Post by MJSUNIFC on Jun 16, 2004 13:19:28 GMT -5
Wednesday, June 16, 2004By Roger Friedman of fox news
Some defendants make sure their appearance at trial is preceded by only the most serious public profile, low-key behavior and as little self-promotion as possible.
Not Michael Jackson. With his trial for child molestation set to begin officially on Sept. 13, Jackson will release a boxed set of greatest hits, remixes and rarities in late August, I learned yesterday.
The three- or four-CD set, including four new songs and lots of hard-to-find material, is still being assembled. But sources tell me that it's a go for release around Labor Day at the latest.
"It can't come out during the trial," my source said, "and it's not going to come out after the trial, that's for sure. So they have no choice but to get it out right before the trial."
The package, which will trace Jackson's history post-Jackson 5 through the present, is key to the pop singer's contractual life. It will be his final release on Epic Records as part of his long-term deal with Sony Music.
This is completely separate from Jackson's 50 percent interest in Sony/ATV Music Publishing and/or including all outstanding loans. But it frees him to start his own label, seek a deal elsewhere or renegotiate with Sony for an entirely new recording deal.
Of course, no new deal is likely to be concluded until after the trial, which probably won't really begin until later in the fall or even the beginning of 2005.
A couple of Jackson insiders voiced surprise to me yesterday when they read my story about the Sony-BMG merger being Jackson's way out of his financial mess.
I wrote that Sony would have to consider selling its publishing company, jointly owned with Jackson, and that Jackson could then bring in new backers and buy the whole deal.
Sony/ATV Music Publishing, one insider points out, is probably worth close to a billion dollars at this point, with the Beatles catalog only being a small part of it.
"There are 251 Beatle songs," my expert observes, "but hundreds of thousands of other titles, including song catalogs by people like Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers."
Point taken, but the Beatles' small number of songs alone is probably worth between $400-$500 million.
Meanwhile, the Jackson camp is scrambling this morning in the light of the unauthorized release, to Court TV's intrepid Diane Dimond, of the settlement agreement between Jackson and his pre-teen accuser from a decade ago.
The papers are not a complete surprise. They say that Jackson paid the child $15 million to be put in a trust, with another $1.5 million for each of his parents. All of this was put on a payment plan.
But the really interesting part of the agreement is a $5 million payment to the family's attorney, Larry Feldman.
The very same Feldman who, a decade later, represents the family of Jackson's current accuser and stands to profit again if Jackson is found guilty — kind of a cottage industry for one attorney.
The "release" of the settlement agreement is a scoop for Dimond, but it does raise the question of where the papers came from. They were sealed by the court, and, I am told, destroyed by some of the lawyers in the case so they could never be fingered as sources.
Certainly the family of the accuser from 10 years ago didn't want the papers to come out. You don't have to be Columbo to figure out that leaves Feldman and prosecutor Tom Sneddon as prime suspects.
Interestingly, in February 2003, literally right after the special "Living with Michael Jackson" aired on ABC, the highly salacious complaint against Jackson from the 1993 case, which had also been sealed, surfaced.
The papers had a court stamp and were drawn up on Feldman's letterhead, something I asked him about at the time. He insisted they did not come from him, but said the guilty party was close at hand and that "just a little connecting of the dots" was needed to get a name.
Now that sealed documents have twice surfaced and wound up in the same place — Court TV/The Smoking Gun Web site — maybe it's time to think about who had access to them and how they could possibly have gotten out.
www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122803,00.html
Some defendants make sure their appearance at trial is preceded by only the most serious public profile, low-key behavior and as little self-promotion as possible.
Not Michael Jackson. With his trial for child molestation set to begin officially on Sept. 13, Jackson will release a boxed set of greatest hits, remixes and rarities in late August, I learned yesterday.
The three- or four-CD set, including four new songs and lots of hard-to-find material, is still being assembled. But sources tell me that it's a go for release around Labor Day at the latest.
"It can't come out during the trial," my source said, "and it's not going to come out after the trial, that's for sure. So they have no choice but to get it out right before the trial."
The package, which will trace Jackson's history post-Jackson 5 through the present, is key to the pop singer's contractual life. It will be his final release on Epic Records as part of his long-term deal with Sony Music.
This is completely separate from Jackson's 50 percent interest in Sony/ATV Music Publishing and/or including all outstanding loans. But it frees him to start his own label, seek a deal elsewhere or renegotiate with Sony for an entirely new recording deal.
Of course, no new deal is likely to be concluded until after the trial, which probably won't really begin until later in the fall or even the beginning of 2005.
A couple of Jackson insiders voiced surprise to me yesterday when they read my story about the Sony-BMG merger being Jackson's way out of his financial mess.
I wrote that Sony would have to consider selling its publishing company, jointly owned with Jackson, and that Jackson could then bring in new backers and buy the whole deal.
Sony/ATV Music Publishing, one insider points out, is probably worth close to a billion dollars at this point, with the Beatles catalog only being a small part of it.
"There are 251 Beatle songs," my expert observes, "but hundreds of thousands of other titles, including song catalogs by people like Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers."
Point taken, but the Beatles' small number of songs alone is probably worth between $400-$500 million.
Meanwhile, the Jackson camp is scrambling this morning in the light of the unauthorized release, to Court TV's intrepid Diane Dimond, of the settlement agreement between Jackson and his pre-teen accuser from a decade ago.
The papers are not a complete surprise. They say that Jackson paid the child $15 million to be put in a trust, with another $1.5 million for each of his parents. All of this was put on a payment plan.
But the really interesting part of the agreement is a $5 million payment to the family's attorney, Larry Feldman.
The very same Feldman who, a decade later, represents the family of Jackson's current accuser and stands to profit again if Jackson is found guilty — kind of a cottage industry for one attorney.
The "release" of the settlement agreement is a scoop for Dimond, but it does raise the question of where the papers came from. They were sealed by the court, and, I am told, destroyed by some of the lawyers in the case so they could never be fingered as sources.
Certainly the family of the accuser from 10 years ago didn't want the papers to come out. You don't have to be Columbo to figure out that leaves Feldman and prosecutor Tom Sneddon as prime suspects.
Interestingly, in February 2003, literally right after the special "Living with Michael Jackson" aired on ABC, the highly salacious complaint against Jackson from the 1993 case, which had also been sealed, surfaced.
The papers had a court stamp and were drawn up on Feldman's letterhead, something I asked him about at the time. He insisted they did not come from him, but said the guilty party was close at hand and that "just a little connecting of the dots" was needed to get a name.
Now that sealed documents have twice surfaced and wound up in the same place — Court TV/The Smoking Gun Web site — maybe it's time to think about who had access to them and how they could possibly have gotten out.
www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122803,00.html