, children, including the current accuser, were often around alcohol with Jackson and possibly consumed it with his encouragement. Children habitually stayed up into the early hours of the morning with Jackson, and their schoolwork was abandoned.

Beyond the evidence there have been the mawkish sideshows: Jackson turning up to court in his pajamas; Jackson attending court with an emergency room doctor in attendance; Jackson and his unlikely retinue, including his personal magician. There have also been glimpses inside Jackson’s cosseted world: the seemingly random excesses of Neverland; the sinister dolls and mannequins throughout his home; the mess in his bedroom worthy of the most rebellious teenager.

And the court has been subjected to repeated showings of the various videotaped accounts of the 46-year-old’s relationship with the 13-year-old: the Bashir documentary, complete with baby dangling and hand-holding; the rebuttal video, with its off-screen cast of Jackson minders; the video recorded by Jackson showing him walking through the grounds of his ranch with the then 11-year-old emaciated cancer sufferer.

It has been a sorry spectacle and there could still be months to come. Jackson’s attorney has promised to call “a lot of witnesses,” although the judge may not permit him to introduce the celebrity list he presented at the start of the case. He is expected to focus on the credibility of the family making the accusations, suggesting that the mother invented the abuse claims and coached her children.

But the biggest promise Mesereau made in his opening statement was the one that began “Michael Jackson will tell you …” Mesereau has a record of putting defendants on the witness stand in child molestation cases, and this case is not expected to be an exception.

Schwarzenegger’s mistake was to take on nurses, teachers, police officers and firefighters — all at the same time. He couldn’t have picked a more revered assembly. But the governor strode ahead regardless, convinced by his previous successes that he could overcome any obstacle. The polls said otherwise, and last week, in a rare public reversal, Schwarzenegger withdrew many of the proposals that had infuriated some voters and given ammunition to his political opponents.

“They should have had their ducks lined up before they launched this political war,” said Dan Walters, a columnist and longtime observer of Californian politics for the Sacramento Bee newspaper. “It shows a lackadaisical attitude. If you do what he is doing, to confront these very powerful interest groups, then you’re going to suffer some diminishing of popularity … but you shouldn’t add to your troubles needlessly.”

The first indication that things were veering off track for Team Arnold came with his promise at the end of last year to “kick the butts” of nurses protesting against his proposals to reduce nurse-patient ratios. “Pay no attention to those voices over there,” Schwarzenegger told a conference as it was disrupted by a group of nurses protesting against him. “They are the special interests. Special interests don’t like me in Sacramento [California's capital] because I kick their butt.”

Then, during his State of the State speech in January, his confidence, or perhaps his inexperience, got the better of him. He said he would take on special interests by introducing merit pay for teachers, reforming the pensions of state employees and redrawing constituencies. But a clause in the pension reform plan would have removed death and disability benefits from the system, leaving the grieving relatives of, for example, firefighters, stranded.

The protests started almost immediately. The California Nurses Association organized demonstrations at his normally discreet fundraising dinners at homes in the Hollywood hills and hotels in San Francisco. A light plane was a frequent uninvited guest at Schwarzenegger events, towing a banner through the skies reading “California is not for sale.” Protesters even blocked the red carpet for a film premiere, forcing Schwarzenegger to enter the cinema through a side entrance.

Then another previously unseen phenomenon began to appear, this time on California’s television screens: the anti-Arnold commercial. Teachers joined firefighters and nurses joined police officers to denounce Arnold’s wicked ways.

“Governor Schwarzenegger, you ought to take your promises on education as seriously as we do,” one teacher said in an advertisement sponsored by the California Teachers’ Association.

“Our governor called nurses special interests after he stopped the new nurses staffing law,” a nurse said in another ad. “But Schwarzenegger doesn’t say a word about his own donations from the big drug and insurance companies: the real special interests that run Sacramento.”

Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger’s favored tactic of appealing directly to voters and circumventing the state Legislature was starting to lose its luster. The governor has promised to call a special election in November for a vote on his proposals. But this appears simply to have induced a public desire for politicians to get on with their jobs. Some 47 percent of respondents in a poll published last week felt the governor would not be right to bypass lawmakers and appeal directly to the voters through special ballots.

Some 49 percent agreed with the statement: “He’s too interested in gimmicks, public relations and image.” From a high of more than 60 percent last year, his approval rating has slipped steadily so far this year. Last week a poll put it at 49 percent, below 50 percent for the first time, and on the same day Schwarzenegger announced he was dropping several of his more contentious proposals.

“I have said to you many times that it makes no difference to me if someone says, you know, ‘This was not as good as it could have been, and he pulled it back’ … What is important to me in the end is what’s best for the state of California,” he said.

“By leaving the field of battle now, he minimizes the fallout from the campaign,” the University of Southern California’s Elizabeth Garrett told the San Jose Mercury. “He reduces the opposition he’s facing, and he focuses most of his strength on the other battles.”

It remains to be seen whether the decision to tone down the pension reforms — which would have made state pension benefits a function of stock market returns — marks a return to the bipartisan promise that saw Schwarzenegger elected.

But his political project received a blow from another serious adversary last week. Maria Shriver, California’s first lady, told an interviewer: “I want him back home. While I was always raised to believe that public service is the most noble calling, it’s all-encompassing, and it’s tough if you have young children. It’s a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job. So I want him back.”