Historically, schools, religious institutions, and the military have performed the job of socializing young men and women. In the future, though, we will increasingly look to reality television to give children and washed-up celebrities the valuable job skills they’ll need to succeed in life. Take La Toya Jackson. Before she enrolled in Reality School University, she was, by her own admission, an unusually naïve woman unschooled in the ways of the world. But after enrolling in Armed And Famous and Celebrity Apprentice, she acquired the financial and procedural know-how to tackle the biggest case of her career: solving the murder of Michael Jackson. (Cue dramatic music.)
La Toya Jackson was raised, as she details in the memoir Starting Over, like a fairy-tale princess. It was drilled into her at an early age that her job in life was to smile, look pretty, wave, and sing and dance whenever Papa Joe Jackson cracked the whip. Everything else was left to the servants. The idea that people might lie to her was inconceivable. She assumed that everyone was as godly as her. She was a bright-eyed Pollyanna in a scary and uncertain world. It could be argued, and I will argue it here, that Papa Joe cultivated an air of helplessness around his children so that they would be easier to control. In La Toya’s mind, however, Joe kept his children sheltered from the outside world to protect them from predators and parasites who would exploit them and their fame. La Toya doesn’t seem to realize that Joe was the biggest parasite of them all.
As recounted in Starting Over, La Toya was so breathtakingly naive that when a friend and business associate of the Jackson family named Jack Gordon asked her out for lunch and told her to bring money, she brought a thousand dollars and slid it to him under the table. Gordon wasn’t asking for a loan or an investment. He was simply ballsy enough to flat-out ask for money from someone he barely knew, and La Toya was too naive to realize that you don’t have to give someone money just because they ask for it.
La Toya kept bringing thousands of dollars to their lunches, and Gordon waged a long and successful campaign to win over the Jacksons. La Toya eventually switched managers from her father to Gordon, and then married him in 1989, substituting one glowering, controlling, physically abusive father figure for another. Gordon beat La Toya relentlessly, stole her money, and kept her a prisoner in a gilded cage.
Gordon had a background in brothels; he was literally a pimp intent on prostituting La Toya’s modest talents for every last penny. He arranged a lucrative Playboy photo shoot, and La Toya was so naive that when she showed up on the set, the first question she asked was where they were keeping all the nightgowns she’d be modeling. According to the book, La Toya had no idea she’d been asked to pose naked. As a devout Jehovah’s Witness, she was never even allowed to look at a Playboy, let alone be its star attraction.
Gordon just kept on pushing. Every time La Toya felt she’d reached a new low, a trapdoor opened and she plummeted even further. Playboy at least had prestige. It’s where classy women exposed their vaginas. Gordon’s next few business ventures were on the seedier side. He famously had La Toya pimp a psychic-advice hotline in which she promised to spill Jackson family secrets. She hosted something called Exotic Club Tour. She shot a second Playboy spread and, as part of a multimedia assault, a Playboy home video while she was at it. (In a much less sordid but equally brazen move, Gordon tried to transform La Toya from a generic R&B never-was to a country crooner with the ill-fated 1994 album From Nashville To You. I would love to read more about these seamy endeavors, but La Toya glides right past them because they don’t fit the two themes of the book: overcoming her dead ex-husband and manager’s abuse and seeking justice for Michael Jackson.)
When La Toya compares Gordon to Satan, she’s not waxing hyperbolic. She claims that she flew to Israel to deliver a press conference loudly proclaiming Michael Jackson’s innocence when he was accused of sexual abuse in 1993, only to discover that the speech Gordon had given her to read instead loudly condemned her brother as a pedophile. Why didn’t La Toya just stick to her original sentiments? By that point, she’d been brainwashed, manipulated, abused, and confused to such an extent that she was perhaps incapable of free will.