Media Outrage

LaToya Jackson sat down for an indepth interview with NewsOfTheWorld and talked about what happened the day Michael died.  She spoke about where she was when she got the call and how the kids re-acted.

Via NewsOfTheWorld:

IT WAS the most heart-rending, intimate moment of the Michael Jackson tragedy – his three stunned children gazing down at their lifeless daddy in a cold hospital emergency room.

Holding his hands in theirs, willing him to come alive. Whispering prayers for him as tears rolled down their cheeks.

In a poignant interview, the star’s closest sister La Toya reveals how she led Paris, 12, Prince Michael, 11, and seven-year-old Blanket to Michael’s side to say goodbye to him just after he died.

“It was Paris who said she wanted to see her daddy ‘one last time’,” says La Toya. “So I took them into the room. There was a towel over his face. I lifted it and Paris said, ‘Oh Daddy, I love you’.

“We hugged, and I kissed him on the forehead and the children lifted up his hands. He just didn’t look like he was gone. His eyes were half open, it was as if he was resting.

“The kids had been screaming – but once they were in that room and saw Michael they stopped and became calm.”

Singer La Toya began by reliving her terror as she heard the news of her brother’s death – and how she had an eerie PREMONITION of it.

“I was at my home just three minutes from Michael’s and was talking to a friend about the fact that Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMann off the Johnny Carson show had just died.

“I said, ‘There’s going to be another one because they always go in threes’. About an hour and a half later my father called to say Michael had been rushed to hospital.

“I jumped into my car and kept calling my mother’s assistant asking ‘How is he?’ But he wouldn’t say.

“Finally, I heard Mother in the background yelling, ‘Why don’t you just tell her?’

“Then she grabbed the phone off him and screamed: ‘HE’S DEAD!’ I nearly crashed my car. My legs went weak.”

When La Toya got there at first a nurse told her Michael was still alive.

“Suddenly I felt so good,” she says. “Then I saw Mother with the kids on her lap who were all crying. They said, ‘He’s gone’. I fell to the ground and couldn’t stop crying.

“But I caught hold of myself after about 20 minutes and realised I had to be strong for the children who were all screaming.”

It was then that La Toya – with her brothers Randy and Jermaine and her nephew Austin – took the youngsters to see their father’s body. “I asked them, ‘What do you want to say to Daddy?’ and they said private things to him,” says La Toya.

“Paris was holding his hand. We were all sitting around the bed.

“His chest was very red from the attempts to revive him but he was wearing no make-up and looked fine. He was NOT bald as some reports have said. Everything looked fine.

“We all said prayers out loud over him. We did that quite a few times over half an hour. When we walked out that room the kids didn’t cry. They were silent. They had closure.” Since then, Paris has taken her father’s death harder than her brothers. She wears Michael T-shirts every day and the walls of her room are covered with posters and pictures of her daddy.

“She still writes him letters – sweet lovely letters about how much she loves him,” says La Toya, holding back tears. “Michael told us Paris always wrote notes for him.”

One, written last week, says: “Daddy, I don’t think I was doing very well today. I noticed that when I looked over at Blanket he looked a little sad.

” I wanted to know why he was sad but he wouldn’t tell me. Do you think you can help me figure out why he was sad, because I want him to be as happy as I am and you are.”

La Toya says: “Her letters are brilliant. When you read them you cry.

“I think she’ll be an entertainer when she grows up. She is always singing her daddy’s songs.”

The boys, she says, are trying to cope. “Prince Michael is not breaking down like Paris. After he’d seen his father’s body at the hospital, I saw him get stronger as we walked away down the corridor,” says La Toya.

“He hasn’t cried since that day. But I want him to cry. I’ve told him, ‘It’s OK to cry’.

“Blanket is adorable and is coping fine.” La Toya reveals how Jackson’s youngest son came from a donor egg and donated sperm.

She says: “Michael didn’t want to know who the biological parents were. They took eggs from a donor and I believe the sperm came from one of five donors picked from a book. I don’t know who carried the child and if the surrogate knew whose child she was carrying.

“Michael was proud of Blanket and of all of his children. They were his prime concern.”

La Toya reveals how Paris paid a secret final farewell to Jackson’s open casket at Forest Lawn Cemetery on the night before the glittering star-studded memorial service.

The boys didn’t want to go and the only other people there were La Toya, her business partner Jeffre Phillips and brother Randy.

They watched in tears as Paris produced a cheap metallic split-heart mood pendant and started trying to tie it around her father’s neck.

The pendants come in pairs. Friends or lovers each wear one half of the heart – which changes colour when it touches the skin – as a symbol of their devotion to each other.

Paris was wearing her half-heart at the memorial service. La Toya says: “Paris had bought the pendant as a farewell gift for her daddy. At first she tried to put it around his neck, but it didn’t tie up, so she wrapped it around his arms.

“Then she connected her half heart and his together, said, ‘Daddy this is for you’, and pulled them apart again.

“She told me, ‘I want one half to go to Daddy and I will wear the other half forever. On Daddy it will be blue because he is cold. On me it’s purple’.

“She then pulled out a bag of children’s play gemstones and put them on Michael’s chest and around his body. It was very moving.”

La Toya had made sure Jacko’s farewell was as flamboyant as one of his stage appearances.

He was decked out in a cream- coloured, bugle-beaded and pearl- encrusted military jacket, a big gold belt with a buckle adorned by two angels and black trousers with sequins.

She also dropped a pair of the superstar’s trademark gloves and sunglasses into the £25,000 casket.

“He looked like the regular Michael – he looked fabulous,” she says. La Toya brushes aside questions about his nose and his obsession with plastic surgery. “He was teased about his nose as a child so he had it altered, that’s all,” she said. What La Toya is keen to talk about is how how Paris stunned the world by speaking at her dad’s memorial service.

She says: “Either when Smokey Robinson or Stevie Wonder were performing Paris whispered to me, ‘Auntie La Toya I wanna go up there and say something about Daddy’.

“I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I said OK. I knew Paris would do something like that because we knew how much she loved her father. She showed the world how much he meant to her with that speech.

“All that week she had asked, ‘Why did they take him away?’, but what she said about Michael being the best daddy in the world was perfect.”

La Toya explains why all the children turned up without the trademark masks her brother always insisted they wore. “They didn’t wear masks at the funeral because we want them to live a normal life now,” she says. “If we’d kept the masks on, people would have been hounding them. By taking the masks off we are hoping people will leave them alone to heal. We are hiring a special grief counsellor to help them deal with this.”

She reveals how the children were so protected from the world around them they NEVER realised Jacko was a superstar. “You must remember these kids have never seen their father perform as Michael wasn’t touring after they were born,” says La Toya.

“Michael was waiting to surprise them in London. I recall them saying recently, ‘Auntie La Toya – guess what? Our daddy is a superstar’.

“The children don’t even watch mainstream TV. They watch Nickelodeon, which is monitored, or movies. Michael never allowed them to watch TV as there are so many disturbing things.”

He also ensured that Paris and Prince Michael were kept well away from Debbie Rowe – the nurse he married to have them – and never knew that she was their mother.

“The children don’t even know who she is,” says La Toya. “They have met her but Michael never introduced her as their mother. HE was their mother, their father, their whole world.”