Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  By then, Ribera, Trent, and TJ Jackson had become convinced that the five siblings who were behind whatever was going on intended to somehow gain a conservatorship over Katherine Jackson, possibly by demonstrating her incompetence to serve as the guardian of Michael’s children. The money, as everyone knew, would follow those three kids.

  That very day the children’s court-appointed attorney, Margaret Lodise, went to Judge Beckloff to recommend that Katherine Jackson be stripped of her guardianship of Prince, Paris, and Blanket, temporarily, until a determination could be made about whether she was able to responsibly care for them.

  On Friday, private investigator Tom Grant joined the group at the Calabasas house. A former L.A. sheriff’s Department investigator, Grant “really calmed everyone and got us focused,” Ribera recalled. He also convinced the people at the Calabasas house they should bring in law enforcement. On Saturday, July 21, Trent Jackson went to the Malibu station of the L.A. County sheriff’s office, the same building where Randy Jackson and Janice Smith had filed their complaint against him a year earlier, to report Katherine Jackson as a missing person. When someone at the sheriff’s department leaked that to the media, the story went international.

  In the United States, every cable news outfit and all three broadcast networks were chasing the story, mainly by following the tweets of Paris Jackson. “Yes, my grandmother is missing i haven’t spoken with her in a week i want her home now,” Paris told her more than 500,000 Twitter followers on the morning of Sunday, July 22. TJ Jackson made his first public pronouncement on what was taking place in a tweet to Paris that read, “I know it’s completely unfair for them to do this to you and your brothers. We will keep trying. I love you.” Jermaine’s attempt at media management was to send out his own tweet: “I want to reassure everyone (incl all sudden medical experts) that Mother is fine but is resting up in AZ on the orders of a doctor, not us.” Paris answered with a tweet that read, “the same doctor that testified on behalf of dr murray saying my father was a drug addict (a lie) is caring for my grandmother . . . just saying.”

  On Sunday afternoon, the sheriff’s investigators called to say that Mrs. Jackson had been located in Arizona but wouldn’t divulge her exact location. Local law enforcement had spoken to her, the Los Angeles sheriff’s investigators said, and Mrs. Jackson had told them she was fine. Ribera, the daughter of a San Francisco police chief, ascertained that the authorities in Arizona had only spoken to Mrs. Jackson while she was surrounded by members of her family. “You have to get her away from them and ask her what’s been going on without them hovering over her,” Ribera said. “That’s the protocol.” The sheriff’s investigators said they would be flying to Arizona aboard a chartered jet early the next morning and would check on Mrs. Jackson’s condition themselves when they arrived. Ribera asked to come along, but the request was refused.

  That evening “it became really serene at the house,” Ribera recalled. With the staff gone, and especially with Janice Smith out of the picture, “everyone was calm and peaceful,” Ribera said. “The kids . . . had had their nanny in their ear, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, a lot of people trying to manipulate them, but now they were thinking for themselves. You could see it. . . . And TJ was amazing.”

  The most outlandish developments thus far, though, would take place on Monday, July 23. First, the sheriff’s investigator in charge phoned from Arizona to say that Janet Jackson’s security detail had met them at “the location” and had told them they could not see Mrs. Jackson. “And I said, ‘Well, why’d you stop there?’” Ribera recalled. “And they said, ‘We didn’t have jurisdiction because it’s Arizona.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you bring in local law enforcement?’ And they said, ‘Well, we thought she was fine.’ I said, ‘If you thought she was fine, why did you go to Arizona in the first place?’ And they just said, ‘Oh, well, Arizona took care of it. We did all we could.’ They were pathetic.”

  “8 days and counting. something is really off, this isn’t like her at all . . . i wanna talk directly to my grandmother!!<|3” Paris Jackson tweeted to her followers. Jermaine answered with a tweet that insisted Prince and Paris were not “being ‘blocked’ from speaking with Mother . . . She is merely an 82-year-old woman following doctor’s orders to rest up and de-stress, away from phones and computers.”

  The adults at the Calabasas house gathered to try to figure out where in Arizona Katherine might be. TJ got La Toya on the phone, but “La Toya wanted to be Switzerland, totally neutral,” Ribera remembered, and wouldn’t get involved. Must be the only time in her life that La Toya didn’t want to talk to the media when they wanted to talk to her, someone at the house observed, and they all shared a chuckle. La Toya did tell them, though, that she thought her mother might be at Miraval.

  Shortly after 1 p.m., Prince and Paris were in an SUV returning to the Calabasas house through the double gates that defended the driveway when another SUV, loaded with passengers, pulled up right on its bumper. Randy Jackson was at the wheel of the tailing SUV, which got in through the main gate and made it to the inner gate just as the steel barrier was coming down. “He just drove through and broke the arm off,” recalled Ribera, who was watching from the property’s pool house. The SUV braked to a stop in the driveway, and “all of a sudden the doors open and there’s this swarm of people pointing cameras all around,” Ribera remembered. She thought it was paparazzi at first, Ribera said, then recognized that the cameras were cell phones and that the people in the driveway were Randy Jackson, Janet Jackson, Jermaine Jackson, and several of Prince, Paris, and Blanket’s cousins, including Randy’s oldest daughter, Genevieve, and Jermaine’s two youngest sons, Jaafar and Jermajesty. It was friendly at first, hugs and handshakes all around, though of course everyone wondered why Janet, Randy, Jermaine, and the others were aiming their phone cameras at them, even as they said hello.

  Rebbie’s son Austin, who had come to “visit” a little earlier, joined the others in the driveway. “They had actually planted cousins in the house to sort of spy and report,” Ribera would marvel later, “to manipulate the kids and try get them to leave the property without security. That hadn’t worked, so they came in themselves.”

  Trent and TJ Jackson stood confused for a few moments, until they realized that the other Jacksons were there to take Michael’s children. The timing of this guerilla action, though, was not propitious. Only two security guards at a time were supposed to be on duty at the Calabasas house, but the guards had called a meeting that day and eight of them were in attendance. None of the guards were anxious to get into a physical altercation with Katherine Jackson’s children, though, and so they mostly stood by with their palms raised, waiting for someone to tell them what they should do.

  Janet Jackson went for her niece Paris, while Randy approached Prince and Jermaine engaged the guards, all three of them still using their cell phones as video cameras. When Janet and Randy told Paris and Prince they were coming with them, both teenagers flatly refused. Prince turned his back on Randy, but Jermaine pulled the boy aside and told him that this was something that had been in the planning for three years and that it was important for him to join in with the rest of the family. Prince shrugged off Jermaine and continued walking toward the house. Paris, meanwhile, made it clear to Janet that she wouldn’t be leaving the Calabasas estate. When Janet tried to snatch Paris’s cell phone, the same phone the girl had been using to tweet to the world, Paris pulled it away and turned a shoulder to protect it. Janet spoke to her briefly, then reached for the phone again and Paris took another step back. TMZ would initially report, based on anonymous sources, that Janet told Paris she was a “spoiled little bitch” and that Paris answered, “This is our house, not the Jackson family house. Get the fuck out!” TMZ also said the two exchanged slaps. TMZ recanted, though, when Janet threatened legal action. It’s obvious from the video of the confrontation between Janet and Paris that there were no slaps. What was said remains a matter of dispute. CNN would repo
rt that Janet “scolded her niece for using her phone to write about family issues on Twitter,” and the network was not threatened with a lawsuit.

  Eventually TJ and Trent realized that the other Jacksons had come to the Calabasas house to take Michael’s children off the property (then on to Arizona, they would learn later) and ordered the security guards not to let that happen. When the guards blocked his way, Randy, who had been smiling up until then, began to snarl warnings about not interfering in a family matter. One of the guards suggested that perhaps he should leave the property and Randy became enraged, cursing in the man’s face, which was when Trent Jackson grabbed him. The two grappled for a moment, then the bull-strong Trent put Randy in a headlock and subdued him. Jermaine, cursing at the top of his lungs, came briefly to his brother’s aid and would claim later that Trent grabbed him by the throat and punched him in the face.

  Whatever was true about that, the scuffle ended quickly when Trent withdrew with Prince and Paris into the house. Those who were staying at the Calabasas house would say later that the saddest thing about the entire scene was the way Jermaine had used his sons. “I mean, Jermaine is cursing as bad as you can curse in front of these kids and fighting and doing all this stuff, and he’s telling his kids to videotape it,” Ribera recalled. “And Jermajesty . . . is just sobbing. His face is covered in tears. He’s taping, but he’s sobbing.” TJ Jackson approached the boy to tell him, “Go upstairs. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be doing this.” “But my Dad told me I have to,” the weeping boy replied.

  While five or six of the security guards faced off against Randy, Janet, Jermaine, and the cousins in the driveway, two other guards and Trent Jackson led Prince and Paris out the backdoor of the house and into a gulley that ran along the rear of the property, trying to get them away before the invading Jacksons came after them.

  A sheriff’s car answering a 911 call arrived at the front gate at almost that exact moment and everyone froze in place. After noting various accusations of battery and trespassing, the sheriff’s deputies persuaded Randy, Janet, and Jermaine, and their group to leave the property. “Gotta love fam,” Paris tweeted to her followers shortly after they were gone.

  Shortly after Randy, Janet, and Jermaine departed, Ribera phoned the estate’s probate attorney Jeryll Cohen to tell her what had taken place. “I normally would never want to ask for the estate’s help, but it was a situation,” Ribera explained. “For one strange moment in time our interests were aligned.” Since the Calabasas house was being rented by the estate, it was up to the estate to lock the place down. Not long after Ribera spoke to Cohen, Margaret Lodise called to say she would be coming out in the evening to talk to the children.

  Perry Sanders had remained at his home in Colorado Springs all during the drama thus far, trying to convince himself—and Ribera—that staying out of this family dispute was the wisest course. Until he had spoken to Katherine Jackson, Sanders was insisting to the reporters who called him, he would make no statements nor form any firm opinions. Privately, he was all but certain that what Ribera, along with Trent and TJ Jackson, believed to be taking place probably was. He phoned Tito’s lawyer to say, “I don’t know what I’ve done to piss your client off, but I’ll be happy to talk to him about it and see if we can clear this up.” Tito was in fact already backtracking, telling his sons that he really hadn’t known what he was signing when he put his signature to that letter, but had just gotten “caught up.” Randy was very persuasive, Tito explained: He had thought he was just closing ranks with the others against Branca. He hadn’t meant to go after Trent or Perry Sanders, didn’t know there was anything about them in the letter, and didn’t know either about this claim that his mother had suffered a “mini-stroke.”

  By Sunday, July 22, the day after the missing person’s report was filed, Sanders had realized there was a battle taking place and that it was largely being waged in the tabloid press, the Internet news media, and the Twittersphere. TMZ was the central clearinghouse, but Roger Friedman’s Showbiz 411 column was almost as important. The X17online Web site was also a player, but they seemed to have become, like ABC News, a public relations vehicle for Randy and Janet Jackson. That had been made clear on that Sunday when X17 posted a photo provided by Janet and Randy that showed Katherine Jackson smiling and playing Uno with her family in Arizona, accompanied by text that mocked the idea she was a “missing person.” Sanders warned X17 management that they had better start doing a better job of telling the truth. He continued to provide “deep background” to the TMZ staff, but was mostly talking to Roger Friedman. Friedman was the smartest tabloid reporter he’d ever spoken to, Sanders would explain, and maybe the only one who seemed to have some actual interest in reporting the truth. By the evening of the July 23, Friedman was at the cutting edge of reporters on the story, the first to describe in any detail the process by which Katherine Jackson had gotten to Arizona and the circumstances of the assault on the Calabasas estate.

  Ribera and those keeping vigil in Calabasas, TJ especially, were heartened when Tito Jackson issued a statement that read, “I completely retract my signature from the July 17 letter sent to the executors of my brother Michael’s estate and repudiate all the claims made against them,” then added, “I don’t want any part of that letter whatsoever.”

  The four siblings whose signatures had not been withdrawn could feel the tide turning. The media was sticking it to them with evident relish after the bungled attempt to remove Prince, Paris, and Blanket from the Calabasas estate. Within a few hours of the debacle, Sandy Ribera issued a statement to reporters that, “Jackson family members ambushed Katherine Jackson’s home after their vehicle tore through security gates on the tails of the SUV containing Michael Jackson’s children,” and then suggested that perhaps the FBI should get involved in this case, since Katherine Jackson had been transported across state lines. That evening Paris tweeted, “days are counting, something is really off, this isn’t like her, all i want to do is talk directly to my grandmother.” That evening, Roger Friedman produced a column about the day’s events with a headline that wondered if Janet Jackson had “Lost Her Mind.” The next day, Friedman’s column ran under a headline that identified Randy Jackson as “Michael’s Delusional Brother.” Paris sent out a tweet that read, “days are counting and help me God, i will make whoever did this pay.” Articles began appearing in newspapers that suggested Katherine Jackson and been “kidnapped” or “abducted” by members of her own family. ABC was reporting that Margaret Lodise was preparing to file court papers that would “demand that Katherine Jackson be allowed contact with the children.”

  Janet, Randy, and Jermaine tried to fight back with their own publicity campaign. Jermaine issued a statement that the questions about his mother’s whereabouts were nothing more than “a conspiracy to deflect attention from a letter we wrote asking for the resignation of [the] executors.” Randy proved he was not yet a complete pariah by turning to the one media personality who would still take him seriously, Al Sharpton. Speaking by phone, Randy immediately told Sharpton that his mother was “doing great,” then repeated the story that she was in Arizona only because “her health was ailing and her doctors ordered that she get immediate rest, isolate herself from the outside world and rest.” He parroted Jermaine’s line about deflecting attention from the letter to Sharpton, who, rather than asking probing questions, jumped on the opportunity to explain his own important role in this part of the drama. “Now, just for complete disclosure,” Sharpton told his viewers, “I want to show people the date that is being in question, that weekend that Michael Jackson was to have signed that will in Los Angeles, he was, in fact, in Harlem with me that weekend. And I am showing that video now.” When Sharpton asked him again, “Why all this drama that we are hearing in the media in your opinion?” Randy sounded like he was enjoying himself for the first time in days. “Well, because executives of the estate, John Branca and John McClain, are doing—they are using the children to try and
put pressure on my mom to try and come out and get her to say things in their favor, to kind of clean up their image. They know they have been caught, they know that they falsified the document. And they know that there are questions that we want answered.”

  Janet, meanwhile, continued to deploy ABC News reporters as her unpaid PR spokespersons. It was through ABC that she and her siblings had first responded to Trent Jackson’s trip to the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department with a statement that read, “This fallacious missing persons report was created by the very person and persons we are trying to protect our mother from. We feel that there is a conspiracy to deflect the attention away from a letter we wrote asking for the resignation of the executors, John Branca and John McClain, as well as some of her ‘advisors’ and ‘caregivers.’” Now Janet’s people were talking to ABC about arranging an interview with Katherine Jackson, so that the “missing” woman could tell the world she was just fine.