Debbie Rowe’s Testimony
Debbie Rowe’s testimony on 28 May 2005 – the fortieth day – was probably the most dramatic of the trial. She hadn’t seen Michael in many years; he wouldn’t speak to her. As far as he was concerned, she’d betrayed him more than once by wanting to see the two children – Paris and Prince Michael – she’d had for him. ‘Sometimes she wants them,’ he’d once told me in a phone conversation, ‘and sometimes she doesn’t, and I’m not gonna screw my kids up by dropping her into the picture and then out of the picture. I’m mad at her now.’
Michael was certainly angry when Debbie made a play for the children right after he was arrested in 2003. In a legal declaration at the time, she claimed that she kept up her visiting rights to the children for about a year but relinquished them because she couldn’t handle all of the publicity surrounding the relationship and thought it would be ‘in the children’s best interests’. However, according to her statement:
‘During the past few years I maintained contact with persons close to Michael so that I could keep updates on the children. I have their pictures throughout my home and often reflected on the fabulous life they must have enjoyed with their father. I was always told that our children were treated like royalty and were very happy children. I wanted to speak with Michael over the past few years to talk about our children but he did not want to speak with me. Michael never returned any phone calls nor initiated any conversation with me, soI unfortunately continued to rely on observations of others that had personal knowledge of the children and their welfare.’
She also maintained that child abuse charges against Jackson had forced her to reconsider, adding: ‘I believe that I will provide a more stable environment for our children at this particular time. I believe that I have a responsibility to protect and be involved with my children’s life and well-being until such time as a full investigation can be conducted to determine really what is in the children’s best interests. If I did not intercede now to help our children I would not be fulfilling my responsibility as a parent.’ Fearing that Jackson was about to flee the country with her children before his trial, she requested that the children’s passports be immediately surrendered. She wrote: ‘Michael has close, influential and rich friends all over the world. He has the ability to rent a private jet at a moment’s notice, have the children taken from the United States and never returned.’
To Michael, a deal was a deal, no matter what – and as far as he was concerned Debbie had signed away her parental rights in 2001 and had also received a sizable payment from him: millions, in fact. He definitely had a stubborn way about him, which I always presumed he got from his father, Joseph. A person can never reason with Joseph Jackson when he has his mind made up about something, and Michael was exactly the same way. Also, once someone had been cut out of Michael’s life, that person was – except for a few occasions – never thought of again by Michael. So Debbie was out of the picture, we all knew it – and now she was being called by the prosecution. Everyone suspected her testimony was going to be very damaging. Certainly the prosecution thought as much, based on their pre-interviews with her, or they wouldn’t have called her.
When Debbie was sworn in, Michael stared at her with an icy expression. Then it was just one bombshell after another with Debbie, as always seemed to be the case.
First of all, she admitted that she and Jackson never shared a home together – that she never moved into Neverland. It looked as if she was going to testify that her marriage and relationship to Jackson was just a sham. But then, as often happened at that trial, things turned on a dime. Suddenly – and much to everyone’s surprise, especially the prosecutors’ – Debbie began to veer from the story she was expected to tell. First of all, the DA promised the jury Debbie would testify that all of the compliments she made about Michael in the ‘rebuttal video’ had been scripted. She said just the opposite: ‘Mr. Jackson knows no one could tell me what to say.’ However, she did admit that the reason she took part in the video was that she thought she would be ‘reintroduced to them [her children] and to be reacquainted with their dad.’ When asked why, she got choked up, looked at Michael and said, ‘Because he’s my friend.’ Then, when asked if she was able to see her children after making the video, she quietly answered that she had tried to do so for nine months until finally giving up.
Debbie also began to insist that Michael was a great father, that he would never harm a child and that she believed with all her heart that he was innocent of everything he was being accused of during these proceedings. Of course, she had to admit, she hadn’t actually seen him or talked to him for, well, she couldn’t even remember how long, it had been that many years. Still, she said she thought of him as a friend, ‘if he’d just talk to me.’ It was sad. She was incredibly likeable, full of spit-and-vinegar (at one point she claimed one of Jackson’s advisers was ‘full of shit’ and then turned to the judge and apologized). When she learned while on the witness stand that the DA had taped conversations with her without her knowledge, she looked aghast and said, ‘You did?
You did?
Damn you guys!’
If anything, Debbie Rowe did Michael Jackson quite a big service that day. If she had testified against him, as his ex-wife and mother of his two children, there seemed no way he would ever be found not guilty. After the trial, I interviewed prosecutor Ron Zonen for Court TV and he told me that, indeed, Debbie ‘was probably the biggest surprise of the entire trial. We didn’t see that one coming, did we?’
After Debbie Rowe’s testimony, we all thought
, Well, she’s sure going to get to see her kids, now
. Unfortunately, even though she probably helped keep Michael out of jail, according to most accounts she would see her children only one time after that trial.
When Michael was in self-imposed exile in Bahrain after the trial, he sent Prince Michael and Paris back to the States for a supervised visit with their mother at a Beverly Hills hotel. It was the first time Debbie had seen them in three years. The tots were told that Debbie was a family friend, not their mother. Certainly that had to have been very painful for her. But that was it. If she ever saw the children again, no one seems to know about it.
Following Debbie’s initial 2003 application for custody, and Michael’s acquittal in 2005, the two of them reportedly came to an agreement for her to give up all parental rights in exchange for about $6 million, staggered in a ten-year deal. She received a lump sum of about $900,000 late in 2006 and then her first installment of about $600,000 on 1 September 2007. The question is: Did she receive the other payments? It’s likely that she didn’t, since Michael wasn’t exactly paying his bills in the last few years of his life. If not, that could influence Debbie’s decision as to whether or not she wants to now claim the children as her own after the death of their father.
As is now well known, Debbie would be notably left out of Michael’s will. Keep in mind, though, that it was drawn up in 2003, a couple of years before the trial. Apparently, though, he didn’t update it after the trial was over.