Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Paris was in the lead paragraph of nearly every article about the June 25 anniversary. Five days before, she had posted online a photograph of Michael Jackson kissing Debbie Rowe on the cheek, above the caption, “Mommy and Daddy!” On the anniversary itself, she had tweeted, “RIP Michael Jackson . . . Dad you will forever be in my heart<3 i love you.”

  Conrad Murray was also featured in articles about the anniversary. Murray was now lodged in the Segregation Unit at the Los Angeles County Men’s Jail, where his neighbors included disgraced major league baseball star Lenny Dykstra and the first man Janet Jackson had ever married, James Debarge. Debarge, it was reported, had actually become friendly with Murray. A week before the anniversary, his new attorney quoted the doctor as saying the conditions of his incarceration were destroying his health. He only got fresh air once a month and clean underwear just once a week, Murray had complained to her, and was suffering from a constant headache he feared might be a brain tumor. “I may not make it out of here alive,” the lawyer quoted him as saying. “This is a very dangerous place. I’m in here dying. The system is intent on killing me.”

  Murray had chosen June 25 as the day on which he once again protested his innocence, insisting through his lawyer that he was not responsible for Michael Jackson’s death. Her client’s one regret, the lawyer said, was that he hadn’t testified on his own behalf, and Murray remained intent upon resuming his career as a physician when he was released.

  June 25, 2012, was also the date that the surviving members of the Jackson 5 had chosen for a major promotion of a “Unity” concert tour performing Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson material, which would stretch from coast to coast and include at least twenty stops. “The brothers don’t know this,” Jermaine told London’s Daily Telegraph on the anniversary date, “but I’ve broken down several times and cried during rehearsals.”

  Katherine Jackson was at least as excited about the Unity tour as any of her sons. Mrs. Jackson was planning to “be a sort of groupie,” as one of her advisors put it, going on the road with her faithful caretaker, Joe Jackson’s nephew Trent Jackson, in the Prevost motor home Michael had purchased for her shortly before his death. She and Trent would be seated in the front row at each of the concerts in the southwest region, beginning in Albuquerque on July 17 and including dates in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Southern California, traveling from city to city in the Prevost. She might even follow her sons north to Saratoga, California, Katherine said, and maybe even on to Lincoln City, Oregon. What Mrs. Jackson didn’t know, of course, was that some of her children and grandchildren had a whole different surprise prepared for her.

  The opening act of the craziest Jackson family drama since Michael’s death would begin on July 14, 2012, when Dr. Allan Metzger arrived at the Calabasas estate at the behest of Janet Jackson and was introduced as an associate of Katherine Jackson’s longtime Beverly Hills physician, a woman doctor whom she trusted, literally, with her life. Her doctor wanted her to receive a physical before she set out on this road trip, Mrs. Jackson was told. Metzger conducted a brief examination, then told Katherine that her blood pressure was elevated. It really wouldn’t be a good idea, the doctor said, to make this trip in a motor home. To avoid placing strain on her heart, Metzger explained, Mrs. Jackson should fly to Albuquerque.

  Though terribly disappointed, Katherine agreed to leave the next morning, Sunday, July 15, on a commercial jet out of LAX, accompanied by her daughter Rebbie, Rebbie’s daughter Stacee Brown (no relation to the ghostwriter), and Mrs. Jackson’s personal assistant, Janice Smith. Not until they were at the airport did Mrs. Jackson realize they weren’t headed to Albuquerque, but rather to Tucson, where she had been booked into a room at the nearby Miraval Spa resort. Janet Jackson was waiting at Miraval. Her doctor had decided she needed bed rest, Janet and the others explained on the way to Miraval, where Katherine was checked into a room in which the telephone had been disconnected and the television was not working. Lots of sleep and no disturbances, Janet and Rebbie explained, were what the doctor had ordered. Rebbie took her mother’s cell phone from her, “so you won’t be bothered by calls.” Confused, but touched by her children’s concern, Katherine settled into her room at Miraval.

  Back at the Calabasas house, there was no worry. Katherine had been taking a motor home trip about once a year since Michael’s death. During those trips, and on the rare other occasions she traveled by air without her grandchildren, Prince, Paris, and Blanket were left in the able care of their thirty-four-year-old cousin Tito Joe “TJ” Jackson.

  TJ and his brothers, Taryll and Taj, had been Michael Jackson’s favorite nephews. Even more than most in the family, Michael had credited that to the boys’ mother, Delores “Dee Dee” Martes Jackson, a daughter of Dominican immigrants whom Tito had begun dating in 1968, when they were sophomores at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, and married in 1972, when the Jackson 5 was just past the peak of its success. In 1994, a year after her divorce from Tito, Dee Dee had been murdered by the man she was dating, Donald Bohana. Her sons had been unable to persuade the district attorney to prosecute until they filed their own wrongful death lawsuit; Bohana was convicted of first-degree murder three years after Dee Dee’s death.

  Michael Jackson had always been supportive of Tito’s sons, putting each of the three through the Buckley School. He became especially close to the young men, though, after their mother’s death, agreeing to produce their first album, Brotherhood, and to release it on his MJJ Music label in 1995. Brotherhood was a considerable success, spinning off five singles and eventually selling more than six million copies. That success was mostly due to the fact that Michael had performed a duet with 3T on the album’s best-selling single, “Why,” and had sung backing vocals on the second best-selling single, “I Need You.” When 3T brought out a second album without Michael’s involvement nine years later, it wasn’t even released in the United States and disappeared quickly overseas.

  Relations between Michael and the two older brothers had cooled somewhat when he declined to continue working with them in the late 1990s, but TJ had remained loyal to his uncle, appreciative of the help and support that Michael had offered them all after their mother’s death. He was also the closest to his grandmother of any of Tito’s sons, and had been the first and the most generous about offering to help her with Michael’s children after his death. Though he was heart-stoppingly handsome and still best-known for being the first serious boyfriend of fellow Buckley School student Kim Kardashian, TJ had turned into a solid family man, fathering three sons by his wife, Frances, and by 2010 was the closest thing to a father that Prince, Paris, and Blanket had left in the world. “He’s so good with them, so kind and patient,” Sandy Ribera said. “TJ is like a male version of Mrs. Jackson.” For months it had been TJ who took the kids to the doctor, rode with them to school, helped them with their homework, met with their teachers. They were fine with being left in his care, but more than a little confused by the fact that they hadn’t heard from their grandmother; she had never before gone twenty-four hours without checking in with them.

  By midday Tuesday, everyone at the Calabasas house sensed that something was up. The media were reporting on a letter that had been signed by five of Michael Jackson’s siblings—Randy, Janet, Jermaine, Rebbie, and, astonishingly, Tito—then sent to John Branca and John McClain. “We insist that you resign effective immediately,” the letter began, “as executors from the estate of our brother, Michael Joe Jackson.” The letter promised to reveal the reasons why Branca and McClain should resign “in the coming weeks,” but then proceeded to state the main one: the will that had named them as executors was “fake, flawed, and fraudulent.” After describing how Branca had at first presented the will to them without a signature page, the letter cut to what the siblings apparently believed was their strongest argument, at least in the court of public opinion: “Michael was absolutely not in Los Angeles, California, on the date of his signature reflected in the will at-hand.”
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br />   The next paragraph detailed what had always been the real and seething contention within the family about why Branca, in particular, but McClain as well, should not be the executors of Michael’s estate: “Our brother told us, in no uncertain terms and without hesitation in the months prior to his death, that he despised both of you and that he did not want either of you to have anything to do with his life or estate for that matter. We know that and you knew that. We believe you relied on the presumption that no one would be so bold as to suggest that you would perpetrate such unconscionable deceit; but you were wrong.”

  The argument that followed was a rough—very rough—approximation of what both Sanders and Ribera had also come to believe: the executors were deliberately dragging things out in the hope that Mrs. Jackson would die before they had to pay her money she could leave to her children. “Even worse still,” the letter to Branca and McClain read, “is what you have done and continue to do to our mother since you fraudulently assumed the position as the executors of the estate of her son. You keep lying to her, you manipulate her, and you make promises that you know will never happen . . . She’s an eighty-two-year-old woman.”

  It was a legitimate reason to take the executors on, Sanders had tried to explain, but not an effective basis for a filing against them in court. The permitted time period in which to challenge the will had passed long before he became Katherine’s attorney, Sanders had said for what seemed to him the hundredth time, so that was a moot point. Only ego or ignorance, he and Ribera agreed when they read the Jackson siblings’ letter, could explain a course of action by Katherine’s children that was sure to work against their own best interests.

  Sanders and Ribera were startled by the next paragraph: “Your actions are affecting [our mother’s] health, and on top of that, we’ve just found out she recently had a mini-stroke,” the letter to Branca and McClain went on. “Please understand, she’s not equipped to handle the stress load you are putting on her. She feels, as she has said, ‘I’m stuck in the middle.’ She too knows and acknowledges that the will was forged. She wants to do the right thing, and move in the direction of justice for her son and family, yet she fears the POWERS THAT BE.”

  Like Sanders, the people holding down the fort in Calabasas were shaken when they read the paragraph after that, which laid much of the blame for the failure to go after Branca and McClain at the feet of three of the four people who had become Katherine’s closest advisors: Lowell Henry, Perry Sanders, and Trent Jackson. These three were “telling her to disregard what she knows as fact,” the siblings’ letter accused. “Instead, her so-called advisors are convincing her to let them negotiate ‘deals’ with Branca and McClain on her behalf, or is it on the behalf of all of you?”

  AEG was the letter’s next target: “AEG has been very vocal about how they are going to destroy [Katherine] and her family publicly and blame her for Michael’s death. Since then, they’ve wasted no time harassing each and every family member, including Michael’s children in a barrage of depositions, where they are asking personal, inappropriate, and disrespectful questions that, to say the least, have nothing to do with his passing.”

  All in all, it was a very sloppy letter, and couldn’t possibly have been written by or even with the help of a competent attorney, thought Sanders, one of the ten people who had been cc’d at the bottom of the last page (along with Randy Phillips, Paul Gongaware, Tim Leiweke, Trent Jackson, Lowell Henry, Howard Weitzman, Martin Bandier, Phil Anschutz, and Tom Barrack). Sanders wasn’t even pleased to see that Michael’s brothers and sisters had made a point he himself had said was of supreme significance: Branca and McClain had written a letter to Judge Palazuelos, who was still presiding over the wrongful death lawsuit, “asking her to keep all documents handed over by AEG under court seal, clearly protecting AEG, but not protecting our mother nor our niece and nephews Paris, Prince, and Blanket. Who are you working for? What is it that you don’t want to be known?”

  The letter got truly nutty in the last paragraph, though, in the opinion of Katherine’s attorneys, when it warned that the Jacksons were “considering retaining the law firm, Baker Hostetler, who have advised us on the potential criminal misconduct in your actions. We will hand this over to the proper authorities.” If you plan to bring the authorities in, Sanders would remember thinking, you damn sure don’t tell people about it ahead of time.

  Sanders’s associate Ribera was dispatched to the Calabasas estate that afternoon, not long after Trent Jackson had left for Albuquerque, where he was supposed to meet Katherine prior to that night’s concert at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. It was almost dark when Trent phoned to say that Mrs. Jackson had never showed up. “That’s when we started getting really worried,” Ribera recalled.

  In her room at Miraval, Katherine Jackson was frustrated mainly that she couldn’t get anyone to come and fix her television. She liked to fall asleep with the TV on, she explained, but the thing was absolutely dead, no picture, no sound. Yet no repairman came, despite her repeated requests for one, so she spent hours playing the word game Scramble with Friends on her iPad. It had become something of an obsession with her in recent weeks; she’d gotten TJ into it and the two of them played daily. But when Rebbie came to check on her, she asked her mother if it was possible to send messages on an iPad. Katherine told her it was and began to show her daughter how. Rebbie immediately took the iPad from her, Mrs. Jackson would recall, saying that she needed rest, not stimulation.

  Prince and Paris had been alarmed by the claim in the letter signed by their five aunts and uncles that Mrs. Jackson had suffered a “mini-stroke.” That certainly hadn’t happened before she left on her trip. Ribera suggested calling Mrs. Jackson’s doctor’s office. When they did, the doctor told them she had no association with Dr. Metzger and had never sent him to see Mrs. Jackson. “That’s when we knew for certain that something was going on,” Ribera recalled. “We started to talk about Dr. Metzger and that was like an ‘Oh, my God’ moment.” For the first time, they realized that this was the same Dr. Allan Metzger who had been called as a defense witness at the Conrad Murray trial. The same Dr. Metzger who had been reprimanded by the state medical board for writing prescriptions for Janet Jackson under fraudulent names. The same Dr. Metzger who had accompanied Michael on the HIStory tour in 1996. The same Dr. Metzger who, after Michael’s death, had sent his attorney out to tell the media that in the spring of 2009 Michael had asked him to provide propofol, and to insist that the doctor had refused to prescribe anything more than a mild sleep medication, and whose records had been subpoenaed by investigators from the coroner’s office during the investigation into Michael’s death.

  At Miraval, Katherine Jackson was being visited regularly by Rebbie, who was in the room next door, and by Randy, Janet, and Jermaine, who were stopping by every other day or so for visits. She would ask them how the children were doing, Mrs. Jackson said, and they would tell her the kids were fine, everything was good at the house, nothing to worry about, just get some rest.

  Shortly after the Dr. Metzger connection was made, Paris took to Twitter, responding to a tweet from her Uncle Randy that read, “We ask that everyone respects that this is a serious matter that will be handled by the proper authorities.” Paris tweeted back, “i am going to clarify right now that what has been said about my grandmother is a rumor and nothing has happened, she is completely fine. i’d like to know who made up the rumor . . . i will defend my beloved family member with all i have, even if it means from other family members.” She also shot a tweet directly to Randy that read, “hello dear FAMILY member I don’t appreciate you telling people things that aren’t true thank you very much.” As word of Paris’s tweet spread on the Internet, the tabloid media swarmed, convinced they were now chasing a big story.

  In its initial response to the letter signed by the five Jacksons, the estate had trotted out the familiar contention that any questions about the validity of the will and Michael’s selection of his executors had been
“thoroughly and completely debunked two years ago when a challenge was rejected by the Los Angeles Superior Court, the California Court of Appeals, and, finally, the California Supreme Court.” Remarkably, not a single member of the media pointed out that none of the questions about the validity of the will or the selection of Branca and McClain had been settled by those courts. The only thing that had been settled was that Joe Jackson lacked the standing to challenge Branca and McClain. If the executors and their attorneys felt contempt for reporters in general, it certainly seemed justified. Saddened as they were by the “false and defamatory accusations grounded in Internet conspiracy theories [that] are now being made by certain members of Michael’s family, whom he chose to leave out of his will,” the estate executors and their attorneys pledged to continue their efforts to secure the financial futures of Michael’s children. By the next day the estate had produced a more politic pronouncement, one that focused less on the executors’ reputations and more on “the welfare of Mrs. Jackson, and most particularly with Michael’s minor children. We are concerned that we do what we can to protect them from undue influences, bullying, greed, and other unfortunate circumstances.”

  At the Calabasas house, people were commenting that, stressful as the situation was, it was nice at least not to have Katherine’s assistant Janice Smith in town. Ribera and Trent Jackson regarded Smith as an especially corrosive force. She continued to work out of an office in the Hayvenhurst mansion, although Katherine no longer resided there, and had been placed on the estate’s payroll. That and her relationships with Joe and Randy Jackson had resulted in widespread suspicion about her loyalties. The previous April, Smith had joined Randy Jackson in filing a complaint of financial elder abuse against Trent Jackson at the Los Angeles County sheriff’s station in Malibu. Katherine Jackson had “emphatically denied” this claim, but sheriff’s investigators had continued to interrogate several people who frequented the Calabasas house, Ribera among them. The attorney had gotten on Smith’s bad side when she attempted to resolve a sexual harassment complaint involving Smith and a security guard, and seemed more sympathetic to the bodyguard than to Katherine’s assistant. sheriff’s deputies said that Smith had complained about her also, Ribera recalled, “and so they started investigating me, too.” Prince and Paris told Ribera and TJ Jackson that their nanny and the chef had been whispering in each other’s ears all day, and when they’d sneaked a look at the cell phones of the chef and the nanny, the two teenagers said, they discovered they were exchanging text messages with Janice Smith about what was going on at the house, and what the kids should be told. Ribera and TJ made the decision on Thursday, July 20, that they would put all of the staff—except for the security detail—on paid leave. “After that, it was just me and Trent and TJ and Prince and Paris and Blanket,” Ribera recalled. “We were the core group hunkered down there at the house.” Prince and Paris were calling their grandmother almost hourly on their cell phones and getting no answer. Ribera and TJ Jackson tried communicating with her through the Scramble with Friends game, but again there was no reply.