Well, joining us now by phone right now from the Los Angeles county jail is Conrad Murray. Also with us, his attorney, Valerie Wass.
Dr. Murray, appreciate you being with us. There are a lot of questions I'd like to ask you obviously about this AEG Live trial. I know you can't answer them or won't. Have you been subpoenaed to testify in the trial and would you in fact be willing to give testimony in this trial if you were?
At this time, I have not been subpoenaed, and I am not interested in giving testimony in the trial.
But do you feel any guilt over the death of Michael Jackson?
I am an innocent man, Anderson. I maintain that innocence. I must tell you, I am extremely sorry that Michael has passed on. It's a tremendous loss for me. It's a burden I have been carrying for the longest while and it's a burden I will carry for an indefinite period of time. The loss is just overwhelming. He was very close to me, I was close to him. He was an absolutely great friend.
And to be honest, I became a sounding board for Michael. He offloaded and regurgitated everything that was bad in his past and everything that was dark. And I have been the absorbent capacity for that.
Let me ask you about Propofol. As you know, it's supposed to be administered in a hospital. It's a sedative used for surgery and you certainly were not the first doctor to give Michael Jackson Propofol. But you did order a lot of it. And as a doctor who swore to do no harm, I guess I just still don't understand how you could give this clearly troubled person this powerful sedative in a non-hospital setting?
I think that's a very good question, Anderson. The thing about it is, I, nobody knows but I basically was doing my endeavor to get Michael away from Propofol. Yes, indeed, I did order Propofol to his home but I was not the one that brought Propofol into his home. I met him at his own stash.
I did not agree with Michael, but Michael felt that, you know, it was not an issue because he had been exposed to it for years and he knew exactly how things worked. And given the situation at the time, it was my approach to try to get him off of it, but Michael Jackson was not the kind of person you can just say put it down and he's going to do that.
As a doctor, though, aren't you the one who is supposed to be in a position to say to a patient, I will no longer treat you if you do not follow my instructions? Because from the time you got hired in March of 2009, according to prosecutors, you started ordering Propofol in April and between then and June, you ordered more than four gallons of the stuff.
How do you see, Anderson, that the whole story was not told in court. I was offered to be Michael's doctor on the 12th in December 2008, and you know, and even after that month, the contract says I’ll work from May to June, but certainly I worked before that.
But you did order all that Propofol.
So there, there is Propofol that I met his home and I used it. Certainly, you know, again, as I said, I was trying to take the item away from Michael that he, he could have a more normal lifestyle. It did not agree with him, whether it was on the concert tour or not. I did not. You know, was it rough for me the day after, again, in retrospect but my intentions were to get the thing away from him and I succeeded. I was able to wean him off of it. That was three days before he passed away. There was absolutely no Propofol given to that man.