They look like each other, but nothing like the man they called “dad.” Still, that didn’t seem to matter to the offspring of Michael Jackson.
Prince Michael Jackson, 12, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson, 11, and Prince Michael Jackson II a.k.a. “Blanket,” 7, were reportedly near their father when he suffered an apparent cardiac arrest in his home earlier today.
He may have been the King of Pop, but some believed that Michael Jackson was far from the King of Pops.
Prior to his death, critics slammed Jackson for his lack of parenting skills. The singer’s rarely seen children have spent their lives being veiled, shrouded and even masked in public, including son “Blanket,” who Michael infamously dangled out a fifth-floor Berlin hotel window in 2002 to gasps from the crowd below.
Others childhood “experts” claimed that Jackson was doing a disservice to his children by raising them in gilded isolation – without friends, conventional schooling or even a mother. Jackson’s three young kids have drifted from one country to the next with their eccentric father, who became more reclusive than ever following his child sex abuse scandal. According to reports, since abandoning Neverland in 2005, Jackson has crisscrossed the globe, spending time on at least three continents. “The kids are always moving from place to place, and they don’t have any playmates,” a source close to Jackson’s inner circle told reporters in 2007.
However, others sing another tune, saying that Jackson was a very attentive father who showered his children with lavish gifts and love. The children reportedly have a tiger cub to play with at home and have been on shopping sprees at London’s Hamleys toy store in the middle of the night. What’s more, other sources say Jackson’s children adored their father because he acted like a child himself, singing songs, dressing up, and making everything a game. Observers noted that the children never fussed about wearing the veils and ornate masks in public because they “thought it was just another game with Daddy.”
Regardless of how his children embraced him, Jackson could never shake accusations that the kids were not biologically his. This despite the legendary singer’s insistence to the contrary.
During his infamous 2003 interview with Martin Bashir, Jackson said: ‘I used a surrogate mother (for Blanket) and my own sperm cells. I had my own sperm cells in my other two children. They are all my children.”
The two elder children do bear some resemblance to their mother Debbie Rowe, who Jackson married in 1996. (Rowe allegedly hammered out a custody deal when they divorced in 1999.) As for “Blanket,” he was reportedly born to an unnamed surrogate mother.
Since Rowe relinquished all parental rights she will not be given custody of the kids in the wake of Jackson’s sudden and tragic death. Rather, PEOPLE magazine is reporting that all three children will stay with Jackson’s mother for the time being.
“Mrs. Jackson loves the kids and she will care for them now,” Jackson’s rep told the magazine.
We’ll probably never really know the type of parent Jackson was to his kids, but does it really matter? The fact is, right now, those three young children are without a mother and a father. The man they have depended on all of their lives has been suddenly taken away, and they will be left to deal with the legacy he left behind—-both good and bad.
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