A CELEBRITY IS ARRESTED, the lawyers with silk ties and silkier tongues preen and posture for the television cameras, the police swoop, and the media erupt with moralising delight. The simultaneous arrests of the singer Michael Jackson and record producer Phil Spector promise a double helping of celebrity justice, America’s favourite daytime soap. Like all soaps, no one believes that the onscreen drama reflects reality; it is the plot and the casting that make for compulsive viewing.

Another famous face in the dock; another scrum of cameras outside; another bravura performance by overpaid attorneys: and when all the money and words have been exchanged, the only certainty is that American justice will once again have been made to appear partial and commercial.

Both Jackson and Spector will get the best defence money can buy; and whatever the outcome, the judicial process will be as different from the justice available to ordinary Americans as life in Neverland Ranch is removed from that on the streets of South Central Los Angeles.

Already, the waters around the Michael Jackson case are being expertly muddied, and personality and process have become hopelessly entangled. Mark Geragos, the lawyer who has been working for Jackson since March (so much for “unexpected” allegations), is reportedly planning to claim that the mother of the boy at the centre of child molestation charges is “a scorned woman”, the ungrateful recipient of Jackson’s largesse.

The tactic of blaming the victim has begun before the victim has been formally identified. “She’s very screwed up,” says a source in the Jackson camp. (Mr Geragos, by the way, is the lawyer who recently defended Winona Ryder on shoplifting charges. The actress received a light sentence; Mr Geragos received £500 an hour.) On the opposing side is Tom Sneddon, the Santa Barbara County district attorney, who has been accused of waging a vendetta after remarking that the public believed Jackson had bought his way out of trouble before by paying $20 million in an out-of-court settlement involving another young boy.

An undercurrent of racial tension is already building. Jackson’s brother has referred to the allegations as a modern-day lynching. Last summer, during his dispute with Sony, Jackson specifically portrayed himself as a victim of racism. “I need your support, not just for me,” he said. “When you fight for me, you fight for all black people — dead and alive.” The lawyer behind that campaign to get recording corporations to pay a larger percentage to musicians was none other than Johnnie Cochran, whose skilful use of the race card played such a pivotal role in the acquittal of O.J. Simpson.

Jackson’s lawyers will surely do the same. Indeed, a passage in Cochran’s memoirs, relating an exchange with Jackson, then his client, suggests that the singer may already see himself as another O.J.: “ ‘Look Johnnie,’ Michael said in his soft voice. ‘I want you to do what you have to do. But I want you to be there for me. If you can do that, then OK. Tell O.J. I love him. Tell him it’s all right.’ ”

From Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (acquitted of sexually assaulting a young actress in 1921) to O.J., via Claus von Bulow, William Kennedy Smith and many others, America has become used to the idea that celebrity justice is merely a form of public entertainment, a spectacle and a process qualitatively different from that available to lesser mortals.

I happened to interview a death-row inmate in Georgia during the California trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez, accused of murdering their millionaire parents. The wealthy brothers were being defended by Leslie Abramson, a lawyer of bristling and very expensive brilliance; the condemned man, by contrast, had been represented by an exhausted public defender who could barely remember his client’s name.

The Menendez trial lasted months; the Georgia court had found my interviewee guilty in three days. Despite their confessions, the first trial of the Menendez brothers’ ended in hung juries; by that time, the death-row inmate had been executed.

Hollywood trials rely on character parts, and the Jackson case is already brimming with box- office talent: the hard-nosed prosecutor, the agile defence attorney and a defendant who may well be the strangest man on the planet. If it comes to trial, the Jackson case will be next year’s blockbuster, a judicial epic of sex, drugs, race, gossip, rumour and weirdness, with a neatly hypocritical subplot about the perils of fame. There is even a soundtrack, for Jackson has written a song about his accuser with the lyrics: “Tom Sneddon is a cold man.”

Conviction or acquittal will depend on the quality of individual performances, which, in turn, depend on money. That has always been the Hollwood way, where the big name commands the biggest price. As Sam Goldwyn once said: “To hell with cost ... we’re overpaying him, but he’s worth it.”

However the Jackson case ends, the process can only reinforce the gulf between the legal process purchased by America’s celebrity aristocracy and the humdrum justice dispensed elsewhere in the US. Over the coming months, the Jackson and Spector cases will usher in a glittering parade of lawyers and sub-lawyers, forensic specialists, jury consultants, PRs and pundits and spokesmen: the hangers-on and courtiers of the celebrity court.

America’s rich are different, and nowhere more so than in the courtroom. Perhaps the richest irony is that while moral America condemns its celebrities for failing to behave by the normal rules, when these are finally brought to court, they are not tried like other defendants but according to the principles of Hollywood; for this is not justice, but showbusiness as usual.

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