Paul Gongaware testified on Friday that he never saw indications that Michael used drugs or travelled with a doctor when he managed that tour in 1996 and 1997.
What Gongaware knew -- or didn't know -- about Michael's drug use is a key issue in this case,
Gongaware, under questioning by his own lawyer Friday, testified that he only became aware that Michael was addicted to painkillers when the singer made a public announcement after his "Dangerous" tour abruptly ended, so he could enter rehab in 1993.
He was a manager for the "Dangerous" tour, but only handled logistics and didn't travel with Michael then, he said.
His job on the second half of the "HIStory" tour, however, carried more responsibilities and he worked closely with Michael, he said.
Gongaware testified that he saw "no indication at all" that Michael was using drugs during that tour. "I would be certain to notice it if that was the case."
Did Michael have a doctor treating him during the "HIStory" tour, his lawyer asked.
"Not that I know of," he answered.
In fact, Michael was "sensational" on stage, performing 10 to 12 shows a month, he said. Unlike in the "Dangerous" tour, he never cancelled a show because of his health.
"He only missed one," he said. "That was when Princess Diana died. He heard about the accident, went to bed, woke up, found she passed away and it affected him deeply."
But an interview that Michael gave to Barbara Walters weeks after Diana's death could help Jackson lawyers refute Gongaware's claim that no doctor traveled with the singer during the tour.
Walters asked Michael about how he learned the news that his friend, the Princess, had died.
"I woke up and my doctor gave me the news, and I fell back down in grief and I started to cry," Jackson said. "That's why the inner pain, the pain in my stomach and in my chest, so I said 'I cannot handle this. It's too much.'"
Michael's statement that a doctor was at his bedside when he woke up the day of a scheduled "HIStory" show in Belgium is not the only evidence he did have a physician on the tour.
Dr. Neil Ratner, an anesthesiologist from New York, has acknowledged that he traveled with Michael during part of the tour. He was at Munich, Germany, in July 1997 when a stage collapsed and Michael suffered a back injury. It was two months before Diana's death.
Dr. Ratner declined to talk about his treatment of Michael when CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta confronted him outside his Woodstock, New York, home in July 2009, although he did confirm that Michael had trouble sleeping.
"It's really something I don't want to talk about right now," he told Dr. Gupta.
A source who was close to Michael Jackson told Gupta in 2009 that when Michael had trouble sleeping that Dr. Ratner helped "take him down" and "bring him back up."
Ratner, who was convicted of insurance fraud and stripped of his license to practice medicine for three years in 2002, is on the witness list for the trial and has been questioned in a deposition by each side.
Debbie Rowe will testify that she assisted in administering Propofol to Michael in the 1990s when she was a nurse, AEG Live's Putnam said on the opening day of the trial.
"She saw several doctors put Mr. Jackson to sleep in hotel rooms while on tour," Putnam said, including in Munich, London, Paris.
But Gongaware and others did not know, he said.
"The truth is Mr. Jackson fooled everyone," Putnam said about Michael's Propofol use. "He kept those who might have helped him at a distance and no one knew his deepest, darkest secret."
Michael's ability to keep his private side private meant AEG executives could not see any red flags warning of Michael's destruction, Putnam said.
"They didn't see this coming," he said. "They had no idea."
Putnam said Jackson family members, including Janet and her famous siblings, will testify about their failed attempts at intervention and their lack of knowledge about what was happening.
"If they didn't know what was going on, how could someone else think there was even a problem," he said.
But Jackson lawyers will argue that Gongaware, who closely watched expenses on the "HIStory" tour because it was losing money at one point, would have noticed spending on hotel rooms and fees for a doctor traveling with the tour.
Trouble is Putnam, someone else DID think that there was a problem In fact SIX people by my count - see my post here. They knew, they brought it to AEG's attention, they even suggested a psychiatrist for Michael, but AEG decided that it was all an over exaggeration and ignored the advice. Now AEG are using the excuse of poor memory, and denial to defend themselves. This, my friends, is how corporations defend their actions these days, and I am not just talking about big cases like this one.
The family also knew something was wrong. They may not have known what exactly, but they would have had a pretty good idea it wasn't good for Michael.
FOOTNOTE:
As I write this, Michael's beautiful daughter Paris is recovering in hospital after an attempted suicide.
We don't know today what triggered this episode, all we know is that she was unhappy for a while and has a lot going on in her life. She is Michael's daughter, so I am really worried about her.
I don't know if this trial played any part in her unhappiness, but I can say that even for myself, someone who never met Michael, the information coming out is particularly difficult to cope with.
I have had to give myself some time off from blogging about it, because it has been very painful to follow. And very depressing.
I can't imagine what it must be like for his children.
"You aren't going to kill the artist, are you?" Michael Jackson purportedly asked producers after viewing and "endorsing" a test of the combustible special effects, a production manager recalled in a June 19, 2009, email revealed in court.
Concert production manager John "Bugsy" Houghdahl relayed the quote to his boss Randy Phillips, the CEO of concert giant AEG Live, as part of an explanation of the singer's sick and disoriented demeanor at the June 19 rehearsal in Los Angeles.
Houghdahl said he assumed the comment was a passing reference to the pyrotechnics, but he also said show director Kenny Ortega later observed Michael acting like "a basket case."
"Kenny said (Jackson) was shaking and couldn't hold his knife and fork. Kenny had to cut his food for him before he could eat, and then had to use his fingers," Houghdahl wrote in the email. "I don't know how much embellishment there is to this, but (Kenny) said repeatedly that MJ was in no shape to go on stage." (Houghdahl is referring to June 19, not the whole rehearsal period).
Katherine's lawyer Brian Panish said outside court that he thought the Houghdahl email showed Michael was shaken by the pyrotechnic display after having suffered serious burns from an explosion on the set of a 1984 Pepsi commercial.
A lawyer for AEG said that wasn't the case.
"It may seem chilling in retrospect, but (Houghdahl) believed (Michael) was making a joke at the time. Michael Jackson wasn't afraid of the pyrotechnics. He wanted them," AEG lawyer Marvin Putnam told the News.
Panish needled Gongaware repeatedly on Wednesday, asking what steps AEG took to address Ortega's concerns, and why some messages about Michael's meltdown were sent by Phillips to his personal email address, not his business account.
Gongaware said he didn't know why Phillips used different email addresses for him but that he believed everyone wanted what was best for Michael.
"The artist's health is the most important thing, I agree with that," Gongaware testified Wednesday. "The artist is the most important thing."
Gongaware also told the court he wasn't worried about Jackson getting adequate health care.
An email from "This Is It" concert documentary director Kenny Ortega about Michael being late or absent for rehearsals. Gongaware responds with a request for a face-to-face meeting with Michael's doctor, Conrad Murray.
"We want to remind him that it is AEG, not MJ, who is paying his salary. We want him to understand what is expected of him," Gongaware says in the email.
The statement is evidence that AEG hired Murray, according to the plaintiffs. It is the centrepiece of their lawsuit.
For 30 minutes Gongaware rebuffed questions about that email. Repeatedly, he testified, "I don't know"; "I don't remember writing it." His only concession was, "I was going through hundreds of emails. If I knew lawyers would be picking apart everything, I would have been more careful."
Further emails show that as the opening of "This Is It" drew near, Ortega writes that Michael needs nourishment, physical therapy. "We have 20 days, we can't let him slip."
Gongaware responds: "We're on it."
Ortega says, "Super, not a minute too soon."
Days later another email was headlined "Trouble on the front." It warned Gongaware that "We might be getting beyond damage control here."
Yet on the stand Gongaware testified that no physical therapist or nutritionist was ever hired. He said he thought Ortega was exaggerating Michael's health concerns.
He said Michael didn't like to rehearse, that previously Michael didn't rehearse before the "HIStory" tour either. But when the lights went up, Michael was "on," he stated.
AEG's position is that Michel did not die from poor health or pressure -- rather that it was Dr. Murray's decision to secretly administer an intravenous sedative. AEG says in court documents that Murray's conduct was not foreseeable.
Paul Gongaware also testified his only role in Murray's contract was negotiating the price of Murray's services in compliance with what Michael asked him to do.
Gongaware said that neither he nor anyone at the entertainment giant investigated Murray's background or credentials.
"The fact that he had been Michael Jackson's personal physician for three years was good enough for me," Gongaware said.
Who told him that? I was aware that Murray had helped Michael's children in Las Vegas a few years before, but does that make him Michael's personal physician?
Asked if he knew that Murray was in financial difficulties when he took the job as tour doctor, Gongaware answered no.
He said that Murray initially asked for $5 million to travel to London with Michael and tend to him during the tour.
"I just told him it wasn't going to happen," he said, recalling that Michael then suggested offering him $150,000 a month.
"Michael Jackson insisted on it and recommended him and it was not for me to tell him no," said Gongaware, who is a defendant in the multibillion-dollar lawsuit.
"I wanted to provide what was necessary for him to do his job...He wanted a doctor and I wanted him to be healthy."
Even after the offer of $150,000, Murray wasn't satisfied.
"He started saying he wanted more and I said, 'The offer is coming directly from the artist," Gongaware said.
Minutes later, he said Murray accepted.
"Did that seem desperate to you?" asked Panish.
"No," said Gongaware. "He just accepted Michael's offer."
Gongaware often pleaded poor memory of events. He said he may have met with Michael as many as 10 times, but could remember only two of the meetings and only one when Murray was present.
Really, is this how people wriggle out of their responsibilities these days, by claiming poor memory?
Prodded by Panish, he remembered a meeting at which Michael arrived late from a doctor's appointment and had slurred speech.
"He was a bit off," he said, "that was the only time I saw him like that."
At the heart of the case is who hired Murray. At first, Gongaware insisted he did no negotiating with Murray, but, confronted with emails and his previous testimony, he changed his position and said, "The only thing I did with Dr. Murray was negotiate a price."
He indicated that he was so shocked by Murray's demand that he consulted a doctor friend to see what he would charge for the same job. The other doctor said he would have gone on tour for $10,000 a week.
"Did you ever convey that to Michael Jackson?" asked Panish. "I don't recall," said Gongaware whose testimony was peppered with that phrase.
AEG Live co-CEO Paul Gongaware, whose career as a concert promoter started with Elvis Presley's last tour, testified on Tuesday about Michael Jackson's final days.
"I was working on the Elvis tour when he died so I kind of knew what to expect," Gongaware wrote in an e-mail to a friend two weeks after Michael died. "Still quite a shock."
Gongaware, who was one of the top producers of Michael's comeback concerts, is expected to be on the witness stand for several days in the fifth week of the Michael Jackson wrongful death trial.
AEG lawyers contend that Michael Jackson chose, hired and supervised Murray, and that his bad decisions were fuelled by a drug addiction their executives had no way of knowing about.
Brian Panish questioned Gongaware about his knowledge of drug use during concert tours. He should have been able to recognize red flags signalling Michael's drug use because of his experience with Presley, and his time as Michael's tour manager in the 1990s, the Jacksons contend.
This is something I also thought, because this man had worked with Michael on the 'Dangerous' tour, which had to be cancelled because Michael went into rehab. I didn't know until this week that Gongaware also worked for Presley on HIS last tour, before Presley overdosed.
"I kind of knew what was going to happen, yes," Gongaware testified. Panish then showed jurors the e-mail in which he made a similar statement.
When Gongaware was managing Michael's 1993 'Dangerous Tour', he warned the tour doctor "Don't be a Dr. Nick" -- a reference to Presley's last physician -- the doctor testified in a deposition.
"Dr. Nick was the doctor whose over prescription of drugs to Elvis had led to Elvis' death," according to a court filing by lawyers for the Jackson family.
Presley collapsed in the bathroom of his Memphis, Tennessee, mansion -- Graceland -- on August 16, 1977, at age 42. While his death was ruled the result of an irregular heartbeat, the autopsy report was sealed amid accusations that the abuse of prescription drugs caused the problem.
"Dr. Nick" -- Dr. George Nichopoulos -- said later he was treating Presley for insomnia. He was charged with overprescribing drugs to Presley, but he was acquitted. He later lost his medical license in another case.
Gongaware was with Presley's manager Col. Tom Parker when he first met Michael in Las Vegas, he testified.
The Jackson lawyers are using Gongaware's Elvis and "Dr. Nick" reference to argue that "AEG knew Jackson had suffered chronic substance abuse and drug dependency problems for many years."
"Shortly after he joined the 'Dangerous' tour in 1993, Dr. Finkelstein was asked to treat Jackson for pain," the Jackson filing said, referring to Dr. Stuart Finkelstein, a doctor on the 1993 tour.
"Having observed signs of opiate addiction in Jackson, Dr. Finkelstein nonetheless administered Demerol by injection, and administered morphine intravenously in Jackson's Bangkok hotel room for 24 hours."
After that, Finkelstein told Gongaware "he thought Jackson had an opiate dependency problem," the filing said.
"For three and a half months, the 'Dangerous' tour continued," it said. "Another doctor attended Jackson regularly, on one occasion breaking into Dr. Finkelstein's bag to get opiates to administer to Jackson. Gongaware was there the whole time, in charge of tour logistics, aware of the various physicians present, and he discussed with Dr. Finkelstein Jackson's opiate problem."
Seriously? A doctor broke into another doctor's bag in order to get opiates? Obviously there is nothing some of these doctors won't do.
When Gongaware warned Dr. Finkelstein, whom the brief described as his "close friend," not to become Jackson's "Dr. Nick," he was "warning me, you know, don't get all infatuated where you start administering meds to a rock star and have the rock star overdose and die on you," Dr. Finkelstein testified.
Despite working as a tour promoter for 37 years -- including for Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead and many others -- Gongaware testified that the only artist he ever knew that was using drug on tour was Rick James.
Gongaware is currently the tour manager for the Rolling Stones North American tour.
Jurors were shown several e-mails from Gongaware that Jackson lawyers suggested were evidence that AEG Live deliberately misled Michael about how much money he would make from his comeback concerts and how many days he would have to rest between shows.
Gongaware wrote to his boss, AEG Live President Randy Phillips, that they should present gross ticket sales numbers to Michael, not the percentage of the net profits, during contract talks. "Maybe gross is a better number to throw around if we use numbers with Mikey listening," his e-mail said.
He sent an e-mail to his assistant in March 2009 suggesting that she design a concert calendar for Michael using light tan colors for show dates, while drawing attention to his rest days.
"I don't want the shows to stand out so much when MJ looks at it. Less contrast between work and off. Maybe off days in a contrasting soft color. Put 'OFF' in each off day after July 8, as well. Figure it out so it looks like he's not working so much."
Under questioning Tuesday, Gongaware said he "wasn't trying to fool him. I wanted to present it in the best possible light."
Hmm. Yeah OK. You're not convincing me Gongaware!
Gongaware is also a key witness because he wrote what Jackson's lawyers call the "smoking gun" e-mail which they argue shows AEG Live executives used Murray's fear of losing his lucrative job as Michael's personal physician to pressure him to have Michael ready for rehearsals despite his fragile health.
Gongaware's e-mail to show director Kenny Ortega, sent 11 days before Michael's death, addressed concerns that Murray had kept Michael from a rehearsal the day before:
"We want to remind (Murray) that it is AEG, not MJ, who is paying his salary. We want to remind him what is expected of him." Gongaware, in a video deposition played in court on the first day of the trial, said he could not remember writing the e-mail. How convenient.
"They put Dr. Murray in a position where if he said Michael can't go or can't play, if he said I can't give you those drugs, then he doesn't get paid," Jackson lawyer Brian Panish told jurors in his opening statements.
AEG lawyer Marvin Putnam said in his opening statement that Gongaware and other AEG executives had no way of knowing about Michael's use of propofol to sleep.
"AEG knew nothing about this decade-long propofol use," Putnam said. "They were a concert promoter. How could they know?"
Decade-long? Is there any proof that Michael had used propofol for decade? We know he used it in 1993 and 2009, but that does not prove he used it over a whole decade.
Gongaware will also face questions about an e-mail in which he seemed to question Michael's commitment to his "This Is It" tour.
"We cannot be forced into stopping this, which MJ will try to do because he is lazy and constantly changes his mind to fit his immediate wants," he wrote to AEG's Phillips.
Michael's makeup artist Karen Faye testified earlier abut an incident in which Gongaware became frustrated because Michael locked himself in a bathroom at his home, refusing to leave for rehearsals at the Forum. Gongaware was "angry and kind of desperate to get Michael to the Forum," Faye said.
She overheard Gongaware screaming on the phone at Michael's security guard, telling him "to get him out of the bathroom. Do you have a key? Do whatever it takes."
Jackson lawyers are also expected to ask Gongaware about e-mails he received that raised questions about Michael's health in the last weeks of his life.
"This Is It" production director John "Bugzee" Houghdahl wrote to him on June 19, 2009 -- six days before Michael died -- "I have watched him deteriorate in front of my eyes over the last 8 weeks. He was able to do multiple 360 spins back in April. He'd fall on his ass if he tried now."
Houghdahl's e-mail, titled "trouble at the Front" was written after Ortega sent Michael home from a rehearsal because of his strange behaviour.
"He was a basket case and Kenny was concerned he would embarrass himself on stage, or worse yet -- get hurt," Houghdahl wrote. "The company is rehearsing right now, but the DOUBT is pervasive."
I suppose Gongaware 'forgot' about this email as well? Is this how everyone avoids the truth these days?
UPDATED:
In an email that was sent on March 25, 2009, Randy Phillips said
"We need to pull the plug now. I will explain."
Gongaware denied that the email was a reference to calling off Michael's "This Is It" concerts in London but instead was pointed at "pulling the plug on Karen Faye," the singer's hairstylist, makeup artist and longtime friend who had expressed fears about Michael's poor health.
So by 25th March, 20 days after Michael had announced 'This Is It" concerts in London, Karen Faye was already expressing concerns about Michael's health. "We never talked about pulling the plug on the Michael Jackson tour, not that I recall.” said Gongaware, co-chief executive of AEG Live's touring division.
Faye testified earlier in the trial that she told tour director Kenny Ortega in June that she was worried Michael would die.
In another March 25, 2009, email, Ortega wrote Gongaware that it was Faye's "strong opinion that this is dangerous and impractical with consideration to MJ's health and ability to perform."
So they were aware 3 months beforehand, that Michael may not be fit for the tour. Yet still they were using strong-arm tactics against Michael, to get his to rehearsal.
In September 2012, emails written by Kenny Ortega and Randy Phillips, discussing Michael Jackson's health came to light - see Los Angeles Times. For those of you that are not aware, Lloyds of London insured Michael for the 'This Is It' shows, and Lloyds of London have a lawsuit out which contends that AEG Live hid Michael's health problems from them. They had asked for Michael's medical records for the 5 years preceding 2009, but never received them, Murray said Michael refused to hand them over to him.The emails have been collected by Lloyds of London for their lawsuit.
When I first heard that Michael had died of a possible overdose (initially it was reported it may have been a Demerol overdose), one of the first things that crossed my mind was :
'Michael must have been in the last few weeks of rehearsal for the shows. He must have been onstage every day with dancers, musicians, choreographers, lighting crew etc.etc. Why didn't anyone notice that there was something wrong?'
I later found out that several people working on 'This Is It' had worked with Michael on previous shows, so they must know how he behaved during rehearsals and performances. This included Kenny Ortega and Travis Payne, the show's director and choreographer, as well as Paula Gongaware, who was now working for AEG.
These emails reveal that problems were apparent as early as March 2009, when Michael went to London to announce the 'This Is It' shows. According to the emails :
"MJ is locked in his room drunk and despondent," Phillips wrote in a March 5, 2009, e-mail to AEG Live's parent company. "I (am) trying to sober him up."
In March 2009, Michael had yet to hire Conrad Murray as his personal doctor, and as far as we know, Propofol was not being administered to him at this time. He passed a health test for Lloyds of London the same month, having been tested by Dr Slavit in January, and in this month he also asked nurse Cherilynn Lee to advise him on nutrition. She administered a vitamin cocktail to Michael several times in March, because he was experiencing a lack of energy and she also advises him on how to beat insomnia. Michael started rehearsals at Centerstaging at the end of March.
So it seemed that nothing is too seriously wrong with Michael at this point, and you could just put the problems of 5th March down to fear and nerves. In a previous post, This Time Around I cover corporate bullying, but what I haven't mentioned is the physical impact it can have on an individual, and how it can cause stress, fear and loss of confidence. I think that this is what Michael was experiencing, although I doubt anyone knew it at the time.
On 4th April 2009, Michael and Kenny Ortega flew to Las Vegas, with Conrad Murray. It is in Vegas that Murray first witnesses Michael being administered Propofol by another doctor, and by April 6, Murray is ordering Propofol by the box. He could be ordering the Propofol for another patient, but by then he was unofficially working for Michael, and he has since admitted that he administered Propofol for about 2 months by 25 June. So that means he started administering in April. At this point Murray's contract was not drawn up, and it wasn't written on paper until May 15, so technically Murray could have walked away from working for Michael at any point, up until the contract was signed by himself and Michael ( and it was never signed by Michael). His claim that he was 'entrapped' by Michael just makes him appear even more of a liar.
During May, Michael was still rehearsing at Centerstaging, and he took part in selecting dancers for his shows. The rehearsal room at Centerstaging was only just large enough to take the size of the 'This is It' stage, and I imagine it was here that the finer details of the music and choreography were thrashed out by the musicians and chorepgraphers, before the show was rehearsed in a larger theatre.
May 20th is the date that the first week of 'This Is it' shows were moved from 2009 into 2010. It is also the date of the video at the top of this Blog. By this time, Michael was being given Propofol 5 nights a week by Murray for over a month. At the time of writing, there is no anecdotal evidence or emails to show that Michael was unwell during May. However, more evidence may emerge as the lawsuit progresses. When the shows were moved to 2010, there was a lot of speculation in the media that this had been done because Michael was ill. Since January 2009 there had been various wildly speculative articles saying that Michael had a rare lung disease or skin cancer. In the video above, Ortega and Phillips are attempting to reassure people that the shows were not postponed for health reasons, but merely because of staging technicalities. As I write I am not clear how much interaction Ortega or Phillips had with Michael at this point in the rehearsals. We shall see.
The problems seem to escalate in June.
May 30, and the rehearsals moved to The Forum. From June 1 to 11, Michael was in Culver City to film the Dome Project, which is the HD footage to be shown during each concert. Some fans visited Michael on set June 11, and said that he was like a skeleton. By June 12, fans report that Michael does not want to go onstage, and security starts taking extreme measures against the fans who are waiting outside the Carolwood house.
June 14 AEG Live Co-CEO Paul Gongaware wrote an e-mail to show director Kenny Ortega addressing concerns that Murray had kept Jackson from a rehearsal the day before:
"We want to remind (Murray) that it is AEG, not MJ, who is paying his salary. We want to remind him what is expected of him."
June 16 and the fans report that Michael did not go onstage again, and is often groggy when leaving home and after visiting Dr Arnold Klein. The emails leaked to the Los Angeles Times in September 2012, show that :
'Those rehearsing with Jackson began sounding alarms in mid-June, according to the emails, a month before his scheduled debut in London. They complained he missed rehearsals, was slow picking up routines and would have to lip-sync some of his signature numbers.
"MJ is not in shape enough yet to sing this stuff live and dance at the same time," the show's musical director informed supervisors in an email. Jackson missed another week of rehearsals, and when he finally showed up June 19, he was too weak to perform.'
On June 19, Michael was shivering, incoherent, and obsessing. Kenny Ortega sent him home.
He wrote in an e-mail to AEG Live President Randy Phillips:
"It is like there are two people there. One (deep inside) trying to hold on to what he was and still can be and not wanting us to quit him, the other in this weakened and troubled state. I believe we need professional guidance in this matter."
Phillips responded with a glowing endorsement of Murray:
"This doctor is extremely successful (we check everyone out) and does not need this gig so he is totally unbiased and ethical."
This is the point where someone, one of those many people who said they were Michael's 'friend', should have stepped in and said "he's not fit enough to continue". Unfortunately, it seems everybody saw it as someone else's responsibility, and they all seemed to hope that Michael was going to 'pull it out of the bag' at the last minute.
They obviously knew Michael was not fit enough, so how did they expect him to make a miraculous recovery?
I also don't understand how Phillips can say that he checked Murray out - the fans who checked out Murray after 25th June 2009 soon dug up all sorts of money issues that Murray had.
And why wasn't Ortega's suggestion of professional help acted upon?
The next day, June 20th, Kenny, Michael's then manager Frank DiLeo, Murray and Phillips met at Michael's rented Carolwood house. Their attitude was that Michael needed 'tough love' in order to gee him up and get him back to rehearsals. Michael was asked about the missed rehearsals, and alarmingly, Murray answered for Michael and said he was in good health. If I had been at the meeting, I would have been concerned by this - why would the doctor need to respond on behalf of Michael - was Michael at the mercy of the doctor, or were they both trying to cover something up? If I had seen Michael the day before, wrapped in a blanket on a Summer's day, I would not have believed there was nothing wrong. Are showbusiness people in Hollyood so used to turning a blind eye to artists' problems, that they no longer can see when someone is physically unfit to perform? Can they not tell the difference between genuine illness and laziness? After receiving these reassurances, Phillips and co. left the house, seemingly confident that the rehearsals would now get back on track. Unbelievable.
You may ask yourself, why Michael himself did not ask for some time to recover. It may have been because, as a younger performer, he would have been told that the show must go on. I have some personal experience of this as a child attending ballet school. Every year we put on a show at Christmas, and we were told that if anything went wrong onstage, we were to carry on and not let the audience know that there was a problem, and we had to finish the scene and sort out the problem after we left the stage. It was also made clear that if we were unwell and could not go onstage on the day of the show, that we would be letting everyone in the show down, and that an understudy would have to be found which would be a great inconvenience to everybody. People seemed to be angry that you would dare to fall ill, as if you were doing so just to annoy them. Professional dancers will often go onstage when sick, because they fear the consequences of 'letting everyone down'. Most dance companies have a dedicated physiotherapist, who will advise whether dancing with an injury will cause further physical damage or not. Dancers know that injury may end their careers, so they do listen to the physiotherapists advice. It may be that AEG Live thought that this was the kind of service that Murray was performing for Michael, advising him how to stay healthy when he was tired or injured. But most performers are not likely to readily say 'I can't go on tonight'. Especially when, as with Michael, they are solo performers, and there is no one to understudy them! They know that if they do not turn up at rehearsal or for a show, that everyone in the show will be sent home, and a paying audience will have their money refunded.
So if Michael was not going to ask for help, and the big guns running 'This Is It' were washing their hands of responsibility, who was left to help Michael?
Michael may not have realised that he would not be able to cope, when he signed the 'This Is It' contract in January 2009. He hadn't performed a series of concerts for 12 years, but he would have no reason to think he couldn't do it again. Even if he did have doubts, he needed the cash, and from the year 2000 music sales for any artist no longer generated good revenues, so he was forced to do live shows, which had proved to be successful money makers for other artists. He agreed, knowing that doctors had warned him not to tour again, as it would not be good for his health. The doctors knew that Michael often did not eat or drink enough during tours, and he became dehydrated and lost a lot of weight.
Some of the comments that Randy Phillips made about Michael during the 'This Is It' rehearsals, suggest to me that he has no idea of the physical and emotional pressure on a performer. From personal experience, I can assure you that giving an electrifying performance is not only physically but also emotionally draining. Even if Michael was only rehearsing and not performing full out, he was still the only person who could say 'yes, the music is played correctly', or' no, you aren't doing that dance routine correctly', because he wrote nearly all the music and helped create the iconic dance moves. He had to do all that extra work on top of rehearsing his own performance. It's a lot to take on, especially when you know you have to do it, even though it will probably make you ill.
I am sure that once he started rehearsals in April, he would begin to feel the pain of any old injuries, and if he had not recovered from the corporate bullying that I believe he suffered, he could be stressed, fearful and riddled with self-doubt. As a seasoned performer, he would know that this was not the way he should be feeling, and he may have worried that couldn't continue like that. Maybe that is why he was asking for the vitamin injections? Maybe when they did not help, he turned to Propofol, just to get some sleep?
Whatever the reason, the fact remains that by June, he was showing signs of being unwell, and Ortega and Phillips knew it. Phillips seems to think Michael is being lazy, and Ortega saw signs of problems, but didn't follow through and make sure that Michael had professional help.
As well as the Lloyds of London lawsuit, there is also the Jackson family wrongful-death lawsuit, which is going to trial to look at whether AEG Live were negligent in hiring Dr Murray, starting April 2. Let's see what else it reveals.
"There is a triable issue of fact as to whether it was foreseeable that such a physician under strong financial pressure may compromise his Hippocratic Oath and do what was known by AEG Live's executives to be an unfortunate practice in the entertainment industry for financial gain," Superior Court Judge Yvette Palazuelos wrote in her order, which became public on March 1.
"Triable issues of fact exist as to whether it could have been foreseeable that Dr. Murray would engage in the exact behavior alleged here: Dr. Murray's provision of drugs which led to Decedent's death," she said.
