Suit Over Secret Michael Jackson Video Settled

Attorney Mark Geragos and an associate have reached a $2.5 million settlement of their lawsuit against a now-defunct charter jet company whose owner ordered the 2003 secret airborne videotaping of Michael Jackson with his lawyers.

Geragos will receive $1.66 million and attorney Pat Harris $833,333 to resolve their lawsuit against Jeffrey Borer, former owner of the Santa Monica-based XtraJet, said plaintiffs' attorney Brian Kabateck. The judgment cannot be avoided by any bankruptcy proceedings involving Borer, Kabateck said.

A retrial of the case was scheduled to begin today, but the parties met with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Yvette Palazuelos on Friday and announced the accord.

Geragos and Pat Harris were awarded a multimillion-dollar judgment by Judge Soussan G. Brugera in March 2008 following a non-jury first trial. But the decision was overturned in January 2010 by a panel of the 2nd District Court of Appeal. Brugera subsequently removed herself from the case and it was reassigned to Palazuelos.

Lawyers for Geragos asked for a new trial on damages in lieu of an alternative proposal by the appellate justices that he accept a total award of $500,000 for himself and $250,000 for Harris.

In July, Palazuelos ruled Geragos and Harris were entitled to have a jury in the retrial.

In her earlier ruling, Brugera called the secret videotaping -- no audio was recorded -- "highly offensive to a reasonable person" and said Borer was "the mastermind behind a scheme to desecrate and exploit sacred attorney-client communications for personal profit."

Borer lawyer Lloyd Kirschbaum claimed Brugera ignored crucial evidence in favor of his client in the first trial and made the wrong conclusion that the tape included sound. Without audio, Geragos and Harris did not have grounds to claim a breach of the attorney-client privilege, Kirschbaum said. Kirschbaum also maintained the award was excessive and that punitive damages should not have been awarded. He did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

The taping occurred on Nov. 20, 2003, as an aircraft owned by XtraJet took Jackson, Geragos and Harris from Las Vegas to Santa Barbara so the singer could surrender in a child molestation case. Geragos was representing Jackson at the time, but the entertainer later replaced him with Tom Mesereau, who helped get the singer acquitted of the criminal charges in 2005.

Geragos, Harris and Jackson filed the invasion-of-privacy suit against Borer and XtraJet in November 2003. Jackson dropped out as a plaintiff in April 2005 and died in June 2009 at age 50.

Geragos testified that after the XtraJet incident, he was no longer comfortable speaking with clients about sensitive matters over the telephone. Jett Reeves, an aircraft mechanic who admitted installing the cameras at Borer's direction, pleaded guilty in 2006 in U.S. District Court to a federal conspiracy charge and was sentenced that July to eight months in prison and six months in a halfway house. Borer was sentenced in October 2006 to home detention and fined $10,000.