LaToya’s Drama
In the summer of 1989, after the Jackson – Moonie Project was no longer an issue for them, the Jackson family braced themselves for more distress from LaToya, who was thirty-three years old. They had heard that she was now writing a book of her own, one that would be nothing like the one penned by Michael. Hers, LaToya threatened, would tell the ‘whole truth about my dysfunctional family’. (One would think the family wouldn’t be so worried, though, since in April of 1988, LaToya told a reporter, ‘To my knowledge, Michael has only had one nose job.’)
According to Marjorie Walker, a friend of the family’s at the time, ‘Katherine telephoned LaToya to ask if it was true that a book was being planned. LaToya said it wasn’t true. Meanwhile, she had been negotiating with G. P. Putnam’s Sons publishing house. When Katherine found out she had a deal, she was hurt. Once upon a time, LaToya never lied. If you knew LaToya, you’d understand how out of character her behaviour had been since she’d met Jack [Gordon]. She is a girl who was scared to death to go out of the house, who felt her family could do no wrong. Now, she was planning to write a book about just how wrong they all were.’
LaToya signed a deal with Putnam, which advanced her more money for her autobiography than Michael had received for his from Doubleday. Michael’s was reportedly a $300,000 deal; LaToya’s $500,000.
‘It won’t be so bad,’ Katherine reasoned. ‘What can she write about anyway?’
For starters, LaToya was going to claim that Michael had been sexually molested as a child. When word of this allegation got back to Michael, he was incensed by it. ‘She can do what she wants, if she wants to get back at Joseph and Katherine for whatever,’ he stormed, ‘but don’t drag my ass into it. I never did one damn thing to hurt that girl. So, stop her, Branca,’ he told his attorney, John.
John Branca arranged a meeting with Jack Gordon to discuss the matter. During it, he told Jack that Michael did not want his sister writing that he’d been molested.
‘Why not?’ Jack demanded to know. ‘It’s the truth.’
‘Look, man, I don’t know if it’s true or not,’ John told him. ‘But I do know that if she writes it, Michael will sue her. That, I fucking
know
is true.’
Rumours that Michael was sexually molested as a child had been circulating for years within the entertainment industry. Michael denies it. With that denial in place, there’s not much more anyone else can say about it. It certainly seems that if such a thing were true, it would be known by now considering how exposed Michael’s life has been in recent years.
In subsequent letters to LaToya and Jack, John Branca reiterated his position at the meeting: Michael would litigate against his sister if she made any claim about him being sexually abused. He also indicated that Michael would make himself available to read whatever it was she eventually wrote in order that he be able to review it for ‘accuracy’.
After he received that particular letter, Jack Gordon telephoned Katherine’s ex-business manager, Jerome Howard, to inquire as to whether he still had the power to arrange a meeting with Katherine. According to Jerome, Jack wanted to offer Katherine a deal: if she and Joseph paid LaToya five million dollars, LaToya would cancel her memoirs. ‘It’s the least they can do for her,’ Jack reasoned, ‘considering all they have done
to
her.’ Moreover, if Jerome was the one who could convince the Jackson parents to pay LaToya the money, he would be paid ten per cent of the total: $500,000.
‘Man, that’s blackmail,’ Jerome said, according to his memory.
‘No, it’s not,’ Jack responded. ‘It’s business. Plain, simple business.’
‘Well, I don’t want anything to do with it,’ Jerome told him. ‘I’ll present the deal to Katherine and have her get in touch with you about it.’
‘
What?
You don’t want $500,000?’ Jack asked, incredulously.
Jerome said no. ‘I telephoned Katherine and then met with her,’ Jerome recalled. ‘I told her what was going on. If she wanted to stop her daughter’s book, it was going to cost her five million bucks. She wasn’t pleased. I also told her I didn’t want to get involved, that Jack had offered me a percentage but that I didn’t think it was fair money. I suggested she should have her lawyer deal with it. I suppose she did.’
After that, someone in LaToya’s camp apparently fed a story to the media that Michael had offered her twelve million dollars to kill the project. It was not true. However, in an apparent attempt to maintain heightened interest in her project, LaToya charged that ‘Michael’s offer is awful, a sign of bribery. Nothing is going to stop me,’ she said, as if a war cry, ‘no matter how much I’m offered.’
Jack Gordon then made the ludicrous allegation that Michael had offered to
purchaseG. P. Putnam’s Sons, for eighty-four million dollars just so that he could prevent the book from appearing.
According to an associate of Michael’s, ‘What really happened is that someone representing LaToya – and I’m not saying it was Jack and I’m not saying it wasn’t, because, frankly, I don’t know – got in touch with Michael’s people and said that Mike had better come up with millions if he didn’t want that book to be published. Mike was hurt. He had never done anything to LaToya to cause her to be so unkind to him, and he felt that Jack was orchestrating all of it. Still, it was LaToya who was responsible for the final outcome of it. “She doesn’t get a free ride just by saying Jack is the one doing the dirty work,” he said. “She has to take responsibility, just likeI do.” I was in the room when Michael made his final decision. “I’m not going to let my own sister, a person I loved, a person who has known me all my life, blackmail me. This is as low as you can go,” he observed. “Tell LaToyaI said she can go jump in a lake. She’s not getting one fucking dime from me.”’
For LaToya, family loyalty was clearly a notion now relegated to her recent past. In fact, to keep the pot stirred, Jack claimed that LaToya’s years at Hayvenhurst had made her so angry and bitter that she would include yet another allegation in her book: that Joseph had sexually molested her.
Katherine was stunned when she first heard the charge from Jack. ‘Why, it’s just not true,’ she insisted.
‘Oh, yes, it is,’ Jack said.
‘But who told you this?’ Katherine demanded. ‘Did LaToya tell you?’ Jack said that it had been Rebbie who told him.
By the time Katherine confronted Rebbie, she was seething. However, Rebbie denied ever having told Jack that LaToya was sexually abused by Joseph.
Michael then telephoned LaToya and, as she later recalled it to me, ‘We fought about many things, but the main thing was the book.’ When Michael wanted to know if there was anything critical of him in it, she refused to get into details. The true issue was not her book, she told me, but the fact that Michael ‘is jealous of all the great exposure I’m getting. He wants to hog the limelight.’
‘Look, I’ve been doing this sinceI was five years old,’ Michael told her, according to her memory. ‘And here you come out of nowhere. What justifies your fame? You’re not entitled to it yet, LaToya. You haven’t
done
anything, yet.’
‘Why, how dare you?’ LaToya exclaimed. ‘After all I’ve been through with this family, how can you say that to me?’ She had apparently confused familial dysfunction with artistic achievement. At any rate, she said that she never wanted to speak to Michael again, and then slammed down the phone.
On 5 September 1989, LaToya, now thirty-three, and Jack Gordon, fifty, were married in Reno, Nevada. Two days earlier, LaToya telephoned Katherine and said, ‘I don’t have a family any more. I don’t have a mother, father, or brothers or sisters. I’ve disowned you all.’ The Jacksons firmly believed that LaToya didn’t love Jack, that she only married him in order to disassociate herself from the family. Jack said that they had six security guards with them at all times to prevent her from being kidnapped by the Jacksons. ‘Jack used to tell me all the time how Joseph was trying to kidnap LaToya, and that LaToya was scared to death. From what I understand, Joseph used to beat her when she was a child,’ recalled Gary Berwin, whose business dealings with Joseph went sour in 1985.
‘LaToya was not a very happy person. She’d had a hard life, and she found someone to love and rely on – Jack Gordon,’ Gary continued. ‘Finally she had escaped from that family. I asked Jack specifically why he married LaToya. I asked him, “Did you marry LaToya because you really love her, or did you marry her as a convenience for you and herself?” He said, “No, man, I really love her.” I said, “C’mon, man, be honest with me.” He replied, “I’m telling you, I love her very much.”’