Doctor in AEG’s 80th court session: Michael Jackson was truly suffering from pain (disturbing content)

“Sometimes he would say, ‘Barney, do me a favor—see if I can fall asleep. I’ll lie down on the bed, pull the blanket over me, and you read a book for me.’ I would pick a book that seemed interesting to me and start reading, or I would tell him a story. But it didn’t help, because he was often excited just from hearing the story, and he would ask, ‘Did that really happen?’ I would read him a tale, and when it seemed like he had fallen asleep, I would ruin it—you know, it was hard because when I left the room, I would make noise. When I thought he was asleep, I would leave the room, and sometimes when I reached the door, he would say, ‘Good night, Barney.’ He hadn’t fallen asleep at all.”

Today, an interrogation video featuring one of Michael Jackson’s doctors, named Dr. William Barney Van Valin, was shown in court as he recounted these statements. Before Michael asked Barni to treat his insomnia with “propofol,” he had tried to put himself to sleep with stories from this doctor.

The pop legend, after decades of trying to sleep at night, died four years ago in his room due to an overdose of propofol.

Dr. Barney Van Valin rejected Michael’s request for propofol and invited him to his home. But only six years later, according to Van Valin, “another doctor put him to sleep with propofol, like an animal being put down with a drug.”

Dr. Van Valin was Michael’s doctor in the early years of the 2000s. In those years, Michael still lived in Neverland. In 2001, he went to Van Valin’s office, which was near Neverland, and asked for a doctor to come to his home. That’s how Van Valin became the doctor who treated him in Neverland. That same night, Michael invited him to Neverland. Van Valin went there with his son, Mason. The friendship between Michael and Barni began.

Van Valin: “We were best friends. I didn’t have a better friend than him, and I don’t think he had a better friend than me.”

Every week, Michael would go to Van Valin’s house. He would stay behind the door until it was finally opened. He didn’t knock because he thought it would be rude.

During the interrogation, Van Valin recalled that once he had shown up to go to work and opened the front door to leave, and he saw Michael standing there at the entrance. MJ told him that they had arrived at that moment, but when he asked Michael’s driver, the driver told him they had been waiting for 35 minutes. Van Valin invited Michael inside his home.

Van Valin and his wife both worked. After school, the children would return home and stay with Michael.

Van Valin: “I would come home from work and see that Michael and the kids were either watching cartoons or eating pizza. At first it was exciting, but after a few years it became normal.”

Michael played with the children. He loved the game Monopoly. When Van Valin returned home, the house was a mess.

During the interrogation of Van Valin, he was asked whether Michael was a good father. The answer was no.

Van Valin: “No, he wasn’t a good father. He was an amazing father. I’m a good father, but he was better than me. He respected the children the way they respected him, and he corrected their behavior gently. He was patient.”

When Blanket was born in 2002, Dr. Van Valin and his wife were guests of Michael in Neverland. Van Valin said that Paris was a very shy girl; she would sit on her father’s leg at the dinner table, and Michael would let her eat right there. She was very attached to her father. Van Valin’s wife saw the baby stroller and realized that a small baby had been added to the household. They went to the baby’s room, where Michael introduced little Blanket to them and said that now his name was Blanket, but he wanted all his children to have his name (MJ).

Van Valin says he knows Michael not as a star, but as a man and a father—and he misses him.

Although Van Valin had been summoned to testify as a witness for AEG, his testimony was in favor of Catherine Jackson’s lawyers, because it showed that Michael’s use of painkillers had a medical reason.

Michael had back pain, and Van Valin continued treating his pain for a year. He used the alias Phil Sanders to write prescriptions for Michael. Van Valin said that Michael’s back pain resulted from an incident that happened to Michael at a concert in 1999. The suspended platform Michael was standing on came down quickly, and Michael injured his back. Two years after that incident, in 2001, Michael was still suffering from this injury. Van Valin says his pain and injury were real. He wasn’t using pain as an excuse to get medication. MRI images confirmed the damage in Michael’s back that caused the pain. In these images, a bulge in the disk area at the end of the spine was visible. The location of the injury and the location of the pain were the same. Van Valin said patients would come to him and use pain as an excuse to obtain drugs even though they didn’t have a medical need; that’s why Van Valin was careful not to be used as a tool by patients. But Michael wasn’t like those patients.

(Session 10 of the court: Christopher Rogers, the doctor who performed the autopsy on Michael’s body, testified that the injury to the lower vertebrae of Michael’s spine had worsened over time and was unstoppable.)

Van Valin would go to Neverland and inject Michael with the painkiller Dalmor. The amount of the injected drug increased, but this doctor does not consider it misuse—although once Van Valin noticed a blood stain on Michael’s shirt and a bandage on the injection site, and asked Michael whether another doctor was also giving him pain medication. Michael denied it, but Van Valin knew he was lying. Van Valin told Michael that more Dalmor could kill him.

Van Valin: “I said, ‘Michael, there’s another doctor who’s giving you medication. You know what danger this is for you and for me. Who came here and gave you the drugs?’ He said he hadn’t received any injections from another doctor, but he was lying. I told him, Michael, if you get medication twice, you have to know it could kill you. If you got medication from another doctor before me and I do another injection, I might cause your death.’”

Van Valin said that because Michael was getting medication from two doctors, the high dose would change his mood, and Michael would become happy—he would read, and he would dance: “It was a little scary. I would sit there until the effects of the drug wore off.”

Dr. Shannon was another doctor who practiced at Dr. Van Valin’s office. He had written notes in the file about Michael’s dental treatment and his pains. Shannon had injected Michael with Dalmor at the office, but in the file he wrote that Michael had brought his medications with him to the office.

According to the notes, on October 10, 2001, Van Valin had discussed concerns about Dalmor with Michael. Michael said he was aware of the risks. Michael never told Van Valin about his dependence on painkillers during the 1993 tour and during addiction withdrawal treatment. Van Valin didn’t think the Dalmor he injected would cause Michael to become addicted because he received injections every few days—or even every few weeks. Dalmor addicts inject every few hours.

Van Valin injected Michael with Dalmor over a four-month period from October 2001 to January 2002. Six times over six days in 2001, and twice in one day in 2002. The doctor said the number of injections might have been higher and that he hadn’t recorded them in the files.

In February 2002, Michael decided to stop Dalmor. He didn’t say anything more to Van Valin—he simply no longer requested Dalmor.

Note, February 28, 2002: “MJ said he needed to stay off Dalmor for a while because its use was increasing. He needed more medication, and I couldn’t give it to him.”

Note, October 25, 2002: “Michael called and said he had developed an infection on his stomach. A device had been implanted under his skin a week earlier to reduce his use of Dalmor.”

(Session 43 of the court: Dr. Farshchian, in the early 2000s, performed surgery on Michael to treat his dependence on Dalmor. The procedure involved implanting a piece of the drug naloxone inside Michael’s abdomen, which prevented Dalmor from taking effect.)

Van Valin said that a doctor in Florida had implanted a piece of naloxone that reduced the effect of the narcotic. The implantation site had become infected. Dr. Van Valin cleaned it. He said naloxone is a drug that doctors inject when they bring an unconscious person to the emergency room and don’t know what they consumed, and the person becomes alert quickly. Van Valin knew another doctor was injecting Michael with Dalmor because he hadn’t been injecting Dalmor for a while. That’s why after that date, he didn’t inject Michael with Dalmor anymore, because he knew another doctor was doing it.

Van Valin stopped injecting Michael with Dalmor after a year. But their friendship continued. They would go out together for fun.

Van Valin said he believes Michael was sleepless, and that insomnia was his biggest problem and complaint. Once in 2003, Michael told his doctor that he hadn’t slept for four days. The doctor gave him six Xanax pills (alprazolam—anxiety and sleep disorder reliever). Michael took all six pills at once, and his body showed no reaction. Michael then talked to Van Valin’s doctor about propofol and told him he used this drug to sleep during the gaps between his concerts on tours. There was a responsible doctor for this—he would wait eight hours and then bring Michael back to consciousness. Michael had told Van Valin that he would wake up energetic and lively from sleep (unconsciousness).

(Session 34 of the court: Dr. Charles Cizler testified that after Michael woke up from the propofol-induced unconsciousness, he felt he had regained strength, but in reality his natural sleep cycle had been disrupted and his brain had been deprived of natural sleep, and his body couldn’t rebuild his brain cells and organs.)

Van Valin: “During the tours, doctors would give him propofol and monitor him—not like that person (Murray) who gave him the medication and left the room, like an animal being given drugs to die.”

Van Valin: “Michael said, ‘Are you putting me to sleep? I haven’t slept for four days.’ I said, ‘What kind of sleep should I give you?’ And he said, ‘Well, I have these…’”

Michael had a box of propofol in his room and showed it to Van Valin. The drug had been shipped from Florida. Van Valin didn’t know the medical name of the doctor who had given this medication to MJ.

Van Valin: “...I said, ‘Mike, I don’t do anesthesia injections. You need a specialist in anesthesia for this.’ He said, ‘It’s not like you’ll die—it's safe. I used this medication all those years between concerts and I slept.’ I told him, ‘I don’t think it was good sleep.’ He said, ‘No, it really works well.’...”

Michael had explained to Van Valin: “...If I had three days of rest between concerts, I couldn’t sleep during those three days, and therefore I couldn’t deliver the show I wanted. I want my shows to be the best quality possible.”

Michael had only asked Van Valin for propofol this one time. At first, Van Valin didn’t know anything about this drug and asked an anesthesia specialist. He was told it was a dangerous drug and used in hospitals. Van Valin told Michael that it was a dangerous drug. Michael never asked Van Valin to inject him with propofol again.

The court has always heard that Michael didn’t want to hear a negative answer to his requests. AEG’s lawyers claim that Michael used the tactic of friendship with doctors to obtain medication. But Van Valin says something else. Van Valin’s refusal to Michael’s request didn’t make the star angry, and Michael was happy and satisfied.

In 2003, Van Valin had talked to Michael about the need to raise his pain tolerance threshold and concerns about medication use. He says he treated Michael like any other patient.

Van Valin also wrote a book titled “Private Conversations in Neverland with Michael Jackson.”

Interrogation video of Dr. Neil Ratner

In the next step, the company’s attorney showed an interrogation video of Neil Ratner, a New York-based anesthesiology specialist. He had treated Michael from the early 1990s until the early 2000s. Michael had told him to contact Dr. Stephen Heuflein, a plastic surgeon based in Beverly Hills, and use his experience in treating Michael. Ratner treated Michael for the surgeries he had undergone (probably meaning the skin graft surgery and the scarred scalp surgery).

Ratner’s response to almost all the questions from the interrogator was: “I don’t remember.”

He wasn’t with Michael on tours, but he had accompanied Michael on trips to Germany, South Africa, and Korea. Their purpose for traveling to South Africa was to deliver a check (concert earnings) to the Nelson Mandela charity foundation.

(In 1999, Michael held charity concerts in Germany and Korea. His back injury was related to one of these two concerts, which took place in Munich, Germany.)

Ratner said that during the fall season in Germany, he had become concerned about Michael’s health. He didn’t remember anything about whether Michael had a drug problem or whether he had given him medication.

Interrogation video of Dr. Alan Metzger

Alan Metzger was Michael’s primary doctor from 1984 until April 2009. Dr. Klein had referred him to Metzger after diagnosing Michael with lupus. Metzger is an internist and rheumatologist.

Metzger said that although he was Michael’s primary doctor, he would appoint doctors in other countries and didn’t provide information about his other doctors to him.

Metzger also had a friendship relationship with Michael, but he says Klein was closer to him. Metzger called Klein “MJ’s mother hen.” (A reference to someone who provides for others with interfering and controlling behavior.)

Metzger essentially treated Michael for back pain and insomnia. He witnessed Michael’s sleep problem during the tour. In 1997, he went with Michael to Australia and attended the wedding ceremony of Michael and Debbie. He also went to Neverland six to eight times.

Metzger last met Michael on April 18, 2009, and prescribed him a sleeping medication. They talked about caffeine use and not watching television before sleep.

AEG’s goal is to show that the use of drugs shortened Michael’s expected lifespan, and that even if he hadn’t died in 2009, he wouldn’t have lived much longer. This matters to the company because if this is proven, even if the jury finds him guilty, it would have to pay less damages.

(Session 43 of the court: Dr. Sydney Sknol testified that these drugs did not shorten Michael’s life.)

Source: eMJey.com / CNN & AP & NY Daily & LA Times