That Michael Jackson lived until the age of 50 is in many ways shocking.

As one of the reporters who camped out in Santa Maria, California, during the spring of 2005 to cover his child abuse trial, there were times when I doubted he would still be alive to hear the jury read its verdict.

In my notes from the final day of testimony, before the jury retired, I observed that the defendant was, “tiny, weak, and with the flesh visibly shrinking from his face, leaving behind an almost skeletal jaw line made stranger by the pulled lips and white man’s chin dimple,” and concluded that, “Michael Jackson is clearly in extremely poor health”.

Facing more than 18 years in jail on ten child molestation-related charges — and forced to sit through 60 days of court proceedings involving 135 witnesses and 1,000 pieces of evidence — Jackson suffered at least one complete mental and physical breakdown during the trial.

The judge was not sympathetic.

After being told by the judge that he would be arrested if he did not show up to court, the singer arrived almost two hours late, still wearing his pyjamas, with a flunky holding an umbrella over his head. Only a couple of months before, Jackson had been in such high spirits that he had moondanced on the roof of his vehicle after a preliminary hearing.

I doubt that anyone who sat through that trial, day after day, will be engaging in much sentimental talk about Jackson this weekend — regardless of the great sadness that always accompanies the death of a great pop culture icon.

It is not that Jackson was obviously a child molester who happened to get lucky with a soft jury in 2005. That was not the case at all: the charges against him were overblown and should never have reached court.

The accusers were hucksters with zero credibility — something that should have been obvious from the beginning to Tom Sneddon, the red-faced, shouty Santa Barbara County District Attorney, who seemed to have made a personal crusade out of putting Jackson in prison. No, what made a little bit of your soul die every time you went to court was the spectacle of a man who had been so utterly corrupted by everything that’s wrong with fame — to the point where he had quite literally mutilated himself.

Once you saw that tragic mask of a face up close, it never left you.

And it was not just the plastic surgery, or the large doses of prescription medication that the man was obviously taking — it was everything about his life.

Contrary to the image he created for himself in his later years, Michael Jackson was no man-child, trapped in time. That was an act, and only his most doe-eyed of fans ever bought it.

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