On Monday, Los Angeles Superior Court judge Soussan Bruguera made public the order demanding XtraJet and its owner, Jeffrey Borer, to pay $20.25 million to Mark Geragos and his associate, Pat Harris. Of these funds, $18 million was ordered to be paid to Mark Geragos directly.

Of the court-ordered decision, Mr. Geragos' lawyer attorney, Brian Kabateck, stated: "The question in this case was whether it's worth it to violate people's privacy. The court sent a clear message that the cost far outweighs the benefit."

Jeffrey Borer's attorney, Lloyd Kirschbaum, has made it clear that he plans to appeal the decision. Borer claims that since the illegally recorded tape had no audio (due to a glitch in the technology) and was never sold or publicly aired, no attorney-client privileges were violated. Borer argued that the judgment was based on a "flawed premise."



MJJR.net Trivia: This case stems back to November 2003 when Michael Jackson and Mark Geragos flew on an XtraJet airline from Las Vegas to Santa Barbara to be arraigned. It was during this flight that secret video recording devices were installed by officials working for the company, and the video was later shopped to networks for a hefty price, including Fox news. Speaking to CNN on November 26, 2003, Geragos proclaimed: "I believe we'll put XtraJet out of business for this outrageous act. Anybody who's connected with it, we will put and seek to do everything else to put them out of business." In April of 2005, Michael Jackson dropped out of his portion of the civil case against XtraJet to focus all of his attention on the criminal trial. The XtraJet Web site and services went down in the summer of 2004, and in January 2007 a two-week bench trial was held where it was also reported that the company was now defunct. In 2006, Borer and an associate pleaded guilty to the federal charges stemming from this case, and received a home detention service (in which Borer spent six months staying at a five-star hotel, at his own expense.

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Source: MJJR.net / LATimes