SUSPECT SLEEPOVERS: Santa Barbara attorney Raymond David Chandler tells all—or almost all—in his book, All That Glitters: The Crime and the Cover-up, about how Michael Jackson often molested his then-13-year-old nephew.

And how in 1994, Jackson paid a reported $22 million settlement (Chandler won’t reveal the figure) to young Jordan Chandler and his family, which had filed a lawsuit claiming that the entertainer molested the boy.

Jackson had frequent sexual sleepovers in 1993 with Jordan, including a trip to Paris, Chandler wrote. During one Memorial Day weekend, “Jordie and Michael spent the weekend at Neverland, masturbating in front of one another … masturbating one another … Michael performing oral sex on the boy,” Chandler wrote in the self-published 2004 book. Jackson was then 35.

“He slept all over the world with my nephew,” Raymond Chandler told me in an interview at his downtown law office. “If a regular-Joe adult did that, he’d be locked up. But he’s Michael Jackson and that made it okay.”

Jackson was then at the peak of his fame, his deal with Pepsi earning the soft drink company an estimated $1 billion a year, Raymond Chandler said. A three-picture deal was in the offing with Fox. “He was on the verge of becoming a movie star,” Raymond told me. “In 1993 he was the most famous person on the face of the earth.”

Then it all came crashing down due to the singer’s reckless obsession with the boy. Jackson was spending nights with Jordan at the boy’s divorced mother’s home, and wanted to take him and the boy’s amazingly unsuspecting mother on his Bad tour, Chandler said. Jordan’s father, Evan Chandler, Raymond’s brother, strongly resisted the tour plan and suspected that the two were having sex, Raymond told me.

Jackson’s lawyers responded with a court order requiring Evan to turn over custody of Jordan within 24 hours, Raymond said. Evan, facing the loss of his son, felt he had no alternative and took Jordan to a psychiatrist, Chandler said. Jordan reportedly told the doctor, then the police, of the molestations. Authorities launched an investigation, which fizzled. Jackson denied wrongdoing and was never charged. The boy then filed a civil suit against Jackson.

Although the suit eventually brought the family a $22 million settlement, according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, the accusation of child molestation created a public firestorm that not only killed the Pepsi endorsement and wrecked the movie deal but dealt a stunning blow to Jackson’s entertainment career, Chandler said. He went from the world’s most famous “to the most infamous.” It also rained chaos down on Jordan and his father. “People wanted to kill them both and still do,” Chandler told me.

Asked why he paid off his accuser, Jackson was quoted as saying, “I wanted to go on with my life. I want to make records. I want to sing. Too many people had already been hurt,” adding that he wanted to avoid a media circus.

Jackson’s sister, La Toya, publicly accused him of being a pedophile, saying, “I cannot and will not be a silent collaborator in his crimes against young children … Forget about the superstar, forget about the icon. If he was any other 35-year-old man who was sleeping with little boys, you wouldn’t like this guy.” Her brother’s own physical abuse as a child had turned him into an abuser, she said. Later La Toya disavowed her accusations.

In 2005, Santa Barbara DA Tom Sneddon filed molestation charges against Jackson, involving a different boy, and what Jackson feared came to pass: a five-month media circus trial in Santa Maria. A jury acquitted Jackson, who then left his beloved Neverland Ranch, never to return. But Jackson’s prescription drug addiction worried his family.

“What we need to remember is that what killed Michael Jackson was not drugs,” Chandler told me. “He was an abused child. His father beat him. It was a dysfunctional family. Due to his stunted childhood, he could not have an intimate sexual relationship except with children. It all comes from childhood. He was a tormented and lonely man and that’s what killed him. As famous as he was and rich as he was, that’s the real story. He couldn’t relate to adults on a sexual level.”

As for his frequent plastic surgery, “You can change the outside but you can’t change inside.”

Although Raymond refused to discuss where his brother Evan and nephew Jordan live, he did say, “I’m sure they’re not in the country now,” having fled at least temporarily due to past death threats from over-zealous fans.

According to Wikipedia, “Today, Jordan Chandler is in his late twenties, living in a $2.35 million home on Long Island under an assumed name. He and his family also own a high-rise apartment in Manhattan.” After the settlement, “Jordan Chandler and Jackson never spoke to each other again; he received his last installment from Jackson in June 1999.”

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