It’s tough to overstate how much shit Paris Jackson has gone through, even just going off of what the general public knows. Her father was Michael Jackson, who had her and her brothers wear masks out in public and kept them homeschooled at his massive amusement park-esque compound. All of that would have to make an impact on a kid, and that’s without even taking into account Jackson’s sudden and well-publicized death, which happened when Paris was only 11-years-old. According to a new profile in Rolling Stone, though, she’s been through even more shit since then.
The piece is long and takes some interesting turns, and it all kicks off with Jackson excitedly taking a tour through Los Angeles’ Museum Of Death—a grisly collection of what Rolling Stone describes as “decapitation photos, snuff films, and serial-killer memorabilia.” Basically, Jackson has a profound fascination with the intersection between death and celebrity, an idea that’s not especially surprising when you consider the way her father’s very public death thrust her into the real world in a way she had never really experienced before. As the profile goes on, we find out that Jackson has tried to kill herself “multiple times,” blaming it on “self-hatred” and general “low self-esteem,” and she has a number of tattoos now that are positioned to cover up her scars and—in Rolling Stone’s words—“what she says are track marks from drug use.”
Jackson has come through all of that, though, and at 18-years-old she seems to be in a better place. However, she still can’t get away from death, possibly because she’s now living in her dad’s old studio, surrounded by artwork he commissioned, and near a “mini-museum” that Michael Jackson set up to display family photos. She can’t escape her father and his death, but it doesn’t seem like she wants to. In fact, she’s kind of driven by his death, but not because of how tragic it was for her family. She actually believes that he was murdered, and there’s “a total conspiracy theory” surrounding him. “It was a setup,” she says. “It was bullshit.”
She does blame Dr. Conrad Murray for getting her dad addicted to drugs, but she seems convinced that there’s a real killer out there. She suggests that “a lot of people” wanted her dad dead, and though she does want to expose the truth, she knows that doing so is “a chess game” that she has to play “the right way.”
It’s unclear just how serious she is about that, as the rest of the profile makes it clear that she has a healthy level of self-awareness about how ridiculous her whole life has been, but the fact that Rolling Stone doesn’t push that topic much makes it seem like it is something she’s not especially comfortable talking about. Either way, it’s probably impossible to really know how she feels about her dad’s death, since nobody—other than maybe her own siblings—can really relate to what she’s been through.