SANTA MARIA, California (AFP) – The mother of the teenager who accused Michael Jackson of sex abuse on Monday clashed with the star’s lawyer for a second day as he sought to expose her as a greed-driven liar.

The witness traded barbs with Jackson’s lead attorney Thomas Mesereau during his fiery cross-examination of the woman whose testimony is central to the case against Jackson.

Her account of the events surrounding the claims of child abuse and an alleged plot to kidnap the boy and his family could make or break the case against the pop icon.

But in a prickly exchange with Mesereau, she refused to answer key questions, said she had only hazy recollections of events or said she did not understand the questions.

“I don’t understand your question,” or “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she told Mesereau repeatedly, turning to jurors to describe apparently unrelated events in a frequently jumbled and unintelligible way.

In a dramatic and frequently bizarre exchange Friday, she butted heads with Mesereau, objecting to his tone, accusing him of trying to humiliate her and even comparing herself to Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry.

On Monday, she refused to say whether she was represented by a lawyer at the time that she claims she and her children were being held prisoner by Jackson and his aides in February or March 2003, citing attorney-client privilege.

“She’s a very difficult witness,” said legal analyst Jim Moret who is following the case, adding that even the prosecution had requested that parts of her testimony be stricken from the official court record.

The woman claimed she was forced by Jackson aides to rehearse lines 10 times a day for a 25-minute video in which she and her children heaped praise on Jackson and described him as a father figure.

Prosecutors claim that Jackson and five employees held the family prisoner until they agreed to make the so-called rebuttal video to dispel speculation about the star’s relationship with his future accuser, a then 13-year-old cancer patient.

“She may be sticking to her story to her detriment,” Moret said. “To say now that she had been coached 10 times a day over a period of days … may come back to haunt her.”

Mesereau is trying to portray the woman as a financial predator with a history of lying under oath and coaching her children to lie in order to win cash settlements in lawsuits she filed in the past.

He claimed in opening arguments that the woman used money collected at fund raisers for her sick son and donated by celebrities to pay for cosmetic surgery and on other luxuries for herself.

On Monday she claimed to have a fuzzy recollection of how two US$10,000 donations from a US comedienne were spent.

When asked by Mesereau whether her son benefited from the cash, she said: “I think so, there was no strings – it was just to the family,” adding that the cash was likely spent on food and household expenses.

She also denied lying to a local reporter who wrote about her son’s plight, citing the boy’s mother as saying that one of his cancer treatments cost US$12,000 that was not covered by the family’s insurance policy.

She told jurors she had said the treatment cost US$1,200 and that the reporter had made a mistake.

“It was a typo; they added an extra zero. At no time did I say it was costing us a single penny. I told her it was miracle of God it was being covered,” she said.

Mesereau has alleged the woman lied to the newspaper – which launched an appeal for the family – in order to extort cash from sympathetic readers.

Court watchers say Mesereau has badly damaged the 37-year-old witness’s credibility in the eyes of jurors.

On Friday she admitted lying under oath in a lawsuit she filed against a department store and claimed that her lavish praise on Jackson in the rebuttal video was entirely scripted.

But on Monday she said she believed what she was saying when she made similar positive comments in a recorded interview with a private detective working for Jackson’s lawyer four days earlier.

Jackson, 46, has denied 10 charges, including that he molested the woman’s son plies him with alcohol and conspired to hold the family prisoner. he faces up to 20 years if he is convicted on all counts.