Paris Jackson: My dad was murdered ... and I’ve tried to kill myself many times
MICHAEL Jackson’s 18-year- old daughter Paris has said she believes he was murdered because he had warned her that ‘they’re gonna kill me one day’.
She said the King of Pop’s final concerts were a ‘setup’ and that promoters AEG could have ‘worked him to death’.
Paris also revealed that she had tried to kill herself multiple times because of self-esteem issues. And she said she had been sexually assaulted by a stranger when she was 14 although she would not give details.
In her first in- depth interview Paris added that she believes her father was innocent of the child abuse allegations against him and said he used to come into her bedroom and cry about it.
Jackson died in Los Angeles in 2009 aged 50 as he prepared for sold- out comeback concerts in London. He had a cardiac arrest caused by a lethal combination of prescription drugs.
The Jackson family lost a wrongful death lawsuit against AEG when a jury ruled the singer was to blame for his own death. But Paris told Rolling Stone magazine she still hates AEG, claiming it works its performers ‘to death’.
She said that during the rehearsals her father was exhausted but couldn’t sleep even though he was being prescribed what would become fatal doses of sedatives by Conrad Murray, his personal physician, who was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
Paris said: ‘I’d tell (my father): “Let’s take a nap”. Because he looked tired. We’d see dust falling from the ceiling and hear stomping sounds because he was rehearsing upstairs.’
The model and actress said ‘all arrows’ pointed to her father having been murdered, adding: ‘It sounds like a total conspiracy theory, but all real fans and everybody in the family knows it. It was a setup.’
Paris, an heir to the $1billion Michael Jackson Family Trust, claimed that ‘a lot of people’ wanted her father dead and she wants justice. But she added: ‘It’s a chess game. And I am trying to play the chess game the right way.
‘And that’s all I can say about that right now.’
On the threats against her father, Paris said: ‘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’’.’ Paris grew up living on her father’s Neverland Ranch in California with her brothers Prince Michael, now 19, and Blanket, 14, but said it was a ‘normal life’.
Her father said they could go to a private school but they preferred being closer to him and they were home schooled. She recalls how Jackson taught them love and acceptance.
But since his death Paris said she suffered a huge upheaval and from 2009 has been battling intense self-loathing. The teenager said she had already tried to kill herself ‘multiple times’ before an attempt in June 2013 when she was 15, an incident which became public. ‘It was self-hatred, low self-esteem, thinking that I couldn’t do anything right, not thinking I was worthy of living anymore,’ she said.
She also claimed she was the victim of a sexual assault by a stranger when she was 14. She said: ‘It was really hard for me, and, at the time, I didn’t tell anybody’. And despite years of speculation she said she never doubted that Jackson was her father and that Debbie Rowe, a nurse, is her mother.
She also spoke about her ethnic background for the first time, adding: ‘I consider myself black.’
The teenager said Jackson ‘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?’
Paris, who has 50 tattoos – none of which are in tribute to her father – concedes that most people who don’t know her think she is white. She said her light skin and blond hair make it look she was ‘born in Finland’.
A white sequinned glove worn on stage by Michael Jackson in the early 1980s will be auctioned online tomorrow by Los Angeles auction house Nate D Sanders with a £60,000 reserve price.
‘He hinted that people were out to get him’