For a name as renown as Paris Jackson‘s, it’s ironic that very little is known about the actual person.
Thrust into the spotlight as the daughter of the most famous name in recent memory, Michael Jackson, the world’s knowledge of her is limited.
Indeed, during her 18 years, she’s spent her childhood in a mask, was the grieving daddy’s girl at the King of Pop’s funeral, and in 2013 was the teen who attempted suicide.
Now in a markedly better place, Paris is an aspiring model; one who is beginning to embrace a spotlight that she inherited rather than chased.
In a startlingly honest interview with Rolling Stone, she addresses a lengthy list of topics – including, but not limited to, her DNA, growing up at Neverland, her relationship with mother Debbie Rowe, her attempts at ending her life, and her drummer boyfriend. She also muses on her 50 plus tattoos, many of which are dedicated to her dad and one of which is of his late rival Prince.
It’s a long, yet riveting read. Check out the most resonating excerpts below…
On Losing Her Father:
“They always say, ‘Time heals’ but it really doesn’t. You just get used to it. I live life with the mentality of ‘OK, I lost the only thing that has ever been important to me.’ So going forward, anything bad that happens can’t be nearly as bad as what happened before. So I can handle it. I feel him with me all the time.”
On Having Several Tattoos In Honor Of MJ:
“He’s brought me nothing but joy. So why not have constant reminders of joy?”
On Her 2013 Suicide Attempt:
“It was just self-hatred. [I had] low self-esteem, thinking that I couldn’t do anything right, not thinking I was worthy of living anymore.”
[Jackson added that 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.”]
On Hanging With The Wrong Crowd At School
“[They were] a lot of older people doing a lot of crazy things. I was doing a lot of things that 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds shouldn’t do. I tried to grow up too fast, and I wasn’t really that nice of a person.”
On Facing Cyberbullying:
“The whole freedom-of-speech thing is great. But I don’t think that our Founding Fathers predicted social media when they created all of these amendments and stuff.”
On Being Sexually Assaulted By A Stranger At Age 14:
“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.”
On Being In A Better Place:
“I’m a completely different person. I was crazy. I was actually crazy. I was going through a lot of, like, teen angst. And I was also dealing with my depression and my anxiety without any help.”
On 26-Year-Old Rock Drummer Boyfriend Michael Snoody:
“I never met anyone before who made me feel the way music makes me feel”
On Modelling & Her Looks:
“Plenty of people think I’m ugly, and plenty of people don’t. But there’s a moment when I’m modeling where I forget about my self-esteem issues and focus on what the photographer’s telling me – and I feel pretty. And in that sense, it’s selfish.”
On Not Knowing Her Dad Was “Michael Jackson” Growing Up:
“I just thought his name was Dad, Daddy,” she says. “We didn’t really know who he was. But he was our world. And we were his world.”
On Life At Neverland:
“We actually had a pretty normal life. Like, we had school every single day, and we had to be good. And if we were good, every other weekend or so, we could choose whether we were gonna go to the movie theater or see the animals or whatever. But if you were on bad behavior, then you wouldn’t get to go do all those things.”
On MJ Schooling Her On Music:
“My dad worked with Van Halen, so I got into Van Halen. 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.”
On MJ’s Tolerance:
“My dad raised me in a very open-minded house. I was eight years old, in love with this female on the cover of a magazine. Instead of yelling at me, like most homophobic parents, he was making fun of me, like, ‘Oh, you got yourself a girlfriend.’
On MJ Schooling Her On Race:
“His number-one focus for us, besides loving us, was education. And he wasn’t like, ‘Oh, yeah, mighty Columbus came to this land!’ He was like, ‘No. He fucking slaughtered the natives.’ He did have kind of a potty mouth. He cussed like a sailor. But he was also “very shy.”
On Believing MJ Is Her Biological Father & Being Black:
“He is my father. 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. [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. 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 – accurately noting that her complexion and eye color are similar to the TV actor Wentworth Miller’s, who has a black dad and a white mom.]
On Her Mother Debbie Rowe:
“When I was really, really young, my mom didn’t exist. [Until I realized] a man can’t birth a child. [At age 10 or so, I asked my older brother] “we gotta have a mom, right?”
[I then asked dad] and he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ And I was like, ‘What’s her name?’ And he’s just like, ‘Debbie.’ And I was like, ‘OK, well, I know the name.'”
[After her father’s death, she started researching her mom online, and they got together when Paris was 13. They were again in touch after her suicide attempt and more recently after Rowe completed chemo as part of her breast cancer fight ]
I’ve had a lot of mother figures (my grandmother and nannies etc), but by the time my mom came into my life, it wasn’t a ‘mommy’ thing. It’s more of an adult relationship.
[I see myself in her] We’re both very stubborn.”
On The Ill-Fated ‘This Is It’ Shows:
“[Dad] kind of hyped it up to us. He was like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna live in London for a year.’ We were super-excited – we already had a house out there we were gonna live in.”
[He was exhausted, though]. I’d tell him, ‘Let’s take a nap, because he looked tired. We’d be in school, meaning downstairs in the living room, and we’d see dust falling from the ceiling and hear stomping sounds because he was rehearsing upstairs.”
On Being Convinced Her Dad Was Murdered:
“Absolutely. 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.”
Chiming in on the feature, Paris’ older brother Prince Michael said of his sister:
“Basically, as a person, she is who my dad is. The only thing that’s different would be her age and her gender.”
[She is like him ]in all of her strengths, and almost all of her weaknesses as well. She’s very passionate. She is very emotional to the point where she can let emotion cloud her judgment.”
Fascinating.
Paris, of course, has a lot of life left to live. But, for a family so private, it was interesting seeing behind the veil. And in a way that didn’t feel harmful or over-exposing.
We wish her the best.
I thought it was Jared Leto
You are SO on point!
Ell he looks like a woman most of the time.
She could be his sister…the eyes? Cheekbones? Jared Leto is good looking in my opinion, so it isn’t a diss to her or him
She looks like lady gaga
Jared Leto fine as f***
Google Paris Jackson looks like Jared Leto! FAF, we’re not the only ones who think so!
She’s very insightful. I’m happy she’s in a much better place. Losing a parent, as I know, is one of the hardest things ever. I miss MJ ??
You’re not black, and you don’t look like you were born in Finland, does she even know how Finns look?, despite being white, you look more British. So Michael told her that she was black and to be proud of that, I can’t, that man was really f***** up in the head.
You’re such an annoying c***
Lol what do Finns look like ?
Most Finns look like us Scandinavians (Danes, Norwegians and Swedes), they’re super blonde with pale skin, actually they say that Finland is the blondest country in the world, although I don’t think they have more blondes than Sweden. Believe it or not, not all white people look the same, for example, Britains look different from Germans, Italians look different from Russians, even though they’re whites, there’s still differences when it comes to phenotypes.
MESS @ “Believe it or not, not all white people look the same.”
Nobody said that, you did lol. If that’s the case, then why is it so hard for you to believe that she’s half Finnish? Like you said before, not all white people look alike. So…
Girl hush! Ive got a cousin who is biracial and looks just as white as her and mariah. She is Black so accept it and shut up..
Mariah doesn’t look white. She looks mixed. And she is less black than Paris ‘supposed’ mix.
@krizta
She’s not less black. Her dad is Afro Venezuelan and her mom is white. She’s half n half too
Mariah Carey’s did is mixed as well and he looks it. Michael Jackson is black to the core.
Very interesting interview. I hope she really is in a “better” place now. Nice to hear Michael was really an open minded man behind closed doors too.
He had to be, otherwise he would have been a hypocrite since he wasn’t straight.
Uh-huh! I thought George or Carrie would be on the cover?!
The girl ain’t black, she needs to quit telling that lie. Even Stevie wonder can see that shes white.
I absolutely adore her! So happy she’s in a better place. BIG HUGS PARIS!!!
Very interesting read…. The highlight? Finding out MJ cussed like a sailor!? Love it!
Now I don’t have any problem with him raising her and the other kids…. but I do with people acting like she and the others are a product of his s****
His kids are the few that can actually say their black because they were raised and identified with it. I know the older son speaks and acts very culturally Black.
A Rachel Dolezal tea.
Except there’s a reason why these kids identifies as Black. Rachel parents are White and she was not only telling a lie, but making up stories to support that lie.
Well, if Michael was telling them they were black, he wanted them to feel black in order to make white people suffer (his kids) or to make them feel what black people feel, he was wrong in doing so, because first, they’re not black, he forced them to identify with something they’re not, and second, he himself wanted to be a white person, a white woman to be exact, so for him to tell them to be proud of being black, was completely wrong, more so when he did the most to look like a Caucasian person.
You got a lot of misinformation out of something so simple. He was a Black man with a skin disorder, I do question why he went out of his way to have White kids, but clear he wasn’t anti black because he told his children to be proud of their black heritage. Even so, their family are black and they were raised by the family. So culturally, they are Black children. Doesn’t matter to us, they rich and doesn’t have to answer to anyone. If I’m not mistaken, Nicole Richie identifies with the same thing.
Why do you always feel like you can dictate what people identify as ?
Plenty of white people adopt black children, they grow up with the privilege but their adopted parents won’t tell them that they’re white, those kids are raised by them and their relatives, how that makes them identify as white?…..It’s just wrong, if a black person would be saying this, y’all would be disgusted by it, but since she’s a white person, it’s ok, she wants to be like us ?
@Tyler
I’m not saying that she can’t identify herself as black, I’m just saying is wrong, if tomorrow Beyoncé decides that she’s a white woman, it would be wrong, because she’s not, would you think that’s ok?….People need to learn to accept who they are.
She didnt just wake up one day and decide that she wanted to be a black woman. That girl’s father is African American. So why do you have such an issue with her embracing her black side ?
Nicole Richie is biologically mixed with African American though. This girl damn sure aint.
That doesn’t apply because this isn’t a “normal” family. We didn’t even see their damn faces until 2009, they’re around Black people (The Jacksons) all the time, so culturally they are. She didn’t say she was a Black woman, she said she identify as Black. And I understand why. This isn’t the same as ol girl that lied and she she was Black, even to the point that she hired a Black actor to play as her father. these kids were raised in a Black family, so they’re going to ID with what they were surrounded by. If Beyonce woke up and said hey I’m now White, then yes there would be an issue because she wasn’t raised by White parents her whole life. I’m sure Brad and Jolie’s kids will ID as White as well CULTURALLY, because of who they were raised by, same with Madonna’s son. It’s not a big deal.
Yesssss….lemme find out she looking like Miley Ray Jackson LMFAO!
Anyone saying that they are not black and are clearly white need to just let it go. Ya’ll have no proof that these kids are not the fruit of his loins. Plenty of biracial kids look just like them.
His death was a “set up”?? GIRL YOUR DADDY WAS ON THAT S***!!..he got whatever he wanted and unfortunately had a money hungry doctor.
How is she black tho? She doesn’t even look mixed ?
Hey DUMMY Black folks look white, their are even FULLY black folks that look White or biracial so your comment is soo stupid
Show me one black person who isn’t mixed race who “looks white”. Lol…chile
Blonde hair and blue eyes. Ain’t an once of African S*** in you. Have several seats
YOu can have several seats because blacks come in ALL colors and hair textures.. The most Diverse group race on the planet Earth so all of you fool who keep say she isnt black need to eat a dikkkkk
Paris kind of favors Lady Gaga on this cover. Also we know biologically Paris is not black but Michael raised her and the other children as his own and he obviously raised them to identify as black. I think Michael should have been more open and honest with his children about their race and heritage but hey what do I know.
Are the people who are questioning Paris identifying as black, Hispanic or white by any chance? I would be questioning why you have a negative attitude and see it as a bad thing instead of just letting her be
She is not black. But if that’s what she identify as then oh well…
Black? Sis where?
This makes me miss mj all over again.
Such a smart beautiful girl
Wait. Michael Jackson isn’t her real father though right?
–
If not, then she isn’t black. That’s like this annoying white girl that I use to go to High School with always trying to tell people that she was half black but her closest friend told everyone that she isn’t and comes Graduation day we all saw through that bs.
According her, MJ is her biological father
She is not biologically black.
She took a genealogy test that said her father was of English and Welsh decent. I didn’t see African. This happened about a month ago and she put it up.
I meant English and Irish descent.
So I was right. She looks British.
Yes, she put it up, then deleted it. She’s a white girl. She took it down because people were saying that it proves she’s all white!
I thought George Micheal or Carrie Fisher would have received an honorary cover from Rolling Stone by now since they both passed away and were apart of pop culture. Prince, Muhammad Ali, David Bowie and so forth got one.
Nice interview