The grandmother of the teen accusing Michael Jackson of molestation testified on today that she was bombarded by phone calls and had rocks thrown at her home after her grandson finally left the singer's Neverland Valley Ranch in 2003.
Speaking in Spanish through an interpreter, the grandmother also said she had to pretend to be sick in order to get the boy, then 13, and his brother released from Neverland.
And when the brothers finally returned "these children that came were not my grandkids ... They didn't talk to me the same way. They were different kids and even up to now (the elder boy) is not the same child," she said.
The grandmother took the stand after the mother of the boy at the center of the child sex abuse case against Jackson stepped down after more than four days of emotional, sometimes bizarre and often rambling testimony.
The mother, considered a key witness by both sides, never witnessed any molestation of her son by Jackson. But she is the linchpin of prosecution charges that the singer conspired to hold her family against their will in February and March 2003 at his Neverland Valley Ranch.
She is also crucial to the defence argument that Jackson (46), was an unwitting victim of a liar and a grifter who latched onto celebrities and who had a history of making false allegations.
The grandmother's testimony focused on the days and weeks after the family returned from Neverland in March 2003 following what the mother had described as a period of intimidation at the hands of some of Jackson's aides.
"I had to lie and say I was ill so they could come, because those children, they loved me very much because I raised them," she said.
She said her Los Angeles home was barraged by phone calls day and night which she could not understand. Rocks were also thrown at her house by an unidentified man standing beside a car who drove off quickly when she came out to investigate.
The mother had testified at length about being harassed by Jackson's aides following the February 2003 broadcast of a TV documentary in which Jackson was seen holding hands with her son and defending his practice of sharing his bed with boys.
In one of the two month-old trial's more bizarre moments, she said she once feared that her family would be spirited away from Jackson's Neverland ranch in a hot air balloon.
But Jackson's lead attorney Tom Mesereau got the woman to admit that she never tried to call police, a lawyer, or anyone else in authority during the time she said she was held against her will at Neverland and in a Southern California hotel.
The woman said she thought no-one would believe her.
Jackson is charged with molesting the woman's son at Neverland in early 2003, plying the boy with alcohol in order to abuse him and conspiring to commit false imprisonment, child abduction and extortion. The performer, who has pleaded innocent, faces more than 20 years in prison if convicted.