By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2011
When MSNBC scheduled a documentary built around Conrad Murray, FishbowlLA flagged the lawsuit that followed the money — and questioned the wisdom of the deal that produced it.
Then
The documentary Michael Jackson and the Doctor: A Fatal Friendship was set to air on MSNBC, and Murray had reportedly been paid $300,000 by NBCUniversal for his participation. According to Radar Online, none of that money was to reach Murray directly; most was earmarked for his lawyers, with the remainder going to his girlfriend.
That arrangement did not satisfy Murray’s creditors. A company called Digirad Imaging Solutions sued Murray, MSNBC, NBCUniversal and several other media companies to recover more than $147,000 it said it was owed.
OC Weekly’s Matt Coker had the filing. Lodged in Los Angeles County Superior Court by attorney Timothy Aires, the complaint sought costs, fees and interest, and characterized the production entities — among them October Films and Zodiak Media Group — as ‘mere subterfuges’ used to shield Murray from his obligations. FishbowlLA’s closing line was blunt: NBCUniversal had arguably invited trouble by climbing into bed with Murray in the first place.
Now
Conrad Murray had been convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson and served part of a four-year sentence, winning early release in 2013 amid California’s jail-crowding reductions. His medical license was gone, and in the years that followed he surfaced only intermittently in the press.
The episode is an early example of a tension that has only sharpened: networks and streamers paying figures at the center of criminal cases for documentary access. The ‘chequebook’ true-crime model the 2011 item eyed warily became a routine and routinely litigated feature of the genre.
MSNBC and NBCUniversal moved on through their own ownership turbulence, as the cable-news business the documentary belonged to entered a long structural decline. The lawsuit itself reads now as a small, telling footnote — proof that the money in a pay-for-access deal rarely stays where the contract says it will.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.