Content area
Full text
CHAPTER ONE
NARRATOR--The roar of the Jackson scandal began as an anonymous whisper, on a quiet morning last August, in the San Fernando vallley.
DON RAY, a free-lance television reporter--I was laying in bed on a Sunday morning, dead asleep and the phone rang very early in the morning. This voice said, "A search warrant has gone down. In fact, two of them have gone down." And I, 'Okay, like what, where? 'And he said: "Neverland." I said, What, MTV, Michael Jackson? He says, 'Yeah, that one. Something having to do with child molestation." That woke me up. He said: "Well, I understand they had to use a locksmith to get into some of the places there." At this point, now I've got to find the locksmith. So I started going down this list. The first one was disconnected. It was the one that was seemingly closest. The second one, I actually scored on. And he says, "Yeah, this is Duane." And I said: "I understand you were in Neverland this morning." He says: "No. No, I wasn't." I said, "Oh, well I've dialed..." and he interrupted and said: "It was yesterday." "Oh yeah, yeah, yesterday, right. Yeah, yesterday."
NARRATOR--Don Ray took his story to [Los Angeles] Channel 4, KNBC. The L.A. police would only confirm they were investigating Jackson. Nothing about the charges. No matter: just the promos were enough.
DIANE DIMOND, Hard Copy senior correspondent--I was sitting in my cubicle at work and I was working on a Heidi Fleiss story. I'd been doing the Hollywood Madam story and my boss came to me and tapped me on my shoulder and said, 'In about seven minutes Channel 4 is going to run a story about Michael Jackson. I...I don't really know what it is, but come to my office. Let's watch it. You're on the Michael Jackson story. I watched the original story and I didn't get it. I knew that they had issued two search warrants. I knew that the police were looking for something. I knew there was a locksmith named Duane they had taken along with them to open up every closet door, shed, that they could find. But I didn't know why.
DON RAY--Nowhere did we say anything...