Jackson medic’s ties with women in the spotlight

Michael Jackson’s doctor was distracted in the hours before the singer’s death by phone exchanges with three women, whose relations with the medic should be explained in court, prosecutors said.

Preparing for Conrad Murray’s manslaughter trial, they called on Thursday for the nature of Dr Murray’s ties with the women – including a cocktail waitress and a Spearmint Rhino club dancer – to be allowed in evidence.

“The details of these relationships are relevant to show Dr Murray’s level of inattentiveness and distraction while he was responsible for the care of Jackson,” they said in a legal document detailing phone exchanges. “The evidence also serves to impeach Dr Murray’s own account of the events leading up to Jackson’s death since Dr Murray never made mention of any telephone activities in his statements to LAPD detectives,” they added.

Prosecutors allege that Dr Murray, 58, “abandoned his patient” after administering the powerful sedative propofol to help the singer sleep, and then tried to cover it up after his death on June 25, 2009.

Dr Murray is due to go to court on May 9. In the legal request made on Thursday, prosecutors listed details of telephone exchanges with the women, and the background to their relationships with Dr Murray.

Dr Murray telephoned Sade Anding, a cocktail waitress he met in a Houston restaurant in March 2009, at 11.51 a.m. on the day Michael Jackson died, and had an 11-minute conversation with her, the prosecutors said.

“The jury will be able to infer that Dr Murray had the desire to talk to and listen to Ms Anding during the time he should have been watching and attending to Jackson,” the prosecutors wrote.

Bridgette Morgan, who met Dr Murray in a Las Vegas club in 2003 and dated him until 2005, called him twice on the morning of Michael Jackson’s death to discuss the medic’s offer to pay for her to fly to Las Vegas for her birthday.

Michelle Bella, a dancer at a Spearmint Rhino club in Las Vegas where she met Dr Murray in February 2008, received a text message from him at 8.30 a.m. on the day of Michael Jackson’s death, it said. Dr Murray acknowledged that he had used propofol, but insisted that on the day of the 50-year-old singer’s death he administered only a small amount of the drug that should not have been fatal. Dr Jackson was eventually pronounced dead at 2.26 p.m. at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Centre, but paramedics estimated that he had already been dead for at least 20 minutes when they arrived following a 911 call.