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March 03, 2005

Jackson's Aides Were Arranging Smear Campaign, Witness Testifies

SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- A public relations consultant hired by advisers to Michael Jackson testified today that she believed that Jackson aides had kidnapped the family of the boy accusing Mr. Jackson of sexually molesting him and were preparing to smear the boy's mother.

Ann Marie Kite, a Las Vegas public relations consultant, was hired by her former boyfriend, a lawyer then working for Mr. Jackson, to help contain the damage from a documentary broadcast in February 2003 in which Mr. Jackson acknowledged sharing his bed with children. She held the job, for which she was paid $10,000, for only six days.

The documentary, produced by Martin Bashir for Independent Television in England, was "an absolute disaster" for Mr. Jackson's reputation, she said. She assessed the damage from the program as 25 on a 1-to-10 scale. In the program, Mr. Jackson is seen holding hands with a 13-year-old cancer survivor who later accused Mr. Jackson of sexually molesting him at Mr. Jackson's Neverland ranch near here.

Ms. Kite, who uses the professional name Ann Gabriel, was put on the stand by prosecutors to provide evidence in support of their charge that Mr. Jackson and five unindicted co-conspirators carried out a scheme to kidnap and intimidate the accuser and his family. In addition to the conspiracy charge, Mr. Jackson faces nine charges of child molesting and giving alcohol to a minor to aid the sexual abuse.

Ms. Kite said Mr. Jackson's advisers panicked after the Bashir documentary appeared and summoned the boy and his family to Neverland to keep them away from the press. On Feb. 13, 2003, as negative fallout from the program spread, Ms. Kite said she received a call from an "extremely agitated" Marc Schaffel, an adviser to Mr. Jackson, saying that the boy's mother had taken the family away from Neverland. He called later that day to say that "the situation had been contained."

Ms. Kite said the calls "made me very uncomfortable."

"I didn't understand why he'd been so concerned about the family leaving the ranch," she said under questioning from Gordon Auchincloss, one of the Santa Barbara County prosecutors. She said she had called her former boyfriend, David LeGrand, a lawyer then working for Mr. Jackson, and asked if it was true that the family had left the ranch. "Don't make me believe that these people were hunted down like dogs and brought back to the ranch," she recalled saying.

Ms. Kite said she was unclear why she was dismissed by the Jackson team after only six days. She said that on her last day on the job she was on the set of the television gossip program "Access Hollywood" preparing to defend Mr. Jackson when she received a call from Mark Geragos, then a criminal attorney representing Mr. Jackson, telling her to abort the interview. She said he called her into his office the next day and asked her to sign a confidentiality agreement calling her a private investigator for Mr. Jackson, which would have the effect of giving her a privilege similar to lawyer-client privilege and making her unavailable as a court witness in any future proceedings.

She refused to sign the agreement. Asked why she thought Mr. Geragos had asked her to sign it, she said, "I believed it was designed to shut me up."

Ms. Kite said that about 10 days after she was terminated she spoke with Mr. LeGrand, who told her that aides to Mr. Jackson had taken care of any potential problems with the accuser's mother, whom the defense has depicted as a money-hungry manipulator.

"He said they no longer had to worry" about the mother "because they had her on tape and they were going to make her look like a crack whore," Ms. Kite said.

On the night of Feb. 19, Jackson aides had taped statements from the accuser, his siblings and her mother that were intended to support Mr. Jackson and to be used in a program to rebut the Bashir documentary.

Mr. Jackson's lead attorney, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., repeatedly interrupted the questioning of Ms. Kite with objections about the relevancy of her testimony and her qualifications to answer questions about Mr. Jackson, whom she never met or spoke with.

On cross-examination by Mr. Mesereau, Ms. Kite acknowledged that her only other public relations client had been a Las Vegas hypnotist who did infomercials. She also said that she never met any of the other people who prosecutors said were involved in a conspiracy directed by Mr. Jackson.

Posted by Nealus at March 3, 2005 12:01 AM

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