Michael’s Recorded Phone Messages Played in Court

Yesterday, Michael’s recorded phone messages to Mark Shaffel were played in court. In these phone messages, Michael asks Shaffel to collaborate on several projects, including a joint project with Marlon Brando and also producing a charity song.

The recorded phone messages, played from Mark Shaffel’s answering machine, were played in court by his attorney to show that Shaffel had close relations with Michael and that Michael had entrusted several million dollars of his assets to him.

Shaffel claims that Michael owes him $3.8 million.

In one of these phone messages dating back to 2001, Michael says: “Mark, this is Michael… Mark, please never let me down. I love you. I really want us to stay friends and take control of the world of business together. Please stay my loyal friend. I love you.”

Shaffel testified in court that he had been working on several of Michael’s projects and even received a $10 million loan from a financial institution. Shaffel said Michael made many requests of him. One of these requests was to find a house in Beverly Hills so he could stay away from Neverland.

In June 2001, Michael sent many phone messages about a project he called the Marlon Brando project to Mark Shaffel. This phone message sheds more light on Michael’s friendly relationship with Marlon Brando, who died in 2004.

Shaffel said Michael had the idea of making a joint interview video with Marlon Brando. In this video, Michael and Marlon would interview each other. The location for recording this video was planned to be Marlon Brando’s island in Tahiti. After that, Michael decided to produce a DVD of Marlon Brando’s acting and his own, but the project was not carried out due to its very high costs.

In many phone messages to Shaffel, Michael asked about the progress of this project and said that Marlon Brando wanted to know where the project stood. In one of these messages, Michael says: “Marlon Brando is putting pressure on me. He’s an amazing man. He’s a god. He wants a lot of money. He wants everything done right now.”

Another of Michael’s projects was creating a charity song titled “What More Can I Give” to help the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York. This charity song was never released because Michael’s relationship with Sony became strained.

Shaffel says that producing this song cost several million dollars, and in addition, to record it he had to make various trips in order to access more than 30 singers who participated in the project.

In 2003, Michael contacted Shaffel again to create a charity song about the war in Iraq and said: “This is a great excuse to record a song. This is the most reasonable excuse for doing it.”

Shaffel also testified that in November 2003, during a trip to Brazil, he delivered $300,000 to a person who was responsible for carrying out a personal matter. Shaffel did not say anything about this personal matter.

In the trial regarding Michael’s sexual abuse allegations in 2005, the prosecutor claimed that Michael’s team intended to take the accuser’s family to Brazil and keep them there. Michael was acquitted of all charges in court.

Shaffel, who admitted his involvement in producing pornography during the trial, added that he withdrew the $300,000 from his personal account and was not repaid by Michael.

Shaffel also claimed that he is owed $664,000 for holding the rights to two television specials that were sold to the Fox network. These specials were produced in response to the documentary “Living with Michael Jackson,” made by Martin Bashir.

Shaffel’s defense attorney called Alvin Malnik to the witness stand. Malnik was Michael’s financial adviser and had learned about his financial problems and chaos.

Malnik said that he had occasionally lent Michael amounts of $7 to $10 million, and all those amounts were repaid to him. He said that once Michael asked him to lend $1 million to buy a piece of jewelry for his friend Elizabeth Taylor.

The reason was that Taylor did not allow the video in which she appeared to be broadcast to Michael, and Michael knew that by buying a piece of jewelry for her, he could win her satisfaction—and that’s exactly what happened.