The death of MJ: Where there’s a will…

This is the first of what may be many Michael Jackson wills, courtesy of Roger Friedman, the guy who got 86′ed from Foxnews.com a while back for talking about file-sharing on the internets, and is now working for the Hollywood Reporter:
The issue of Michael Jackson’s will—containing disposition of assets and appointment of guardians for his children—can finally be addressed.

Sources say that Jackson’s final will was drawn up in 2002, after the delivery/birth/acquisition of baby Blanket aka Prince Michael II. The word is that Jackson’s longtime attorney and adviser John Branca, the man who kept Jackson out of many calamities in the 1980s and 90s, is the executor.

(The link is to HR sister pub Billboard.)

As Hitsville noted yesterday, Jackson’s former friends and associates will be poking their heads up in the weeks to come. This is the first sally from Branca, who was of course the source for Friedman’s story. I always found Friedman level-headed, but here, perhaps overheated in these perfervid postmorten days, he’s overwriting.

Friedman lets his feelings for Branca show in his blog:
Branca, as I’ve noted before, is Michael Jackson’s children’s best possible advocate at the moment, and the only assurance they have of not being ripped off in the long run.
As a consequence, it’s hard to take seriously his assertions. One, this isn’t “finally going to address” the status of Jackson’s will. It’s going to begin to address it.
And how does he know—how could Branca know—that it was Jackson’s “final” will?
Most particularly, if, as is often said, Jackson’s child molestation trial in 2005 was a watershed for him financially and emotionally, it’s not hard to imagine he’d taken steps to revisit it in the ensuing seven years.

I’d be more convinced if Friedman had said, “The will, written in 2002 and updated by Jackson as circumstances had changed over the ensuing seven years …. ” Since Branca is undoubtedly his source, the fact that he didn’t say that is a pretty strong indication Jackson hadn’t been updating it—and that there’s no reason to think there’s not a later, supplanting document.