‘Daddy’s little girl’ defends pop superstar’s legacy
At the age of 18, Paris Jackson is ready to reveal the story of her life, reports Carol Midgley.
A FEW years ago it was claimed that Paris Jackson hadn’t celebrated a birthday since her father, the global pop icon Michael Jackson, died. Two months before his death in 2009 he had thrown her an 11th birthday party complete with a circus and she could never face marking it again. "Being Daddy’s little girl, Paris is . . . devastated and lost," the family’s chef told a court at the time. Quite how devastated and lost, we are only just discovering. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine published this week, Paris, now 18, reveals she has attempted suicide "multiple times", including at the age of 15 when, already battling depression and drug addiction, she slashed her wrist and swallowed 20 Motrin pills. The strikingly beautiful girl who took the microphone at her father’s funeral had spiralled into grief and had been self-harming, hiding from her family both the cuts and the drug track marks on her body. When she was 14, she says, a much older "complete stranger" sexually assaulted her, but she told nobody. The hospital treating her eventually insisted that she attend a residential therapy programme and she spent her high-school sophomore year (15 to 16) and half of the following year at a therapeutic school in Utah that she says helped her greatly. "I was crazy. I was actually crazy," she said. "I was going through a lot of, like, teen angst. And I was also dealing with my depression and anxiety without any help." To this day she has on her wrist a rope-and-jade bracelet that Michael Jackson bought in Africa and was wearing when he died. Paris’s nanny made sure it was passed to her. "It still smells like him," she says.
Paris is convinced that her beloved father was murdered. She lays the blame for Jackson’s dependency on the drug propofol on Dr Conrad Murray, who was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. However, she has darker suspicions that someone, somehow, took his life.
"Absolutely," she tells the magazine. "Because it’s obvious. All arrows point to that. It sounds like a total conspiracy theory and it sounds like bullshit, but all real fans and everybody in the family knows. It was a set-up."
If this sounds like paranoia it seems Jackson fed it. "He would drop hints about people being out to get him," she says. "And at some point he was like, ’They’re gonna kill me one day.’ "
Even without the controversies that dogged Jackson throughout his life, including allegations of sexual molestation of minors and gossip over his daughter’s parentage, Paris and her brothers, Prince and Blanket, did not have what you might call a normal childhood, although she asserts that Jackson was a wonderful father. Paris and Prince were born to Debbie Rowe, a nurse, although they were whisked off to Neverland, Jackson’s Disney-style ranch home, soon after birth and she played no part in their upbringing.
It was only when Paris was 10 that she realised they must have a mother and asked her father her name. "Debbie," he replied. After Jackson died Paris began researching Rowe online and they met when she was 13.
When Prince, Jackson’s eldest, They always say, time heals. But it really doesn’t. You just get used to it. was born Jackson was reportedly so obsessed with hygiene that all baby toys had to be thrown away after a single use. Famously, Jackson also made them wear masks when in public; Paris initially thought this was "stupid" but later she told the American talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres, "I kind of realised, the older I got, he only tried to protect us". The children were, as you might expect, home-schooled. When Jackson asked if they wanted to attend normal school, they declined. "We were like, ’We don’t need friends. We’ve got you and Disney Channel,’" she told the interviewer, acknowledging that she was a "really weird kid".
As the magazine points out, she’s had a life of overexposure and overprotection, never more so than when Michael Jackson stood trial in 2005 accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy, plying minors with alcohol and showing them pornography. He was acquitted of all charges, but the trial had been humiliating and shattering to him. Paris says she remembers when she was about nine that he would cry to her over the world "hating him" (perhaps a lot to lay on a primary school-aged child). She has no doubts about his innocence and believes that the public didn’t know him. "Nobody experienced him being a father to them. And if they did, the entire perception of him would be completely and for ever changed."
She describes her magical but disciplined life at the 2,700-acre Neverland with its amusement park, zoo and cinema, which was where she spent her first seven years. "We couldn’t just go on the rides whenever we wanted to," she told Rolling Stone. "We had school every single day and we had to be good. And if we were good, every other weekend or so, we could choose whether we were gonna go to the movie theatre or see the animals or whatever."
Yet after the trial Jackson decided to leave Neverland for good and he and the children spent the next four years living in Bahrain, Las Vegas and Ireland. After Jackson’s death, the three children went to live at the Jackson family compound in Los Angeles in the care of their grandmother Katherine Jackson. Three years after Jackson’s death, in 2012, Paris hit the headlines when she tweeted that she hadn’t seen her grandmother for nine days. In a public scuffle outside the family home, some of Jackson’s siblings tried to remove Paris’s phone. Family members said Katherine was resting in Arizona.
Paris now lives in the private Los Angeles studio where her father recorded the demo of Beat It. She is sober, has a boyfriend (a drummer in a band), and is working as a model. She has 50 tattoos, nine of which are dedicated to her father.
And she has no doubt that he really is that - her father. Rumours have abounded about a number of men who could be her biological father, including the actor Mark Lester who played the title role in the film Oliver!, partly because of her light skin and blue eyes. Paris accepts none of it. "He [Michael Jackson] is my father," she told Rolling Stone. "He never wasn’t, and he never will not be." Jackson would say to her, "You’re black. Be proud of your roots."
"I consider myself black," she said. "Most people that don’t know me call me white. I’ve got light skin and, especially since I’ve had my hair blond, I look like I was born in Finland or something." She points out that it’s not unheard of for mixed-race kids to look like her.
"They always say, ’Time heals,’ "she says. "But it really doesn’t. You just get used to it. I live life with the mentality of ’OK, I lost the only thing that has ever been important to me.’ So going forward, anything bad that happens can’t be nearly as bad as what happened before. So I can handle it." She still dreams about him, she says: "I feel him with me all the time." The Times