‘I feel him with me all the time’
PARIS JACKSON
In her first ever public interview, Paris Jackson, the daughter of Michael Jackson and Debbie Rowe, appears on the cover of this month’s Rolling Stone. Jackson had a lot to say, mostly on the bond between her and her father.
“They always say, ‘ Time heals,’” she said, reminiscing on the seven years since his death. “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. ... I feel him with me all the time.”
The 18- year- old has been battling online bullying and accusations since his death over whether or not Michael was her biological father. “He is my father,” she said. “He will always be my father. He never wasn’t, and he never will not be. People that knew him really well say they see him in me, that it’s almost scary.”
“I consider myself black,” she said, adding that her dad “would look me in the eyes and he’d point his finger at me and he’d be like, ‘ You’re black. Be proud of your roots.’ And I’d be like, ‘ OK, he’s my dad, why would he lie to me?’ So I just believe what he told me. ‘ Cause, to my knowledge, he’s never lied to me.”
While she acknowledged her white complexion, Paris also noted that it isn’t unheard for mixed- race children to look like her.
After talking about falling into a deep depression and drug addiction in 2013, and her experiences with a sexual assault, Jackson recalled her history of self- harm and “multiple” suicide attempts.
“It was just self- hatred, low self- esteem, thinking that I couldn’t do anything right, not thinking I was worthy of living anymore.”
She spent time in a therapeutic school after her last suicide attempt, and has since remained clean and considers herself to be a “completely different person.”
When it came to discussing Michael’s death, Jackson placed the blame on Dr. Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Michael’s death in 2011 and served two years in prison for the medication he administered Jackson to treat his chronic insomnia.
But Jackson does not believe the drug is what killed her father, rather she believes he was murdered.
“Absolutely,” she said. “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. He would drop hints about people being out to get him, and at some point he was like, ‘ They’re gonna kill me one day.’"