Photo: LISA O’CONNOR / AFP via Getty Images
We already knew that Paris Jackson didn’t exactly have a normal childhood. But now, the singer is publicly sharing more details about what it was like to grow up in the shadow of her famous (and embattled) father, Michael Jackson. On Wednesday, the 28-year-old sat down with Alex Cooper for an episode of Call Her Daddy. The wide-ranging conversation swerved from Paris’s spirituality and her sobriety to ending her engagement with her bandmate Justin Long. Cooper then prompted Paris to talk about losing her dad. (He died 16 years ago at age 50 after suffering from a heart attack caused by a drug overdose.) The singer admitted that at her father’s 2009 funeral, when no one else in the family seemed like they were going to speak in his honor, she decided to give an impromptu speech herself. “No one moved,” she said. “So I was like, ‘Fuck it. We ball.’”
Seems like a pretty good attitude going into a public memorial service at the Staples Center. Paris’s brothers — Prince, now 29, and Bigi, now 24 — were also on hand for the service. “It felt like it happened very slowly, and it felt like someone’s got to say something,” she recalled. “Little bro is not going to do it. Older bro is not moving. Alright.” Jackson also told Cooper that she has never watched the footage from the funeral to see how she did.
The siblings, of course, have endured a lot together. Paris opened up about living at Neverland Ranch, which she said was never intended to be a playground for the Jackson kids. “It was made very, very clear that all of the attractions there were not for us, that they did not belong to us,” she added. “That was for underprivileged children and children that were terminally ill that couldn’t go to Disneyland.”
But Paris insisted that she didn’t “grow up” at Neverland — only that she, along with her older brother, had spent the first few years of her life there, and just so happened to have a private amusement park, zoo, movie theater, and train station nearby. “I’d wake up, and I’d go to school,” Paris said of her homeschooling on the premises. “We’d go to the room that was our classroom.”
At least it seems as though Paris is thriving now: She’s making her own music, scoring major wins in her ongoing estate battle, and staying as far away as possible from that biopic. In my world, we call that protecting our peace.
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