Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson

By Ian Halperin

In late December 2008, Ian Halperin told the world that Michael Jackson had only six months to live. His investigations into Jackson's failing health made headlines around the globe. Six months later, the King of Pop was dead.

Whatever the final autopsy results reveal, it was greed that killed Michael Jackson. Friends and associates paint a tragic picture of the last years and days of his life as Jackson made desperate attempts to prepare for the planned concert series at London's 02 Arena in July 2009. These shows would have earned millions for the singer and his entourage, but he could never have completed them, not mentally, and not physically. Michael knew it and his advisors knew it. Anyone who caught even a fleeting glimpse of the frail old man hiding beneath the costumes and cosmetics would have understood that the London tour was madness. Why did it happen this way? After an intense five year investigation, New York Times bestselling author Ian Halperin uncovers the real story of Michael Jackson's final years, a suspenseful and surprising thriller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Release date: Jul 14, 2009
• ISBN: 9781439177198

Ian Halperin

Ian Halperin is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain, and Whitney & Bobbi Kristina, among many other biographies. He is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning filmmaker, having directed and produced several films, including the documentaries Gone Too Soon, Chasing Gaga, and The Cobain Case. Halperin regularly appears on television and radio to share his perspective on celebrity culture.

Book preview

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX

PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT

INTRODUCTION

When, before Christmas 2008, I revealed on my celebrity blog, ianundercover.com, that Michael Jackson had a life-threatening condition, it set off an international media frenzy. Publications ranging from US Weekly to the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report to Rolling Stone reported my exclusive, along with thousands of other newspapers, TV stations and magazines throughout the world, including eleven outlets in China alone.

On December 24, In Touch magazine quoted me as saying Jackson had six months to live. That day, Jackson’s official spokesman, Dr. Tohme Tohme, called my report a complete fabrication. The singer, he assured the media, was in fine health. Most of the media took his word for it and the feeding frenzy came to an abrupt halt.

Six months and one day later, Jackson was dead.

My involvement in the Michael Jackson story actually began four years earlier, on June 13, 2005. As a breaking news alert flashed on CNN announcing that the jury had reached a verdict in Jackson’s molestation trial, I knew that American legal history was about to be made. Finally, justice was going to be served, I remember thinking. This was not going to be another O. J. Simpson travesty where an uneducated group of twelve unqualified jurors fell sway to a high-priced legal team that helped a celebrity get away with murder by playing the race card. No, this was by all accounts a mostly white, middle-class, educated group of citizens—eight women and four men—that was smart enough to weigh the evidence and come to a credible conclusion about innocence and guilt.

I hadn’t been following the trial very closely but I had caught enough snippets on TV and newspapers that made it fairly obvious he was guilty of some very heinous acts.

And so I fully expected the jury to return a guilty verdict on the most serious counts for which Jackson had been indicted, especially the charge that he had sexually molested a thirteen- year-old cancer patient whom he had taken under his wing the year before.

As the banner moving across the screen announced that the verdict would be read in open court at 4:45 p.m., the commentators who had been following the case since the beginning seemed reluctant to hazard a guess about the outcome. I figured that they were just trying to remain objective for the cameras. Like me, they must have seen enough convincing evidence throughout the trial to make Jackson’s guilt a foregone conclusion. Hadn’t the boy’s entire family, after all, been witness to the crimes? Hadn’t a stewardess seen Jackson plying the boy with alcohol on board an airplane? Hadn’t members of the staff at Neverland testified to some highly suspicious shenanigans that pointed to only one conclusion? And what about reports that Jackson had been accused before of molesting a boy and had apparently offered a multimillion-dollar settlement to avoid going to trial years earlier. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, his detractors argued convincingly. And, most telling of all—the only evidence that I really needed to convince me—hadn’t Jackson actually admitted to letting the boy sleep in his bed?

All very damning evidence and surely enough to send Jackson away for a very long time to a place where molesting children would not be likely to elicit him a warm welcome from his new roommates.

As I waited for the fateful moment of justice, the scene outside the courthouse resembled a circus as crowds of Jackson fans and detractors competed for the attention of the hundreds of television crews who had assembled from all corners of the globe to report on the latest trial of the century.

MJ innocent. MJ innocent! came the cries from his large contingent of loyal fans. They were met with cries of Fry him. Fry him! from the equally boisterous crowd of child advocates across the street. The crescendo built to a deafening roar as a motor-cade pulled up in front of the courthouse. As the doors of a black SUV opened, a phalanx of bodyguards surrounded its occupant, an uncharacteristically normal-looking Michael Jackson, wearing a dark suit and tie. This was a far cry from the day he arrived 20 minutes late in the middle of the trial wearing a pair of pajamas.

The legal commentators were reporting that the district attorney, Tom Sneddon, was very confident—cocky, even—as he entered the courthouse, convinced that a conviction was imminent. This was the man who had spent more than a decade determined to bring Jackson to justice for the unspeakable crimes he was sure the singer had gotten away with when he settled with the first boy in 1994. A modern-day Inspector Javert, he had more than ten years to gather evidence, assemble witnesses and wait for the victim he knew would eventually come forward to secure him the long-awaited indictment he had been itching for all these years. Surely he would not have gone forward unless he had an airtight case.

And so I waited along with the rest of the world for the only possible verdict: guilty. The word that would finally erase the stench that had been lingering over the American justice system ever since the O.J. trial, when the jury pronounced a cold-blooded killer not guilty on all counts.

Four forty-five p.m., the time we had been promised an announcement, came and went. I think we’re going to see convictions here, declared one legal analyst as the wait dragged on, noting that the jury had deliberated too long for an acquittal.

The judge had not allowed cameras in the courtroom but he had authorized an audio feed so that we could hear the verdict in real time along with the defendant, who faced as much as twenty years in prison if found guilty. Reporters in the courtroom informed us that the verdict had been handed to the judge and that two of the jurors were staring at him on the bench instead of at Jackson.

When the jury stares at the judge, it’s not an ‘innocent,’ announces a seasoned legal observer. They do not want to look at the defendant that they have just convicted.

Finally the talking heads shut up and the audio feed begins.

The People of California, plaintiff, vs. Michael Joe Jackson, defendant. Case #1133603. Count one, verdict. We the jury in the above entitled case find the defendant not guilty of conspiracy as charged in count one of the indictment…. Count two, verdict. We the jury in the above entitled case find the defendant not guilty of a lewd act upon a minor child.

By the time the second count was read, I was hardly listening anymore, and neither were the cheering fans outside who realized the implications of the foreperson’s words. The case had collapsed like a house of cards and the prosecution had completely failed to get even one conviction. Jackson was free. I was stunned.

As the father of a young child, I found the idea that a sexual predator had evaded justice repugnant. Having not followed the trial closely, I assumed that Jackson’s all-star legal team had simply outmaneuvered the less accomplished civil servants who were responsible for prosecuting him. Something snapped. I decided on the spot that I was going to bring Michael Jackson to justice in some way and make him pay for his sickening acts. Around that time, I had just begun a new career as a documentary filmmaker and I figured the best method at my disposal would be to make a film and finish the job started by Martin Bashir, the British filmmaker whose special, Living with Michael Jackson, had been the catalyst for Jackson’s prosecution. With my decades of experience as an investigative journalist, I intended to find and present the evidence that the jury had never got to see and which I assumed existed in abundance. I would in effect prosecute him once again in front of the cameras, but without the archaic rules of evidence that handicapped Tom Sneddon and Marcia Clark before him, and which usually favors the rich and powerful.

Like a prosecuting attorney, I was in no way objective. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t be fair. A hatchet job accomplishes nothing except to tarnish the reputation of the person doing the hacking. I was determined to let the facts speak for themselves.

By the time I stumbled upon the Michael Jackson case, I was already somewhat of a veteran in the field of celebrity justice. In fact, it was another notorious case involving a music icon a decade earlier that had carved out my journalistic reputation, for better or worse.

In 1994, I was on tour with my band, State of Emergency, in Seattle, Washington, where Kurt Cobain had allegedly killed himself a few months earlier. During this tour, I met a number of people who had known Cobain, including one of his heroin dealers and his best friend, who told me that everything was not as it appeared. They were convinced that the rock star had not in fact killed himself, but that he had been murdered.

I assumed that the whole thing was a typical conspiracy theory until I heard about Tom Grant, the respected Beverly Hills private investigator who had been hired by Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, to find Cobain after he fled from a Los Angeles rehab center shortly before his body was found in a room above the garage. Grant, a former L.A. sheriff’s deputy, worked for Courtney for months after the suicide until he quit abruptly and publicly accused her of having her husband murdered.

When I returned to Canada, I wrote a magazine article about the case with my writing partner at the time, leading to the offer of a book, which was eventually published in 1998, entitled Who Killed Kurt Cobain?

The book looks in depth at the case for and against the murder and presents some very damning circumstantial evidence. It reveals that there were no fingerprints found on the shotgun that Cobain allegedly used to kill himself. It reveals that he had a triple lethal dose of heroin in his blood at the time of his death and that such a dose would have rendered him unconscious before he could have neatly put away his heroin kit, picked up his shotgun and pulled the trigger. It presents evidence on tape proving that at the time of the death, Kurt and Courtney were in the middle of a very messy divorce. He had recently asked his lawyer to take Courtney out of a new will, which had not yet been signed at the time of his death. Because the two had a prenuptial agreement, Courtney would have received virtually nothing if the divorce had gone through. Instead, she inherited an estate that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in future royalties. We interviewed Eldon Hoke, a former friend of Courtney’s who revealed that she had offered him $100,000 months earlier to blow Kurt’s brains out and make it look like a suicide. He declined the offer. He passed a lie detector test administered by the world’s top polygraph examiner. A week after he told his story to the BBC, he was himself mysteriously found dead. We obtained a tape recording of Courtney’s own entertainment lawyer and godmother to the couple’s daughter, who said she believed that Kurt was murdered and that the so-called suicide note he left was traced or forged.

Yet, despite the abundance of damning evidence, we also debunk many of the conspiracy theories surrounding the case, present exculpatory evidence and conclude by admitting that we found no smoking gun linking Courtney Love to her husband’s death. One of America’s most respected publications, The New Yorker, praised the objectivity of the book, describing it as a judicious presentation of explosive material.

Thus, by the time I set out to indict Michael Jackson on film, I believed I was capable of also being as fair as possible in examining the evidence for and against his guilt. Nevertheless, I assumed that the viewers would come to a verdict different from that of the jurors. Until I actually began to examine the evidence.

Over the next three years, I was forced to juggle my Michael Jackson film amongst several other projects, including a book and another documentary already in progress. I hired a team of researchers to track down witnesses and I devoted much of my spare time to pursuing my mission of bringing Jackson to justice. During this period, I had also started a pop culture blog that was receiving a lot of attention and which I occasionally used to reveal a nugget or two about my Jackson findings.

Much of what I discovered did not present Jackson in a positive light, especially dealing with the period between the first molestation accusation in 1993 and the 2005 trial, when the beleaguered star engaged in behavior that was even stranger and more disturbing than what the world had come to expect. Some of it was positively creepy. But my progress in finding evidence of molestation was not as smooth as I had anticipated. In fact, the more I delved, the less convinced I became. Occasionally, the thought crossed my mind that Jackson himself was the victim. Still, the circumstantial evidence was highly suspicious. I believed it was just a matter of time before I found the smoking gun I needed.

Meanwhile, as the result of my blog and a documentary where I had posed as an actor to uncover the secrets of Hollywood and Scientology, I was traveling frequently in the sphere of celebrity journalism. I was encountering and corresponding with some of the world’s top entertainment journalists, many of whom had covered Michael Jackson for years. In my frequent discussions, many of them appeared resolutely convinced that he was a pedophile. Whenever I confided that I was having trouble finding evidence proving he was guilty, they usually rolled their eyes and treated me as a naive bumpkin. If you say in your film that he’s not a child molester, you’ll be a laughingstock, said one internationally known broadcaster. He’s a sick pedophile and everybody knows it. Another warned me not let myself be used by Michael. Don’t fall for his act, he told me.

I assumed that their certainty was based on sources they had cultivated over the years or evidence that they were not allowed to publish. So I got excited. These people had already done the legwork. Surely they’d be all too glad to point me at the evidence. Yet time and time again when I asked them for some proof or credible sources, they were vague or noncommittal. Read the trial transcript, said one. It’s all there.

And then when I was still trying to track down the story, I inadvertently became the story.

During the course of my investigation, I had cultivated a fairly impressive array of sources, even if none of them had been able to furnish me with the kind of evidence I was looking for. Some were disgruntled former employees, so their revelations had to be taken with a grain of salt; some were friends or hangers-on; and some still worked for him. At one point, I discovered that I had once dated one of the most trusted members of Jackson’s staff, somebody who saw him almost every day and who was eventually fired when she revealed that she knew me.

My blog, ianundercover.com, was among the fastest-growing celebrity blogs in the United States and had gained a loyal following of fans, entertainment journalists and fellow bloggers, including Perez Hilton. On the rare occasion that I revealed something about Michael Jackson, I would invariable be contacted by a source offering new information about the reclusive oddball, sometimes specious, sometimes reliable.

When in December 2008 I shared on my blog an intriguing piece of medical information that I had confirmed with two sources, the world went crazy. I had revealed that Jackson suffered from a potentially fatal genetic condition and that he could barely walk. Within hours, paparazzi were camped outside my Manhattan apartment building. The story only intensified when a British newspaper added new details about his medical condition, seemingly confirming what I had written, and published photos of Jackson being pushed in a wheelchair and wearing a surgical mask.

The next day I was contacted by one of the most important players in the Michael Jackson saga, the Court TV broadcaster Diane Dimond, the woman who was perhaps most responsible for convincing the world that Jackson was a serial molester of young boys. She had some choice words of advice for me: Don’t let Michael manipulate you. She seemed convinced that it was Jackson who had fed me the story about his illness to garner sympathy.

Her warning reminded me of something told to me by one of Jackson’s acquaintances who, strangely enough, was also one of his most ardent defenders. Whenever he tells a particularly egregious lie, he explains to us that you’ve got to ‘razzle-dazzle’ them, said the longtime friend, explaining that Jackson was obsessed with the character Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago, who had patented that expression while continuously pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes.

Was I simply allowing myself to become the victim of Jackson’s razzle-dazzle?

Dimond told me that if I wanted to discover the truth about the King of Pop, I had to start with Jordan Chandler. I took her advice.

ONE

As Michael Jackson stepped onto the stage on January 19, 1993, for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration gala, he was seemingly on top of the world. Media accounts hardly needed hyperbole to capture just how big a superstar he had become at this point in his career. They merely needed to quote the entries devoted to Jackson in The Guinness Book of World Records: most successful entertainer of all time; highest-grossing live performer in history; best-selling album of all time; youngest vocalist to top the U.S. singles chart; first vocalist to enter the U.S. singles chart at number one; longest number of weeks at the top of the U.S. album charts; most successful music video; and highest-paid entertainer of all time.

His very presence could spark a mob scene reminiscent of Beatlemania. In fact, I was once stuck in a London bus for nearly an hour on Oxford Street because word had spread that Jackson was shopping inside an HMV record store. The crowds that gathered as a result shut down traffic for half a mile in all directions.

Nevertheless, the public found Jackson decidedly odd. Tabloid stories abounded about his strange behavior. It was said that he wanted to buy the bones of the Elephant Man and that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber to stay young. His ever-changing facial features were apparently sparked by his obsession to look like Diana Ross, his Motown mentor. Then, after he fell out with her, he decided to mold himself in the image of another Diana, the Princess of Wales. Despite his protests that such stories were absurd, his denials didn’t assuage public skepticism. They had watched him turn from a dark-skinned youth to a bizarrely androgynous pale-skinned male before their eyes over the nearly quarter of a century that he had been in the public spotlight. Yet, rather than dampening his popularity, such behavior only seemed to elevate it. The worst adjective the media could usually summon to describe the singer was eccentric. It helped that Jackson had never really been associated with the bad behavior often connected with other celebrities of his era, especially in the music business, where drugs and excess were the norm.

On the contrary, by January 1993, he was becoming almost as well known for his humanitarian efforts as he was for his music. During the eighties, he had befriended a teenager named Ryan White, a hemophiliac. Ryan became the national poster child for HIV and AIDS after contracting the infection through a blood transfusion. White helped shift the American perception that AIDS was a disease confined to homosexuals. He was instrumental in convincing President Ronald Reagan to address the crisis for the first time. Jackson’s friendship with White helped him gain prominence as an advocate for HIV/AIDS research, cementing his reputation as a compassionate celebrity. At White’s funeral in 1990, Jackson delivered a particularly touching eulogy, declaring, Good-bye, Ryan White, you taught us how to stand and fight.

In 1992, explaining that he wanted to improve [living] conditions for children throughout the world, Jackson founded the Heal the World Foundation to provide medicine to children and fight world hunger, homelessness, child exploitation, and abuse. The foundation also brought hundreds of low-income and minority children to visit Neverland, the spectacular 2,700-acre ranch he had purchased in 1988 in Santa Ynez, California, which came complete with a zoo and amusement park. In 1992, Jackson donated all the profits from his Dangerous World Tour—tens of millions of dollars—to the Foundation.

And so it was not a surprise when Jackson was invited to perform at President Bill Clinton’s inaugural gala in 1992. He seemed a natural symbol for the new progressive era that Clinton represented after twelve long dark years of right-wing American presidents.

As Jackson bounded onto the stage to thunderous applause from the audience, including the new president and first lady, he dedicated a song to all the children of the world. The next day, glowing media reports lauded his performance of Heal the World as a tribute to Jackson’s love of children. A few months later, those words would have a very different meaning and it would be Jackson’s world that needed healing as it came crashing down around him.

The collapse of Michael Jackson’s unprecedented reign as the world’s most beloved and popular entertainer may have been triggered by a faulty spark plug. In May 1992, Jackson was alone driving his van down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles when the vehicle suddenly broke down in heavy traffic. Without a cellular phone to call for help, Jackson got out of the van at a loss for what to do. Wearing mirrored sunglasses, a black turban and a scarf covering his face, he was immediately recognized by an employee of a nearby rental car agency on her way to work. She approached Jackson and offered to bring him to her agency to hire a vehicle. She then made a phone call to her boss, David Schwartz, owner of the rental agency. When Schwartz heard that Michael Jackson was on his way, he knew what he had to do. He immediately called his wife, June Chandler Schwartz, and told her to bring her twelve-year-old son—his stepson Jordan—to the office. He knew that Jordie had idolized Michael Jackson ever since the day he had bumped into him at a Los Angeles restaurant called the Golden Temple seven years earlier. From that moment on, he was obsessed with the star. He bought every Jackson album, knew the words to all his songs and imitated Jackson’s dance moves in front of the mirror.

It was later reported that Jordie had sent Jackson a get-well card, enclosing his photo and phone number, after the singer’s hair got singed in a Pepsi commercial. Michael thanked him personally by phone the same day. But this would have been impossible because Jordan was only four years old at the time of the 1984 Pepsi incident. There are also unconfirmed reports that Jordie once auditioned for a part in a commercial featuring Jackson, but was turned down.

Nevertheless, Jordie was very excited to meet his hero face-to-face. He was a little shy and didn’t do much talking, but his star-struck mother, June, more than made up for it. She gushed about how thrilled they were to meet him, reminding Jackson that he had met the boy once before. Before Jackson drove off in a beat-up rental car from David Schwartz, June insisted on giving Jackson her son’s phone number. Jackson pocketed the slip of paper she gave him, shook Jordie’s hand and promised to call.

A few days later, the phone rang at the Schwartzes’ home in Santa Monica. June was stunned to hear the unmistakable falsetto voice asking to speak to Jordie. She later claimed that Jackson asked if Jordie would like to visit him at his Century City condominium, but she had said that she would not permit it because her son was in the middle of his final exams. Jordan was finishing seventh grade at the time. People close to her, however, claim that she would never have turned down such an invitation, a claim that rings true given her subsequent behavior. Michael was about to embark on his Dangerous World Tour and the two didn’t meet again until almost a year later. Meanwhile, Jackson phoned Jordie several times from the road, talking for hours at a time, and a friendship developed. When asked about these phone conversations, Jordie said Michael talked frequently about Neverland and how much fun it was for kids. He looked forward to the day when the boy could visit and see the amusement park, the video games, the water fort, and the zoo for himself.

A month after the Clinton inaugural gala, Jackson had completed the first leg of his world tour and was back in California. That’s when Jordie finally got to visit Neverland for the first time. In early February, Jackson sent a limo to fetch Jordie, his mother and his five-year-old half sister, Lily. The family spent the weekend in Michael’s guesthouse and had the time of their lives. The highlight was a shopping spree at a nearby Toys R Us store, which was kept open after hours so that Jordan and his sister could pick out as many toys as they wanted.

A few days after they returned home, Jackson invited them back the following weekend, promising to send a car for them on Friday afternoon. At the appointed time, the family was excited to discover that Jackson himself had come personally to fetch them. They were a little taken aback, however, when they stepped into the stretch limo to discover that he was not alone. Sitting on his lap was an eleven-year-old boy named Brett. Jordie later admitted how the sight made him jealous.

By the time Jordan Chandler met Michael Jackson, it was no secret that Jackson had a number of special friends. The most famous of these friends were the pint-sized former Webster TV star Emmanuel Lewis and Home Alone child actor Macaulay Culkin. They

Reviews for Unmasked

[Cara H · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I feel the author gave a fair and unbiased look at his reasoning for believing Michael Jackson to be innocent of the charges of child molestation. He put a lot of work into his research.

[Dana Young · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Not worth reading if you want credible information. I will never read another book authored by him ever again !

[Kimberly Savage · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Biased. Collected other folks writing and threw in his personal opinions. This is not a true biography.

[Anna · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Obviously a very bias writer, with a jaded agenda. Not much better than reading a tabloid. Advice to writer: take a class on journalism