Jacko Accuser's Family Has History of Charity

Michael Jackson

Jacko Accuser's Family Has History of Charity

The mother of Michael Jackson's teenage accuser — let's call her Janet X — received monetary donations, Christmas gifts and school supplies from members of the Los Angeles Police Department in the late fall of 2001, according to a published story just discovered from that time.

On Dec. 21, 2001, a newsletter published by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles reported how three generous cops and a whole police station chipped in to help Janet X and her children.

The family, pleading poverty, received a Christmas tree, ornaments, gifts and at least $200 in cash from the Hollenbeck station house of the LAPD, the newsletter reported. The story, called “Chance Encounters with Cops Lead to Merry Christmas for L.A. Family,” was written by editor Bill Heard.

The two officers, along with Sgt. Eric Windham of the Hollenbeck division, were photographed for the newsletter standing in front of an ornamented Christmas tree as a reward for their generosity.

According to the newsletter story, this happened between October and December 2001, a year and several months after the family met Jackson and other celebrities through a summer camp program, received massive amounts of monetary assistance from them and was already being treated to the good life.

This column has already reported that by early 2001, the family became such good friends with people like movie director Brett Ratner and comedian Chris Tucker that it got to hang out on the set of the film "Rush Hour 2."

(Ratner told this column how Jackson's accuser quickly took advantage of the privileges extended to him, including refusing to vacate Ratner's director's chair on the set.)

In the MTA newsletter, Heard's story recounts how Janet X's kids were first spotted by the cops in Los Angeles' Union Station "on the same day she was having surgery." The two boys were said to be hanging around the station and crying. No reason is given for why they weren't in school.

According to the MTA newsletter, this meeting initiated a series of charitable acts on behalf of the cops, who were immediately told that the boy (who would eventually become Jackson's accuser) had had cancer but was in remission. The boy quickly showed them his scar from cancer surgery.

Strangely, the two boys' ages were reversed in the story, making Jackson's eventual accuser the younger of the two. A source tells me the mother often changed the boys' ages depending on how it would play to her advantage.

The cops — Edward Moreno and Diane Reyes — told Heard they came across Janet X six weeks later, making her way through the same subway station on crutches. She told them she was going to a job interview.

The kindhearted cops, wanting to do something for the family, went to their apartment and found a Christmas tree that had already been donated by other cops. The two officers then spent their own money to buy gifts and ornaments for the family, and proceeded to raise $200 more for them at their station house. They even bought the kids school supplies, according to Heard's story.

Heard's report does not indicate whether any of the police officers involved knew that the family was already being cared for by a phalanx of celebrities, or that the cancer-suffering boy had already been the beneficiary of an earlier fundraiser at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood.

The family had also been featured in the Mid Valley News, a newspaper in El Monte, Calif., a year earlier. A story in that newspaper documented the family's impoverished state and the boy's illness. That story also yielded funds that were donated to the family.