“This was a fucking mess, man.” Kevin Sites peers at the monitor in the bright California sunlight, trying to make out the images on the screen. But Sites doesn’t really have to look. This is his film, his moment; the images on the screen are ones that have come to define his life.
Sites is the journalist who captured the moment when a young U.S. Army Marine shot an equally young insurgent inside a mosque in Fallujah in November of last year. Sites’ video, broadcast around the world, caused a storm. For some it showed an American soldier executing an insurgent, proof of the brutality of war, of the U.S. Army and of its soldiers. For others, it highlighted the perils faced by U.S. troops, from booby-trapped insurgents taking cover in mosques to the threat of an embedded liberal media.
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.”
It is the sort of irony that would not have been lost on the notoriously hard-living writer. Excerpts from an unpublished play by Jack Kerouac are to be published in the July edition of a men’s lifestyle magazine. “Beat Generation,” written in the autumn of 1957, the same year as the publication of Kerouac’s breakthrough work “On the Road,” was unearthed in a New Jersey warehouse six months ago. An excerpt will appear in the July issue of Best Life magazine.
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.”
One day in August 2003, a group of strangers knocked on the door of Isabel Allende‘s house in the exclusive enclave of Santa Rafael, overlooking San Francisco Bay. The imposing wooden door to La Casa de los Espiritus swung open to reveal a diminutive, sparkly-eyed, smooth-skinned woman of indeterminate age who bore only a passing resemblance to the photograph that has adorned Allende’s books for the past 20 years. “We own Zorro,” the strangers announced. “Yeah?” she replied. “So?”
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.”
For 43 days a procession of the bizarre, the freakish, the gullible and the trustworthy has trooped into a small courthouse in a small Californian town. But they haven’t seen the half of it. As the prosecution sums up its case in the Michael Jackson trial, the hullabaloo is about to get a new lease on life, with the defense promising to serve up a smorgasbord of celebrities, from Elizabeth Taylor to Diana Ross, and from Macaulay Culkin to Stevie Wonder.
Outside the courthouse camera crews and fans jostle for position; at the rear of the court buildings retirees bowl, seemingly unaware that the “trial of the century” is unfolding just 100 meters away.
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.
Something is rotten in the state of Arnold. Just five months ago the governor of California seemed unstoppable: Propositions were passed, opponents were reduced to “girlie men,” and the talk was of Washington and the first foreign-born president of the United States. But in the wake of a series of political miscalculations, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s poll ratings are in a slump, his closest colleagues are questioning his judgment and he has been forced to reduce his ambitious plans to make 2005 the “year of reform.”
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.”
The 15-year-old boy who accuses Michael Jackson of child molestation Wednesday confronted the pop star across the courtroom as he took to the witness stand. In emotionally charged scenes the teenager and the entertainer sat barely 15 feet apart but studiously avoided eye contact in the hushed court.
Speaking in a quiet, occasionally hesitant voice, the boy told how 46-year-old Jackson had initially invited him to his home when he was receiving cancer treatment but subsequently seemed to drop him. But that changed, said the boy, when Martin Bashir was making his documentary, “Living With Michael Jackson.” “Before that I hadn’t talked to Michael in a very long time,” the boy told the court.
After being introduced to Bashir at the singer’s Neverland ranch, Jackson took the boy to another room. The boy said: “He was telling me, ‘Hey, you want to be an actor, right? I’m going to put you in movies and this is your audition. I want you to go in there and tell them how I helped you, that you call me Daddy Michael.’ He told me that he wanted me to say that he helped me and that he pretty much cured my cancer.”
Was that true? he was asked by district attorney Tom Sneddon, prosecuting. “Not really,” the boy replied, “because for the majority of my cancer he wasn’t really there.”
Asked by Sneddon what his attitude was to Jackson at the time of the filming of the Bashir documentary, the boy replied: “I thought he was the coolest guy in the world, like my best friend ever.”
The boy said that Jackson had not told him that the video was for public broadcast. Instead the interview, in which the boy and Jackson hold hands and talk of their practice of sharing a bedroom, provided the climax of the Bashir documentary that provoked controversy over the singer’s attitudes toward children. Those revelations in part led to the current charges.
The courtroom meeting between the boy and Jackson, who is being tried on various charges, including two counts of sexually molesting the boy, is the centerpiece of a trial expected to last several months. The boy appeared nervous and spoke quietly into the microphone. It was a dramatic contrast to the image of a 13-year-old cancer sufferer shown to the jury earlier in the day.
But growing in confidence, the boy described how on his first visit to the ranch, Jackson had suggested to him that he and his younger brother sleep in the entertainer’s bedroom. “He told us to ask our parents … at dinner. My parents said yeah.” The boy also agreed with previous testimony from his brother that the singer and an assistant showed them pornographic Internet sites on that first night in Neverland.
The boy said that after a few meetings, when he was in the midst of cancer treatment, Jackson appeared to drop him. “Michael stopped talking to me in the middle of my cancer,” he told the court. “I don’t know what happened.”
On one occasion he bumped into Jackson at Neverland when the singer had said that he wasn’t there. “He acted as if, ‘Oh crap, he saw me.’”
Before the boy’s appearance the defense continued to explore discrepancies in testimony by his younger brother, who was 11 at the time of the alleged offenses. The defense played a home movie made by the two brothers for Neverland’s television channel and a DVD showing the entertainer and his alleged victim walking through the Neverland ranch.
The boy is almost bald in the DVD, has difficulty walking and appears emaciated. At the time, he was receiving chemotherapy for an aggressive cancer.
In earlier cross-examination, Jackson’s lawyer, Thomas Mesereau, continued drawing the jury’s attention to inconsistencies in the younger brother’s testimony. When asked by the defense, the boy was unable to explain why he had told the grand jury he knew where the key to Jackson’s wine cellar was. In testimony on Tuesday he had told the court he did not know where the key was.
The defense contends the two boys were “running wild” through the main house, breaking into the wine cellar and drinking alcohol. The prosecution argues that Jackson administered alcohol to the boys to help commit a crime.
Mesereau also pressed the boy on his different accounts of the molestation given to police, the grand jury and the court. Asked to explain the discrepancies, the boy said: “I was nervous when I was doing the interview.”
“Because you were nervous you didn’t get the facts right?” asked Mesereau.
“Yes,” the boy replied.
The singer faces charges of child molestation, administering alcohol to a child and multiple counts of conspiracy involving extortion, kidnapping and false imprisonment. If found guilty he could face up to 20 years in prison. The trial continues.
