In her first long-read interview, model and actress Paris Jackson has opened up about her personal struggles and discussed in depth the path her life has taken since the death of her father Michael Jackson in 2009.
“It’s obvious. All arrows point to that,” the 18-year-old told Rolling Stone, alluding that the cause of her father’s death might have been deliberate. “All real fans and everybody in the family knows it,” she continued. “It was a setup.”
Her father, often known as the “king of pop”, died of an acute propofol and benzodiazepine overdose and his doctor, Conrad Murray, was given a two-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter in 2011.
While his death was a shock to the world, one person that Paris revealed it might not have been a shock for was Michael himself. The LA-based teen shared that her father was often suspicious of those closest to him. “He would drop hints about people being out to get him… And at some point he was like, ‘They’re gonna kill me one day.'”
The interview – which hit newsstands in the same week that Paris attended the couture shows in her namesake city and was photographed on a shoot set in head-to-toe Chanel – also revealed the struggles that she has faced in her formative years.
Struggling with “self-hatred” and “thinking that I couldn’t do anything right, not thinking I was worthy of living anymore”, Paris tried to take her own life aged 15, so headed to a therapeutic school in Utah to recover.
This wasn’t the first time. Years of self-harm, previous suicide attempts and drug abuse have taken their toll on her body. Now, she uses body art to conceal the scars boasting 50 tattoos – nine of which are dedicated to her father.
She also chose the cover interview as the platform to share that she was sexually assaulted aged 14 by a “complete stranger” a lot older than herself. “I don’t wanna give too many details,” she said of the attack. “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.”
Now in her late teens, Paris is living in one of her father’s studios and is dating drummer Michael Snoddy and is “happier than she has ever been.”
