Bill Whitfield: ..there was one memory that kept running through my mind, a conversation I’d had with Grace back at the Monte Cristo house when I first started working there. She and I were in the garage. I was putting together some of the security equipment, and Grace was at the little workstation she’d set up. Mr Jackson had told her to try and get in touch with somebody. 

She was getting frustrated and she said, “The boss wants me to get in touch with this person, and I keep leaving messages, but nobody’s calling me back. It’s like he forgets sometimes that people don’t want anything to do with him after all this mess.“ I said, ”What mess? What are you talking about?“ 

”The trial,“ she said. ” Since the trial, a lot of people just don’t call back anymore.“

She was giving me the heads up, filling me in on how things worked, like she often did. She started telling me about the days right after the trial was over. ”After he was acquitted,“ she said, ”we had a party at Neverland for him to celebrate, and nobody came.“

”Nobody?“

”A few people,“ she said, ”but not many“.

She said they’d put together a guest list of all these friends and people Mr. Jackson had worked with over the years. They invited close to three hundred people. Maybe fifty showed up. And a lot of people who did come were people that worked for him. People that worked the grounds at Neverland. People from his lawyer’s office. People who were paid to be there. Everyone else called and said they couldn’t make it or they had other things planned.

”And he knew,“ Grace said, ”He knew why they didn’t come. People called him and told that they loved him and that they were praying for him, but very few people would go public and say that they believed him. A lot of people act like his friends but not they’re not really his friends. If he’s not making money, they’re not really around.“

- Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days