Paris Jackson Talks About Michael, Previous Suicide Attempts & Her Heritage: “I Consider Myself Black”

Paris Jackson speaks on being  “proud” of her black roots in the 2017 February issue of Rolling Stone magazine, a lesson she learned from her father Michael Jackson himself. For the first time, Paris Jackson goes on the record about her childhood, and why she believes that her father was murdered.

After reading this, you get a lot of insight on Paris as a whole person, as an individual, not just being Michael’s daughter. Paris opened up a lot in this interview conducted by the magazine, and one issue she dealt with for awhile after Michael’s death is suicide and depression.

“In June 2013, drowning in depression and a drug addiction, she tried to kill herself at age 15, slashing her wrist and downing 20 Motrin pills. “It was just self-hatred,” she says, “low self-esteem, thinking that I couldn’t do anything right, not thinking I was worthy of living anymore.” She had been self-harming, cutting herself, managing to conceal it from her family. Some of her tattoos now cover the scars, as well as what she says are track marks from drug use. Before that, she had already attempted suicide “multiple times,” she says, with an incongruous laugh. “It was just once that it became public.” The hospital had a “three-strike rule,” she recalls, and, after that last attempt, insisted she attend a residential therapy program.”

Paris also talked about how at the age of 14, she was sexually assaulted by a complete stranger. “I don’t wanna give too many details. But it was not a good experience at all, and it was really hard for me, and, at the time, I didn’t tell anybody.”

Paris on Michael’s Musical Influence on Her:

“My dad worked with Van Halen, so I got into Van Halen,” she says. “He worked with Slash, so I got into Guns N’ Roses. He introduced me to Tchaikovsky and Debussy, Earth, Wind and Fire, the Temptations, Tupac, Run-DMC.”

Paris on Michael’s Molestation Allegations:

“My dad would cry to me at night,” she says, sitting at the counter of a New York coffee shop in mid-December, cradling a tiny spoon in her hand. She starts to cry too. “Picture your parent crying to you about the world hating him for something he didn’t do. And for me, he was the only thing that mattered. To see my entire world in pain, I started to hate the world because of what they were doing to him. I’m like, ‘How can people be so mean?'” She pauses. “Sorry, I’m getting emotional.”

Paris on Michael’s Death:

Paris definitely blames Dr. Conrad Murray for Michael’s death. Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Michael’s death, for the dependency on the anesthetic drug propofol that led to his final breath.

“He would drop hints about people being out to get him,” she says. “And at some point he was like, ‘They’re gonna kill me one day.”

Lisa Marie Presley had also had conversations like this, along with many members of his family similar to what Paris described. Presley told Oprah Winfrey that Michael expressed fears that unnamed parties were targeting him to get at his half of the Sony/ATV music-publishing catalog, worth hundreds of millions.

“Paris is convinced that her dad was, somehow, murdered. ‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘Because it’s obvious. All arrows point to that. It sounds like a total conspiracy theory and it sounds like bullshit, but all real fans and everybody in the family knows it. It was a setup. It was bullshit.'”

 

 

Paris On Claims That Michael Isn’t Her Father & Her Blackness:

“He is my father,” she says, making fierce eye contact. “He will always be my father. He never wasn’t, and he never will not be. People that knew him really well say they see him in me, that it’s almost scary.

“I consider myself black,” she says, adding later that her dad “would look me in the eyes and he’d point his finger at me and he’d be like, ‘You’re black. Be proud of your roots.’ And I’d be like, ‘OK, he’s my dad, why would he lie to me?’ So I just believe what he told me. ‘Cause, to my knowledge, he’s never lied to me.

“Most people that don’t know me call me white,” Paris concedes. “I’ve got light skin and, especially since I’ve had my hair blond, I look like I was born in Finland or something.” She points out that it’s far from unheard of for mixed-race kids to look like her