Accuser's mum says singer fooled the world

The mother of Michael Jackson's teen accuser on Monday spent another day locked in a verbal tug-of-war with his lawyer, taking repeated pot shots at the singer and telling jurors that he had "fooled the world" with his professed love for children.

The woman, testifying for a fourth day in the 46-year-old entertainer's sensational child molestation trial, remained defiant in the face of a sustained assault on her credibility by Mr Jackson's lead defence attorney Tom Mesereau.

But in one of the day's more bizarre admissions, she conceded she had once feared that her family would be spirited away from Mr Jackson's Neverland ranch in a hot air balloon.

Though the mother never witnessed any molestation of her son by Mr Jackson, she is a key witness in the trial and the linchpin of prosecution charges that Mr Jackson conspired to hold her family against their will in February and March 2003.

The self-proclaimed King of Pop is charged with molesting the boy, then 13, at Neverland and conspiring to commit false imprisonment, child abduction and extortion. He faces more than two decades in prison if convicted.

"He really didn't care about children. He just cared about what he was doing with the children," the mother said of Mr Jackson.

"He's managed to fool the world and I was just one woman inside of that. What he puts out to the world is not who he really is," she said. "Now because of this criminal case, people know who he really is."

Despite an objection by Dr Mesereau, Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Rodney Melville refused to strike those remarks from the record.

Dr Mesereau spent much of the day trying to show jurors that the woman was a liar and a swindler, confronting her with conflicting versions of events or accounts that strained credibility.

"Did you tell the police that you thought your family might disappear from Neverland in a hot air balloon?" Dr Mesereau asked at one point, citing an interview with sheriff's deputies.

The woman responded that Dr Mesereau had taken her remark out of context and that two Jackson henchmen had threatened "various ways of making my children disappear" - including by hot air balloon.

Dr Mesereau challenged the woman to admit that she continued to bring her children to Neverland and let them sleep with Mr Jackson after watching him lick her son's head on an airplane.

"That was poor judgment on my part," she said. The woman also acknowledged that a lawyer she hired to retrieve her passports and furniture from Mr Jackson after the family left Neverland for the last time wrote many letters to the performer's attorney but never mentioned any sex abuse or false imprisonment.

She said she was afraid to tip off Mr Jackson's legal team before the police could investigate him and only wanted her passports back. Jabbing a finger at Mr Jackson and addressing him directly, she added: "And for your people to stop following us. We didn't want anything to do with you anymore."

Earlier in her testimony, the woman said that after the family left Neverland they were followed by Jackson associates, who left notes on her doorstep and threw rocks at her house.

Dr Mesereau suggested in his cross-examination that the aides were in fact hired by one of Mr Jackson's former attorneys, who was trying to investigate her to protect the pop icon.

"Why would he (Jackson) have a criminal defence if there was not a criminal case under way?" the woman shot back.