Michael Jackson Cascio Lawsuit — Hearing This Week Could Seal or Expose Everything

0:30This is Hidden Tillers Live with Tony Brusky and Robin Dree. It's got another topic. The Kaseo family has spent 25 years as Michael Jackson's most credible defenders. They testified it is 2005 criminal trial. They went on Oprah. Frank Kaseo wrote a memoir called My Friend Michael insisting Jackson never harmed anyone. Now all five siblings have filed a federal lawsuit alleging Jackson drugged, essayed and trafficked them, starting when some of them were as young as seven years old. The estate is calling it a $200 million extortion scheme and pointing to a 2019 settlement that Kaseo's already accepted. A judge is set to rule very soon on whether the case goes to public trial or disappears into private arbitration. Former felony prosecutor and criminal defense attorney Eric Fattis is joining me and Robin Drake to break down the legal battle, the credibility questions and what's really at stake when accusers spend decades defending the accused before changing their story.

1:36Eric, welcome. The Kaseo siblings defended Michael Jackson for over 25 years, interviews, testimony, a memoir and they're alleging now that he was a serial predator who trafficked and abused them since childhood from a prosecutor's perspective. How devastating is this in terms of being a credibility problem for them 25 years of sworn statements defending someone, creating an insurmountable obstacle. Does this create an insurmountable obstacle, I guess, for any claim against him? What's your thoughts on the strength of this case that they're bringing against the estate? For any potential criminal charges, it's a complete non-starter that there is just no chance of a defense attorney would eat these folks alive, whether they're telling the truth now, whether they're telling the truth before there is such a discrepancy. There are so many inconsistency, so many contradictory statements. No chance in hell that a criminal prosecution would be successful. In terms of on the civil side, you have a lower burden and you hire experts who would

2:40opine as to, hey, people who are sexually assaulted, they usually don't want to talk about that. In fact, they might come forward and say, hey, this didn't happen and things like that, but still, I just can't imagine any successful lawsuit criminal or civil with that kind of a backdrop. How do you, because you're so right on that, just looking at the stats and the research of these types of things, like you said, the defense would probably say that these things get leaked over time or they've got therapy, but people don't go from zero to 100, hey, everything is completely fine to all of a sudden today, 25 years later, all of us at the same time are saying it was this, so how could, obviously, as you said, on a bigger level, they can't do it, but on a civil level, they might try to do that. What are some of the things that a prosecutor would do to try to overcome that credibility issue? Yeah, in a civil side, plaintiffs counsel who represent the Casios, they, like I said,

3:46they're experts who can talk about latent outcries, who can talk about the evolution of a recollection, they can talk about repressed memories, although that's a controversial topic. Just say, you could talk about the societal pressure, this guy was the biggest, started on a world for a long time, and these people were very close to him, and you have mixed feelings about folks, but when you're close to someone and they wrong you, that sucks and it hurts, but you also might have some other feelings towards them that are favorable, and how do you result those, especially if you're young and aged, when all of this occurs, maybe you don't breach that resolution until much later in life, and they've reached that resolution now. That's the way their attorney could try to stop. Is it helpful or hurtful that all are coming together at the same time? Because that, I think, is the hard part to overcome, but I don't know, I haven't done one in court before, but that seems like a really hard hurdle overcomes all of a sudden

4:48all of this had the same revelation. Is that hard for the prosecution, you think? You know, yes and no, I think for the plaintiffs side, the Casios side, what they're going to say is, hey, it's not one person just coming out and saying, it's not two people, but it's like the whole family, they had this awakening, they had this come to Jesus moment where they were like, hey guys, we've been wrong about this forever, and now is the time to tell the truth. But on the defense side, they're going to say, hey, these folks are looking for a payday, man, this has been going on for decades, they've been saying the exact opposite story. Now they're all coming forward, now they all want millions and millions of dollars, even after they allegedly received a settlement, they're greedy and asking for more, so I think it can be played multiple ways. What's interesting to me on this case is the fact that they're all coming together at the same time and they're all saying, oh, see, we all had this realization, we all got together and started sharing stories.

5:48And look, I mean, these sort of things happen, they happen in families a lot where it's like, oh, you were, you and uncle, so and so, that happened to you too. And sometimes revelations are made in adulthood many years after the abuse, but that's usually after many, many years of quiet and nobody speaking this stuff out loud. The idea that Michael Jackson was doing this to kids is not a new topic, this family is well aware of all of this. They've ensigned a settlement agreement with the Jackson estate in 2019, reportedly $690,000 per sibling per year for five years that included confidentiality, non disparagement and mandatory arbitration clauses. Now they're trying to avoid the agreement claiming it was signed under duress without proper legal counsel. It's a very different dynamic than the situation of family kind of making a realization about

6:49somebody over here and none of this has been talked about. This has been the conversation forever surrounding Michael Jackson. So the idea and them pitching this is, oh, we all just, who would have thought Michael would have done any of these things? I don't know, everybody, everybody and their brother, anybody who was in or close to the Jackson's like you guys were, this would have been the main topic of conversation and has been forever. Again, Robin, I want to throw that to you like behavioral wise, how absurd is it to think that this family just had this, this, this aha moment all simultaneously and they were all holding this back from each other for all these years. And now suddenly gosh, we got to get what we're owed. You know me, you already did the research on all this, completely absurd. So what happens typically is there's a lot of red flags that happen along the way before this. I'm curious about, you know, Eric and, you know, the, the, what they would try to do to prove it. Because first of all, these things don't go from zero to a hundred.

7:51They come from a motion leakage. They come from counseling and it's typically not all people at the same time. Now granted, one person could spur everyone to get counseling to do it, but it doesn't go this way. It is one person or a couple of them decide to get counseling. Then there's reluctance that actually leaks out because they don't want to come forward. I mean, think about this, do the thought experiment. So here's a family that was very, very close. I mean, Michael trusted them. They met through the father that was the manager of the hotel that Michael stayed at and they all became friends and, and Michael traveled with them. I mean, Michael, I mean, this family became Michael's anchor for many, many years and they wrote memoirs. And for, for that flip, it doesn't happen like this. If it's real, it actually comes from a little bit here, a little bit there and it would take 25 years of building of leakage of reluctance and all of a sudden, they have an epiphany. But it didn't go from zero to 100. It was a gradual, like everything in life, it's an arc and this does not have an arc to it at all. Yeah.

8:51I mean, it's, it's just, I'm not saying that Michael Jackson may not have been doing these things. I have no idea. I mean, there certainly is a lot of evidence that Michael Jackson, certainly, and I think it's beyond evidence. Michael Jackson did not understand how to have healthy relationships with other people period and what he, he, his boundaries were beyond gray. Was he doing things to children? I would, you know, I think there's a lot of evidence that points to it. But without actual proof, without, you know, there's not going to be a video. There's not going to be, I mean, who knows, I guess anything's possible, but, you know, the out, actual proof, smoking gun evidence and he's dead and he's been dead for God, almost 20 years now, believe it or not, which I was shocked by the, like, that was almost 20 years ago. You're making that feel really old, Tony. I know. I mean, it's like, it's like we're in 17, 18 years since he died. I know, but it's, without any of that, it's their word against in a state.

9:59How easy of a money grab is it when you're going after in a state and someone that, that can't defend themselves anymore and that is the estate's interest is in, you know, keeping money flowing from whatever exists in the estate and just kind of shutting this sort of stuff down. I mean, is that an easy grab for somebody like this or for a family like this, if this is what the goal is and we don't know, but is that an easy thing to achieve because Michael's dead or are they, are they really kind of counting their chickens before they've hatched? It's not as easy as it might appear on on its face. You know, like you said, there is the circumstance where the accused cannot give their story. They can't say, hey, that's not what happened. I can prove it in this fashion and just decades ago. On the other hand, you know, it's difficult because in these civil claims, you typically want and often need information from the at-faults side.

11:04And so you would depose them and you would try to, you know, identify where they were when these things took place and try to identify corroborating circumstances and evidence and link this all together through that discovery process, but there's not going to be that kind of process, at least with respect to, to a deceit. So you don't have the counter attack from the accuser, but you also don't have access to much of the evidence that you would need to get the thing crossed the finish line. Yeah, Eric, besides their opinions of what they think they were exposed to from Michael, what kind of things is a judge going to be looking for to actually prove it beyond, hey, this is what he did to me. I mean, and what kind of things you think they could actually provide or a, you know, their lawyer would try to provide the judge in jury to actually prove that this happened besides a collective four or five people's opinions. You know, if the casios are able to get out from under this purported settlement agreement,

12:07then the claims would be adjudicated on their merits. But that's big if, you know, I think the judge's probably going to look at this and say, hey, you guys entered into a settlement and you got stupid money for it. And now you just want more money. I'm going to shut this down or at least send it to arbitration to determine if that settlement stands. If it does not stand, then you've got to take this and it's usually to a jury and you've got to convince them of these things happen. What more do you have from something that happened 20, 30 years ago by a person's testimony? You know, it's going to be under oath. It's going to be corroborated by the co-plaintiffs, but like Tony said, probably don't have pictures. You probably don't have photographs. You don't have text. You don't have emails. None of those things even really exist. I don't have the access to my research on this at the second. What's the probability of success in these types of cases that actually works just doing it with no hard physical evidence and just people's opinions? Oh, I think the probability is low, but does it result at some leverage that could result

13:08in some additional compensation short of going to trial? You know, maybe the estate says, hey, this didn't happen. We don't believe you, but it's going to cost millions to go to trial. We'll pay you one million to shut up and go away. I mean, is that the legal play here in so many of these cases where it's like, it's going to cost us more. We're going to win, but it's going to cost us more to do that. So it's more to our advantage of saying, here's some money go away, not because we're admitting guilt, but because it's, it's just, it makes more financial sense to do that. And they know that. Yeah, I mean, especially when you're a high profile person, you'll look at the daddy lawsuits and, you know, some of those, there are credible accusations. Some of those there are not credible accusations of my opinion. Yeah, and so the box that daddy's team is motivated to try to get some resolution on this stuff. And usually when you tend to our financial settlement like from Daddy or the Michael Jackson of state or whatever, you expressly say, we are not admitting any kind of wrongdo. We're, we're simply paying for this to kind of go away.

14:10And those things happen all the time. And it's basically a legalized extortion, because that's how our system makes it work, unfortunately. I mean, one more question on this, because I mean, credibility matters. Certainly, I would think in a case like this, maybe not when we get down to that level of, it's cheaper just to make it go away, but if this were to actually go to court, this family, they have a history of, of lies, fake songs. And that's an interesting thing. Several years back, Michael Jackson posthumously put an album out. And some of the tracks were supposedly recorded in the Casios basement. You may remember this. I remember this when this album came out and people were like, that doesn't sound like Michael. Producers who were on the album have said, yeah, I was bamboozled. They said this was his material. We don't believe it was. Sony has since actually removed the tracks from streaming services, because they believe they were not Michael Jackson either.

15:11But the family argued it forever. No, these are really his tracks. They gave them to the producers to produce and put out as Michael Jackson's work. Turns out that allegedly was all complete bunk. Kind of a big deal. Kind of a big, big lie surrounding Michael Jackson that they're willing to perpetuate as long as the cash keeps coming in. It's part of the record. It's not part of the story of was he doing these things to you inappropriately. But it is part of the record of Michael Jackson and their relationship with him and part of that record shows them lying about him. Here's the thing. Nearly any time you bring a civil claim, especially one like this, you're putting your credibility at issue. And so that opens you up to, hey, have you ever engaged in an act of dishonesty in your life? You know, it has every human being at some point to some degree. Yes. And those acts of dishonesty can be the subject of discovery. You know, it can be the subject of deposition.

16:11Certainly the subject of trial testimony to got that far. So their credibility is going to be central, because that's kind of all they have. All they have is their work. They don't have like corroborating evidence due to whatever circumstances. And when you have some prior fraud, not just any fraud, but fraud against the person whom you're accusing again, that's a bad look, man. It kind of looks like you're just sort of ganging up on this person because you think you can get a payday. And I imagine there's other acts of dishonesty that the defense will allege of these claimants. And yeah, it's already kind of a dicey look. Good, good, it works. Yeah. It's a damning look. It's a dicey look. But at the end of the day, if you can extort somebody for money, that's the American way, isn't it? That seems to be how so many of these things go, unfortunately. Fascinating, continuing chap. I mean, I really wonder how many decades,

17:13how many how many how many centuries are lost? It's going to be continued to be filed against Michael Jackson. When you said the notes last night that were covered in Michael Jackson, I had to double do a double thing. We're talking about Michael Jackson again. It's like, oh my gosh, what's going on here? I'm waiting for it at some point where it's going to be. My father was abused by Michael Jackson and because of that, his parenting, he abused me or something happened in my life, and I'm going to blame it on Michael Jackson as well. I mean, who know? I mean, I mean, and that's true. I mean, there is intergenerational trauma that can happen. But it just seems like if you want to pay day, Michael Jackson seems to be the place that people have gone to for many years. And Michael Jackson, by his own choices, set himself up for this to go on into infamy, from whatever reason that is, ignorance, being too isolated, who the hell knows. All right, we don't know exactly.

18:13Was he actually, we don't know. But it certainly, he did nothing to help his cause or his argument by any stretch of the imagination. Fascinating case. Eric Fattis is always thanks for joining us and giving us your insight. Robin Drake, as always, fascinating conversation. Be sure to press subscribe wherever you get podcasts. You don't miss any of our updates and any of the cases we follow for you right here. Give us your thoughts in the comments section on sub-stack and on YouTube. Want more on this case and others? Then press subscribe now. And don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Brusky and the Hidden Killers podcast.

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