Stop the Jackson Trial...

Here's a nice piece on Fox News about how ludicrous the Michael Jackson trial has become.

The Santa Barbara District Attorney's office is now potentially guilty of exploiting a disturbed woman's condition to get a conviction. It's wrong, and it's not going to achieve anything but tarnishing the reputations of their well-intentioned staff.

The testimony on Friday of Janet Arvizo, mother of Michael Jackson's teenage accuser, was alternately maddening and heart breaking. She came across on the stand during her cross-examination by Thomas Mesereau as a compulsive and pathological liar, a shrewd manipulator and a real operator.

But she was also quite sad, and unable to control her emotions. At one point she declared in an aside, "I now know that Neverland is a place for booze, pornography, and sex with little boys." The statement was immediately stricken from the record.

In fact, Arvizo may have really alienated an already shell-shocked jury. Mesereau played a video made by Jackson's associates in February 2003 in which Arvizo and her three children sang the pop star's praises as a father figure. Arvizo's appearance in the video was in stark contrast to the woman on the stand. In the film she is glamorous, with a winning smile and laugh. She resembles a darker complected version of Meg Ryan.

But the woman on the stand now, who had to take questions every few minutes, is about 25 pounds heavier and stripped of her bubbly determination. Two years and two different people. It was startling.

Then again, neither of these two Janet Arvizos resembles the one on a police interview tape leaked to a TV show last winter. That makes three Janets, and there are probably more to come.

The Janet Arvizo who testified on Friday was close to the one described to me a year ago, and about whom I've been reporting on since then. She was feisty and obnoxious, manipulative and cunning.

She did not shrink from fights with Mesereau. She often addressed the jury directly instead of answering Mesereau's questions, and didn't seem to care how Judge Rodney Melville instructed her. Her hubris was her undoing, and it was magnificent and tragic.

She had sharp recollections of things that interested her and no memories of dates, times, or places that could undermine her case. She couldn't recall, for example, how much money her children or ex-husband received in their settlement from JC Penney. She also could not remember how she met a Los Angeles police officer, how they became friends, or if he once gave her a ride in his car.

She couldn't remember how many times she'd discussed the current case with her lawyer, Larry Feldman, the same man who secured a $20 million settlement for another Jackson accuser in 1993.

Building on a theme she started Thursday concerning Jackson's group as "masters of choreography," Arvizo nearly stopped court entirely when Mesereau brought up a visit she made to a Los Olivos salon while staying at Neverland.

First they tussled over whether she received a "body wax" or a "leg wax." She insisted it was the latter, and also claimed she'd paid for it. That was a mistake. Mesereau, of course, had the receipt for $140, which showed multiple beauty treatments including leg, bikini and lip waxing, and a manicure. "Do you want to see the receipt?" Mesereau offered.

Arvizo refused, claiming that he'd somehow changed it. It was another example of what she termed the Jackson team's masterful "choreography."

"Who paid for it?" Mesereau demanded. Arvizo refused to answer several times, finally claiming: "I don't know." She also said it was all a plot to enhance Jackson's P.R.

There was more. It seemed endless, and painful. Mesereau walked her through the "rebuttal video," an interview with her and her three children that wasn't finished in time to be included in a Jackson TV special. Even though all four members of the family seem relaxed and spontaneous, Arvizo insisted over and over again it was scripted.

When this position became ludicrous to maintain, she refused to back down. Instead, she embellished the story. "Dieter [Wiesner] worked with me on it ten times a day so I could memorize the lines. I was acting!" she declared continuously, speaking of Jackson's former manager.

Wiesner, she said, wrote every word of it, despite the fact that he's German, has a poor command of English, and had no contact with Arvizo — by her admission — after about a week.

There wasn't a single person in the room who believed her.