LOS ANGELES (CNN) — Conrad Murray, who literally sang his innocence in a jail cell interview with CNN in April, has given his first interviews since spending two years in jail for the death of Michael Jackson.
Australia’s “60 Minutes” promoted a video interview with Murray to air Sunday, while London’s Daily Mail newspaper published a print interview.
“I did not kill Michael Jackson,” Murray told the Mail. “He was a drug addict. Michael Jackson accidentally killed Michael Jackson.”
The cardiologist said he found Jackson to be “in crisis at the end of his life, filled with panic and misery” as he prepared for his comeback concerts in 2009.
“By the end Michael Jackson was a broken man,” he told the newspaper. “I tried to protect him but instead I was brought down with him.”
His claims are similar to what he told CNN in two separate interviews earlier this year.
“Why am I innocent? Because I did nothing wrong, and all I tried to do was to help a friend who I encountered in a devastated state. And I tried to do everything possible to help my friend,” Murray told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Murray told Lemon he is a scapegoat who had the bad luck of being “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
When Murray called in to CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” from his jail cell phone for a live interview on April 2, he serenaded Cooper with a sad Nat King Cole Christmas song that he said “tells my story.”
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“He is a little boy that Santa Claus forgot, and goodness knows, he did not want a lot. He wrote a note to Santa for some crayons and a toy. It broke his little heart when he found Santa hadn’t come. In the streets, he envied all the lucky boys, but goodness knows, he didn’t want a lot. I’m so sorry for that laddie who hasn’t got a daddy. He’s a little boy that Santa Claus forgot.”
“That song tells my story,” Murray then said. “That’s how I grew up. I had no toy. I had nothing. As I grew up, my heart has been whole and my heart says to help, and all I do is to give. I want to give.”
Sunday’s newspaper interview gets into too-much-information territory, with Murray revealing intimate details of his nightly treatments of Jackson.
“You want to know how close we were? I held his penis every night to fit a catheter because he was incontinent at night,” he said.
A jury concluded after a two-month trial in 2011 that Murray’s negligence led to Jackson’s death from an overdose of the surgical anesthetic propofol.
Murray told investigators he gave Jackson nightly infusions of propofol to treat his intractable insomnia for two months, so he could rest for rehearsals.
Prosecutors argued that Murray’s negligence included leaving Jackson unmonitored and unattended while the powerful anesthetic was flowing into his vein through an IV drip.
Deputy District Attorney David Walgren, arguing for the maximum four years in jail, said Murray was “playing Russian roulette with Michael Jackson’s life every single night,” by using propofol to put him to sleep in “a reckless, obscene manner.”
Murray’s lawyers unsuccessfully argued that Jackson self-administered the drug while Murray was out of his bedroom.
His appeal of the conviction is still pending in a California court.
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