Daniel Kapon
In 2003, Daniel Kapon was 18 years old when he, accompanied by his mother, contacted the Santa Barbara Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department claiming he had been sexually molested by Michael Jackson when he was a child. The young man was represented by Gloria Allred, an attorney who also represented the Chandlers for a short period of time in 1993. The claim was that Kapon had “repressed memories” of the molestation and therefore only recently recalled the abuse. The psychiatrist who helped Kapon “remember” was Dr. Carole Lieberman. Allred and Lieberman had filed earlier complaints against Jackson for the so called “baby dangling incident” and campaigned for Jackson’s children to be taken away from him. [4]
The police interviewed the boy but they did not find him credible. He described horrendously sadistic acts, kept changing his story and he claimed impossibilities. Most importantly, when the police contacted Kapon’s father, they learned the boy had never even met Michael Jackson.
On May 28, 2004 the police closed the investigation stating "after an extensive investigation, which included hours of interviews with the person making the allegations, detectives concluded there was no evidence that any crime occurred. No charges will be sought". [5]
After the police closed their investigation, Kapon sold his story to the tabloid publication, News of the World. Reportedly, the tabloid paid him $500,000 for an approximate half hour video tape where he described the alleged abuse in graphic detail [6]. On May 30, 2004 the paper printed the story of Kapon’s allegations, but failed to mention that the police had already investigated his claims and did not find them credible.The article was published two days after the police released the statement stating that the case had been closed but at the end of the article, the journalist claimed that the investigation in Kapon’s case was actually ongoing [7].
Kapon also filed a civil complaint against Jackson. In his case, besides the allegations of sexual abuse, he claimed that a number of Jackson's hit songs had been stolen from him, including songs on Jackson’s Bad album which was released in 1987. In 1987, Kapon was two years old. Kapon also claimed that he fathered the singer’s two eldest children; that his mother appeared in Jackson’s Thriller video and that Jackson was “madly in love” with her; that “his mother married Jackson multiple times, and testified that the ceremonies were attended by Elizabeth Taylor, Celine Dion, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Beyonce Knowles and Diana Ross” [8].
Daniel Kapon did not show up at start of the civil trial and the case was thrown out of court in January 2008.
Joseph Bartucci Jr.
Another accuser who, as it later turned out never even met Jackson, was a man called Joseph Bartucci Jr. Although he did not go to tabloids and “only” filed a civil lawsuit against Jackson, we will briefly discuss him in this article because his case has similarities to Kapon’s in terms of absurdity.
In 2004 Bartucci filed a civil lawsuit against Jackson claiming the star kidnapped and molested him in New Orleans between May 19 and May 27, 1984. Bartucci alleged that Jackson cut him, licked the blood off of his arm and proceeded to snort coke off of the laceration – all while raping him. Bartucci was 18 years old at the time of the alleged assault. As an explanation for why he waited until 2004, twenty years later to report this kidnapping, he too cited “repressed memories” that he claimed he only recalled when he heard that Thomas Sneddon was calling for alleged victims to come forward in November, 2003.
Jackson was not in New Orleans but in California at the time of the alleged assault, a fact that could be easilly proven by the entertainer's attorneys, so Judge Eldon Fallon tossed the lawsuit. It also emerged that Bartucci was, as Judge Fallon put it, a "professional litigator". He had been involved in 18 civil and criminal suits over the previous 17 years and had also formally accused a minister of sexual abuse [9].
According to The Smoking Gun website, in 1996 Bartucci was arrested for stalking a woman: “According to court records, Bartucci took a plea to a reduced count of harassment and was fined, sentenced to probation, and hit with a 90-day suspended jail term.” [10]
