Brother challenged over Jackson case evidence

THE brother of Michael Jackson’s accuser was yesterday confronted by the singer’s lawyer with a statement he made to investigators showing he gave a different account of the alleged incidents than the one he told to jurors.

Star Arvizo, 14, testified this week that he twice saw his brother being molested by Jackson, both times by walking up stairs into the star’s bedroom in the master bedroom suite at the singer’s Neverland ranch.

Defence lawyer Thomas Mesereau produced an interview Star gave to sheriff’s deputies in which he said he was lying on a couch pretending to be asleep when he witnessed the second molestation.

“I was pretending like I was sleeping. I was in his couch, the little couch,” Mr Mesereau quoted from a transcript.

Mr Mesereau asked Star whether his account of the second molestation had changed.

“It was actually three times,” Star replied from the witness box in the court in Santa Maria, California.

Mr Mesereau also asked him about what exactly Jackson was doing to his brother, Gavin, in the second incident.

“I was nervous when I did the interview,” said Star.

“So because you were nervous you didn’t get the facts right,” the lawyer asked. “Yes,” the boy said.

On Tuesday, Mr Mesereau produced a transcript of grand jury testimony by a psychologist who interviewed Star and reported yet another description of the second molestation with fundamentally different physical details.

Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting the then 13-year-old cancer survivor Gavin Arvizo at Neverland in 2003, giving him alcohol and conspiring to hold the boy’s family captive to get them to rebut a damaging TV documentary.