By Roger Friedman

Michael Jackson is running an annual deficit of about $30 million a year. Not only that: his ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, and her former attorney, Iris Finsilver, have been accused by Jackson’s attorneys of working “undercover” with the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s office during their prosecution of Jackson on child molestation charges.

Those are just two of the revelations in a stack of papers finally made publicly available in the ongoing child custody case between Rowe and Jackson, who were married for three years and had two children, Prince and Paris.

The papers go on and on, stacks of them, and show a long and contentious battle that started soon after Rowe and Jackson were divorced in 2000.

The papers had been sealed when the former couple was using a private judge to help them through their case. But Judge Stephen Lachs was forced to recuse himself from the case last December when Jackson’s attorney accused him of being biased against Jackson. That seems like it was a major tactical error as it helped push the case into a public forum.

Much of the proceedings have been dry, but some of them prove pretty wild. Unknown until now, for example: a July 2005 settlement negotiation between Jackson and Rowe almost netted Rowe $4 million in exchange for seeing her kids once a year and giving up most other rights.

She was ready to sign the papers, until Jackson’s lawyers sneaked in a provision by which she would lose her parental rights for good. The plan fell apart, and Rowe subsequently had all her rights restored by an appeals judge.

The settlement offer, however, produced a letter from Jackson’s attorney, Thomas Montague Hall, that makes for alarming reading. On July 20, 2005, he wrote to Finsilver: “Penal Code 273 makes it a serious crime to take money in exchange for giving up a child. We need to be very careful to make sure that no one can say Debbie gave up the children in exchange for money. Debbie certainly doesn’t want any criminal exposure and I’m sure she does not want to create any risks for Michael. She certainly knows that are people who would love to try and prosecute him for any such action. So we have to avoid giving them the chance.”

Hall continues: “My suggestion is that we put language into the stipulation which clarifies what the money to Debbie is for. My suggestion is that we include some recital about Debbie incurring emotional distress, loss of privacy, and actual legal expense as a result of being dragged unwillingly into the [child molestation] case…Such recitals could separate the money from the children.”

Rowe, according to the papers, has already received approximately $11 million from Jackson as well as a house in Beverly Hills that she subsequently sold.

Jackson - claiming that his ex violated their original confidentiality agreement - cut off her spousal payments in October 2003 after Rowe gave a TV interview about her horse-raising business. The unpaid money, roughly $1.6 million, sits in an escrow account until the case is resolved.

In the end, though, it’s unclear where Jackson would have gotten $4 million for Rowe in July 2005. Nearly a year later, in May 2006, his accountant gave a secret affidavit in the custody case claiming that his client’s finances were in shambles and put Jackson in the red to the tune of $2.3 million a month. The conclusion offered was that even Jackson’s recent refinancing hadn’t helped the situation.

But the voluminous papers are even more revelatory. For one thing, it was only said that Judge Lachs had been hired in 2003 by Jackson and Rowe to deal with their issues. In fact, he’d been on the job since 2000, trying to sort out the miserable state of their affairs.

The papers also show a continued level of high-pitched enmity between Finsilver - whom Rowe dismissed earlier this year - and Jackson’s attorneys Hall and Michael Abrams.

Their letters are filled with accusations, bile and of lots of capital letters and underlining, indicating personal squabbles and petty vendettas on both sides that would make even the most contentious divorce adversaries blush.

Hall, for example, accuses Finsilver of listening in on phone conversations between Jackson and Rowe, and then counseling Jackson without his attorney’s knowledge. Finsilver responds that Hall has done everything he can to undo settlement negotiations and was not informing Jackson of the status of his case.

But one of the glaring errors of the case was the ouster of Lachs, who no doubt was thrilled to see an exit sign after five years of bickering.

In all that time, for example, he’d never even seen Jackson in court. The singer had managed to avoid the entire proceedings. In April 2005, Lachs told the parties: “It is though we are treated in this case as though he [Jackson] doesn’t exist.”

Source: FOX News

Category: General