Singer may sue TV company over British reporter Bashir's exposé

AFTER Michael Jackson's acquittal on all charges, the focus of the story may now fall on Martin Bashir, the British journalist whose fly-on-the-wall documentary about the pop superstar's bizarre private life triggered the molestation charges.

According to reports, the pop star has drawn up plans to sue television company Granada, which made the controversial 2003 show fronted by Bashir. The programme became a centrepiece of the star's trial.

Living With Michael Jackson, the ITV1 special in which the singer admitted sleeping in the same bed as young boys, formed key prosecution evidence during the trial and was shown to the jury along with excerpts that were not broadcast.

Jackson, eyeing an opportunity to revive a flagging career, agreed to the film partly because of Bashir's fame as a film-maker who talked to the big names.

The journalist had gained attention for his acclaimed 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, in which she spoke frankly of the break-up of her marriage and her battles with bulimia.

But if the singer thought Living With Michael Jackson would similarly portray him as a sympathetic figure, he was mistaken.

"Martin Bashir persuaded me to trust him that this would be an honest and fair portrayal of my life and that he was the man that turned Diana's life around," Jackson said in a statement.

"I feel more betrayed that someone who had got to know my children, my staff and me, whom I let into my heart and told the truth, could then sacrifice that trust and produce this terrible and unfair programme."

The 2003 documentary made a celebrity of Bashir, 42, and prompted America's ABC network to poach him as a big-name correspondent for its flagship news-magazine programme 20/20 last autumn for a salary said to be about $1 million.

Jackson was shown blowing $6 million on one shopping trip to Las Vegas, and claiming he had only ever undergone two minor plastic surgery procedures.

Bashir defended the making of the programme, for which he spent eight months with the pop star at his Neverland ranch in California. After the 105-minute film was broadcast, Bashir said he was "deeply concerned" about the star's relationship with Gavin Arvizo.

"I don't believe I betrayed Michael Jackson at all. I agreed that we would make an honest film about his life," he has said. "There's been allegations about distortion and misrepresentation and I refute them all. The film was fair to his musical achievement and gave him every opportunity to explain himself."

In fact the interviews in the documentary and out-takes were the only words jurors heard directly from Jackson, who refused to take the stand in his own defence.

Prosecution lawyers made much of his admission that he saw nothing wrong with sharing his bed with children. Jackson's defence team, however, attacked Bashir's motives and ethics when he was called as the trial's first witness, summoned by a subpoena he tried to fight by claiming that California's "shield" laws exempted journalists from testifying about anything they saw while reporting a story.

The out-takes showed Bashir fawning over Jackson's "extraordinary voice" and "fantastic English accent" and claiming his own romantic development was shaped by the star's music.

Thomas Mesereau, the lead defence attorney, brought up a Broadcasting Standards Commission complaint that was upheld against Bashir after a 2001 documentary about a runaway student, and scored direct hits during questioning which was laden with ill-disguised vitriol.

Bashir, by contrast, appeared nervous and uncomfortable in the witness box as he repeatedly refused to answer questions.

"It did harm the case and I don't think the jurors viewed him as objective in any way," said Laurie Levenson, professor at the Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and a former federal prosecutor. "In terms of his reputation, he comes away looking like an opportunist, and if anything had been resting on his credibility, the jurors wouldn't have accepted it."