Untouchable
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By August 1, Jermaine had decided unconditional surrender was the only course left to him. He declared his new position with a tweet that began by describing “a phone call with my son Jaafar that broke my heart. He asked, ‘Is it true that we cannot visit grandmother’s house as a family anymore?’ Enough has become enough . . . After much soul-searching, it is clearly time for us to live by Michael’s words about love not war. In this spirit, I offer this statement by way of extending an olive branch. Accordingly, I rescind my signature from the letter which was sent to the estate, and which should never have gone public.” That last part was pretty amusing to those who knew that it was Randy, Janet, and Jermaine who had sent copies of the letter to various media. Blaming his excesses on “questions of whether we stepped off him too much or whether we did enough to help when the corporate world surrounded him,” Jermaine made a plea for understanding: “When it comes to the well-being of loved ones, and especially our mother, we are perhaps understandably and unapologetically over-protective.”
The next day, August 2, the world learned what had otherwise occupied La Toya during the conflict in the family: She was negotiating with the Oprah Winfrey Network for a reality show that was to be titled, “Life with La Toya.”
Those who imagined that capitulations from Janet, Randy, and Rebbie would soon follow were startled when, on August 4, Janet’s lawyer Blair Brown issued a statement on behalf of all three Jacksons that was essentially a double down on the bad bet they had made almost three weeks earlier. The statement, of course, began with the claim that their only concern had been the well-being of their mother, Katherine, and their brother Michael’s three children, then went on to say, “The negative media campaign generated by the executors and their agents has been relentless. In recent weeks the media has received preposterous reports—all now proven to be false—of a purported kidnapping of Katherine Jackson and of physical and verbal abuse of a child.” All that banning Janet and the others from the Calabasas estate had accomplished was “to damage fundamental family relationships,” the letter asserted, and “also to isolate Katherine Jackson from anyone questioning the validity of Michael’s will.”
It was at the very least a remarkable coincidence that on the very same day an affidavit signed by Katherine Jackson was submitted to Judge Beckloff in which Mrs. Jackson effectively accused her children of doing the very things they were so vehemently denying. The affidavit began by describing how she had been held incommunicado at Miraval, with her room phone and television set shut off, her cell phone and iPad taken from her. She had never been told that Perry Sanders had flown to Tucson to meet with her, the affidavit continued, or that Janet and Jermaine had prevented him from going any further than Miraval’s lobby. She was particularly upset that she had been prevented from speaking to her grandchildren for ten full days, noting that it was not until the night she left Miraval that “I was permitted” to speak to them. “I trusted the people I was with to be honest with me,” the affidavit concluded. “They clearly were not. I never would have gone such a long time without communicating with [my grandchildren].”
Signing the affidavit had been the price Katherine was forced to pay to regain her guardianship of Prince, Paris, and Blanket. “She doesn’t want to hear or say anything bad about any of her kids,” Ribera said, “even Randy. But nothing is more important to her than Michael’s children.”
Perry Sanders followed shortly by granting a brief interview to TMZ in which he stated that Mrs. Jackson had “absolutely” no plans to press charges over the incident: “This chapter of chaos is closed and we are supportive of family unity in spite of recent events and arguably poor decisions.”
A new chapter of chaos would undoubtedly open soon enough, but Sanders, who had already outlasted the tenures of Burt Levitch and Adam Streisand as Katherine Jackson’s attorney, hoped he could survive long enough to show even the likes of Joe and Randy that he was preparing not just a well-made brick but a suit-case sized nuclear bomb for John Branca—and Howard Weitzman as well. Even as the letter sent to Branca and McClain was raising tabloid headlines to banner heights, the estate and its attorneys had been given far greater reason for concern by the request Sanders had made for “all supporting documents” of the “Second Account Current” the estate had filed with Judge Beckloff, covering the period between November 1, 2010, and December 31, 2011, with a particular emphasis on its dealings connected to AEG and on third-party payments. Branca and Weitzman certainly were smart enough to see where this was heading. In its submission to Judge Beckloff, the estate’s accounting was extensive but opaque, divided into broad categories of “disbursements” such as “Payroll,” “Public Relations,” “Attorney Fees,” “Legal Fees” and, of course, “Co-Executive and Creative Director Compensation.” There were some startling figures that indicated the scope of Michael Jackson’s properties; the automobiles he had kept in Las Vegas alone were valued at more than $675,000, while the bills for the moving and storage of his possessions alone had come to more than $1.5 million in a nineteen-month period. The estate also reported that it had employed more than a dozen law firms in London, Tokyo, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., Cleveland, and Los Angeles, but that the largest shares of legal fees had gone to the firms of Howard Weitzman ($4.28 million) and Joel Katz ($3.71 million).
Sanders had hired the best forensic accountant he could find to go through the estate’s documents piece by piece, looking for evidence of conflict of interest, self-dealing, and failure of fiduciary responsibility. Katherine’s attorney was clearly targeting anything that might suggest collusion between the estate and AEG. He already possessed perhaps enough ammunition, Sanders believed, to file a claim based on conflict of interest that targeted Branca and Weitzman personally for the estate’s failure to either file its own lawsuit against AEG or to join in the case filed by Katherine Jackson, and was prepared to make this known at the August 10 hearing before Judge Beckloff.
In apparent anticipation of such a move, the estate in early August had requested and received a postponement of the “Second Account Current” hearing before Judge Beckloff, putting it off until September 20. He had no problem with that, Sanders said; it would give him time to complete his audit of the estate’s dealings, once the “supporting documents” were turned over. On August 20, however, the estate had filed nine separate objections to Sanders’s request for documents, characterizing it as “vague and ambiguous” and “unduly burdensome.” The estate’s lawyers also claimed that some of the information sought by Katherine Jackson was “highly confidential” or was protected by attorney-client privilege and as attorney work-product. The demand Sanders had made on Mrs. Jackson’s behalf clearly infringed upon Branca and McClain’s “rights to privacy,” argued the estate’s attorneys, who also objected to the demand for documents in the “control of third parties” and assumed “the existence of certain documents” without proof that they did in fact exist.
In short, the battle had been joined even before war was declared.
The fight was starting undetected by the media, and while Katherine Jackson was off on that motor home trip that had been delayed by her diversion to Arizona. It had been a grueling month for a woman whose next birthday would be her eighty-third. On top of all that her children had put her through, Mrs. Jackson had been greeted on the day of her return home to Calabasas with a public invitation from Conrad Murray to visit him in jail. “I’ve been told that she has a desire to speak with me before she departs this life,” Murray had explained in a statement to CNN. “Seeing that she is up in age and in questionable health, and the fact that she is the mother of a very dear departed friend, it would give me great pleasure to sit with her one on one and answer any questions she might have.” Three days later, the attorneys handling Murray’s appeal of his conviction had gone to court to ask that it order a forensic analysis on the residue in a drug vial that had been a key piece of prosecution evidence at his trial. Murray’s
fingerprint had been found on the bottle, which prosecutors maintained was the one that had contained the propofol that killed Michael Jackson. If that argument could be disproven, then the court would have to find that Jackson had, after all, injected himself with the fatal dose of the anesthesia, Murray’s attorneys argued. Infuriated by his persistence, Katherine took a pass on Murray’s offer and hit the road with her most faithful companion, Trent Jackson, seeking relief together from the fractious drama of recent weeks. That series of clumsily plotted scenes had left her brood more divided than it had ever been before, and the matriarch was still suffering the sadness of it all, those closest to her said. She needed a break.
It was a comfort to Mrs. Jackson to know that, in the end, they would all be together again. Katherine’s deal with Forest Lawn to acquire the crypt in the Sanctuary of Ascension had included the purchase of eleven other burial spots on Holly Terrace, ensuring that in death Michael Jackson would be closely surrounded by the members of a family he had tried to keep at a distance for most of his life. Michael may have been one of a kind, but he was sharing with the world one last lesson in the common lot: There is no escape from family.
Timeline
July 26, 1929 Joseph Walter Jackson born in Fountain Hill, Arkansas
May 4, 1930 Kattie B. Scruse/Katherine Esther Scruse born in Barbour County, Alabama
May 29, 1950 Maureen “Rebbie” Jackson born in Gary, Indiana
May 4, 1951 Sigmund Esco “Jackie” Jackson born in Gary
October 15, 1953 Tariano Adaryl “Tito” Jackson born in Gary
December 11, 1954 Jermaine LaJuane Jackson born in Gary
May 29, 1956 La Toya Yvonne Jackson born in Gary
March 12, 1957 Marlon David Jackson born in Gary
August 29, 1958 Michael Joseph Jackson born in Gary
October 29, 1961 Steven Randall Jackson born in Gary
1961 Jackie, Tito, and Jermaine begin to perform as a singing group
1962 Marlon joins the group
1963 Michael performs “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” at his kindergarten, begins singing with his brothers
August 29, 1965 As the Jackson 5, brothers win “Tiny Tots’
(MJ’s 7th birthday) Back to School Jamboree” at Big Top Department Store in Gary with their performance of “Doin’ the Jerk”
Spring 1966 Jackson 5 wins talent show at Roosevelt High School in Gary
May 16, 1966 Janet Dameta Jackson born in Gary
Late 1966 to early 1967 Jackson 5 joins the chitlin’ circuit
Early 1967 Jackson 5 wins talent show at Chicago’s Regal Theater three times in a row
August 1967 Jackson 5 win Amateur Night contest at Apollo Theater in Harlem
January 31, 1968 Steeltown Records releases the Jackson 5’s first Record, with “Big Boy” on side A
July 23, 1968 Jackson 5’s Motown Records audition, Detroit
July 26, 1968 Jackson 5 signs with Motown
August 11, 1969 Jackson 5 introduced by Diana Ross at the Daisy in Beverly Hills, California
October 1969 Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” is released by Motown
December 14, 1969 Jackson 5 appears on The Ed Sullivan Show
December 18, 1969 Jackson 5’s first Motown album, Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5 is released
October 10, 1970 Jackson 5 perform “The Star Spangled Banner” at Game 1 of World Series, Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati
October 17, 1970 Jackson 5 become first group to have first four singles top the pop charts when “I’ll Be There” reaches #1
February 25, 1971 Joe and Katherine Jackson purchase estate at 4641 Hayvenhurst Drive in Encino, California
April 29, 1971 Michael Jackson on the cover of Rolling Stone
September 11, 1971 The Jackson 5ive animated series debuts on ABC
January 24, 1972 First Michael Jackson solo album, Got to Be There, released
August 4, 1972 Second Michael Jackson solo album, Ben, released
October 29, 1972 Jackson 5 arrive at Heathrow Airport, London, to begin first European tour
March 9, 1973 Katherine Jackson files for divorce from Joe Jackson, Los Angeles Superior Court
February 19, 1974 Michael Jackson meets Rodney Allen Rippy at first annual American Music Awards ceremony
April 9, 1974 Jackson 5 open at MGM Grand in Las Vegas
June–July 1975 Jermaine leaves Jackson 5, Randy joins the group
July 1975 Jackson 5’s Motown contract expires; they sign with CBS and become the Jacksons
June 16, 1976 The Jacksons variety show debuts on CBS
Spring 1977 Michael Jackson meets thirteen-year-old Tatum O’Neal at On the Rox club in Los Angeles
July 1977 Michael Jackson moves to New York to begin work on The Wiz
December 1978 Michael Jackson begins recording Off the Wall in Los Angeles
December 17, 1978 The Jacksons Destiny album released
Spring 1979 Michael breaks his nose in fall onstage; has first rhinoplasty surgery
Late 1979 Dr. Steven Hoefflin corrects previous nose job; relationship continues for more than twenty-five years
April 14, 1979 The Jacksons begin their Destiny North American tour in Cleveland
August 10, 1979 Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall released
Autumn 1979 Michael Jackson hires John Branca as his attorney
July 8, 1981 The Jacksons begin Triumph tour in Memphis
April–November 1982 With Quincy Jones producing, Michael Jackson records Thriller in Los Angeles
November 12, 1982 Katherine Jackson files second time for divorce from Joseph Jackson in Los Angeles Superior Court
December 1, 1982 Michael Jackson’s Thriller released
March 25, 1983 Motown 25 special taped at Pasadena Civic Auditorium
Early April 1983 Michael meets Dr. Arnold Klein
October 1983 Michael Jackson meets Emmanuel Lewis during shooting of “Thriller” video
December 2, 1983 “Michael Jackson’s Thriller” video debuts on MTV
January 27, 1984 Michael Jackson’s scalp burned while filming Pepsi commercial at Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles
February 7, 1984 Michael Jackson’s first date with Brooke Shields
February 28, 1984 Michael Jackson wins record-tying eight Grammy Awards for Thriller
January 21, 1985 Michael Jackson, assisted by Lionel Richie, finishes lyrics and music for “We Are the World”
January 22, 1985 “We Are the World” recording sessions begin at Lion Share Recording Studio in Los Angeles
Autumn 1985 Michael Jackson purchases the ATV Music Publishing Company for $47.5 million
June 1986 For first time, Michael seen in Los Angeles wearing a surgical mask
September 16, 1986 Michael on cover of National Enquirer in a hyperbaric chamber
Early 1987 Michael buys Century City condominium that will become known as “The Hideout”
January 5–July 9, 1987 Bad album recorded at Westlake Studio in Los Angeles
April 1987 Michael withdraws from Jehovah’s Witnesses
August 31, 1987 Michael Jackson’s Bad released
September 12, 1987 Bad world tour kicks off in Tokyo
April 20, 1988 Michael Jackson’s autobiography Moonwalk released
June 23, 1989 The Jacksons CBS/Epic Records contract expires; without Michael as a member of group, contract is not renewed
October 7, 1991 Elizabeth Taylor and Larry Fortensky are married at Neverland Ranch
November 14–15, 1991 Video for Michael’s “Black or White” released
November 21–22, 1991 Michael Jackson’s Dangerous released
1992 Deepak Chopra introduces Grace Rwaramba to Michael
May 1992 Michael meets Jordan Chandler in Los Angeles
January 1993 Michael introduced to Lisa Marie Presley at Brett Livingstone Strong’s home in Pacific Palisades
January 19, 1993 Michael Jackson sings “Heal the World” at 1992
> Inaugural Gala for newly elected president Bill Clinton
January 25, 1993 Jordan Chandler visits “Hideout” condo in Westwood for first time
January 31, 1993 Michael Jackson performs at halftime show of Superbowl XXVII at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena
February 10, 1993 Michael appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show, speaks for the first time publicly about being abused as a child by his father
February 27–28, 1993 Michael invites Jordan Chandler, his mother June, and sister Lily to Neverland for first time
March 28–30 1993 Michael takes Jordan Chandler, June, and Lily to Las Vegas
Early May 1993 Evan Chandler invites Michael to sleep over with Jordie at his house
May 9, 1993 Michael checks into the Hotel de Paris in Monaco with Jordie, June, and Lily, accompanied by Bob Jones
Early July 1993 Evan Chandler retains Barry Rothman; Michael’s attorney Bert Fields hires Anthony Pellicano
August 17, 1993 The LAPD officially opens a criminal investigation of Michael Jackson
August 21, 1993 Michael arrives in Bangkok to begin the third leg of his Dangerous world tour; the LAPD serves search warrants on Neverland Ranch and the Century City condo
August 30, 1993 Michael collapses backstage at concert in Singapore
August 31, 1993 Michael undergoes brain scan in Singapore hospital; Gloria Allred is retained to represent Jordie Chandler in Los Angeles
September 14, 1993 Gloria Allred resigns as Jordie’s attorney, is immediately replaced by Larry Feldman; a civil suit is filed against Michael Jackson in Los Angeles Superior Court that day
November 12–14 Via Canada and Iceland, Michael flies with Liz Taylor and Larry Fortensky to London, where he checks into a private detox clinic
November 16, 1993 In Los Angeles, a strip search warrant is obtained to examine Michael Jackson’s genitals
November 24, 1993 Trial date of March 21, 1984, is set for Jordan Chandler’s civil suit against Michael Jackson