One-degree of separation from Michael Jackson

It's happened again. For the fourth time this week, I have a direct connection to a major news event, making me feel like, instead of 6 degrees of separation, it's more like 1.

I have been watching since last weekend  the demonstrations and violence filling some of the same streets I drove and walked on in Tehran, Iran, where I lived 30 years ago during the run-up to and outbreak of the Islamic Revolution.

On Monday, came news of the fatal collision on Washington D.C.'s Metrorail Red Line. I had been riding on that very line just a couple of weeks earlier during a visit there, as I had 25 years ago when I worked in D.C. as a Congressional intern.

On Tuesday, there was Chris Brown entering the Los Angeles court where I used to work and is the site of countless celebrity cases. At least Brown's domestic-violence case didn't end up being another media spectacle like the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial. (Read behind-the-scenes media craziness and longterm impact of that trial in my book "Anatomy of a Trial" www.anatomyofatrial.com.)

Yesterday, it was Michael Jackson.

I recall three encounters involving him in the past couple of decades, including his 2005 child-molestation trial in Santa Maria, California. The first was 12 years before that. The occasion was a hearing for a lawsuit filed against him on behalf of a young teen who claimed Jackson had molested him. (The case settled out of court for a reported $20 million.) The crowd that gathered at the courthouse in Santa Monica for that 1993 proceeding dwarfed those that swarmed the Simi Valley courthouse for the Rodney King-beating trial little over a year earlier.

A year or so after Simpson's '95 trial, a Santa Barbara County judge asked me to help him prepare for a civil trial he was presiding over in which Jackson had been sued.

Santa Barbara County was the scene again in 2005. By then, I was living here in South Milwaukee. My consulting on that trial involved a couple of trips to the Santa Maria courthouse in northern SB County. I discussed the pros and cons of courtroom camera coverage and other media-related issues with the judge, was in the courthouse entrance as Jackson arrived for a pretrial hearing, sat in the courtroom a few feet away from him during that and other proceedings, watched the estimated 2,000 fans scream in adulation at him and press against a chainlink fence security had put up to hold them back as Jackson entered and left. I watched him walk out to the street in front of the courthouse, jump up on top of his SUV parked out there where he waved to and danced for his fans.

I'm hoping all the TV coverage, email traffic -- one from an Associated Press-reporter friend who covered the Jackson, Simpson and countless other celebrity and high-profile trials who said she's in shock -- Facebook chatter and Twitter tweets will soon subside so I can get back to scraping and repainting the trim on my house.  

www.anatomyofatrial.com