FUROR: Prince, here with kid sibs Blanket and Paris, revealed a text exchange he had with Janet. (WireImage)
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Even the most dysfunctional families have their sane one, and in the famously chaotic Jackson clan, that member has always been Janet.
Until now.
This past week, the family feuded publicly over the late Michael’s estate, with his children taking to Twitter to accuse their Aunt Janet and others of kidnapping their grandmother and legal guardian, Katherine, in order to wrest away control of the King of Pop’s fortune.
At the public memorial service for Michael on July 7, 2009, it was Janet who soothed an emotional Paris, then just 11 years old, as she tearfully remembered her father as “the best daddy,” and it was into Janet’s arms she flew after emotionally collapsing.
Nearly three years to the day, things are quite different. Last Monday, 14-year-old Paris Jackson not only defied her 46-year-old Aunt Janet but also defied the way the Jackson family has traditionally operated: Instead of keeping this latest family feud private, Paris, frantic over her relatives’ refusal to let her speak to her grandma, took to Twitter and declared matriarch Katherine missing.
The national media were quick to go on red alert, and Janet was caught on camera confronting her niece in the driveway of Katherine’s estate.
“You’re a spoiled little bitch!” Janet yelled.
“This is our house,” Paris shot back. “Not the Jackson family house. Get the f–k out!”
On Thursday, Paris’ brother Prince Michael, 15, posted a text message he’d sent to several relatives, including his famous aunt, listed in his iPhone simply as “Janet Jackson.”
“This is enough,” it read, “so I am texting you for the simple fact that WE DEMAND TO SPEAK TO MY GRANDMA NOW!!!”
Janet’s reply was terse: “Don’t let them pls.”
What’s happened to Janet Jackson? How is it that the seemingly calmest, most soft-spoken sibling could be so vicious to her niece and nephews?
Why would a woman who launched her solo career by publicly emancipating herself from her overbearing family — her 1986 breakthrough album was called “Control” — allow herself to become enmeshed in such an ugly family feud? And why would Janet — the only one of 10 Jackson siblings to have a career nearly as successful as Michael’s — allow her image to be tarnished this way?
One Jackson family member tells The Post the answer is simple: It’s all about money. She’s got some; Michael’s estate has more — Billboard recently estimated its net worth at $1 billion — and her siblings have none. She lives in fear of supporting them.
“Janet’s last three tours have failed to sell tickets, and she’s cut each of them short,” the sibling says. “She hasn’t had a hit record in more than a decade, and she no longer has a recording contract.”
This family member says that Janet’s net worth is estimated at $100 million but that “she only has money going out and nothing new coming in.”
Janet hasn’t had a hit song since 2001’s “Someone to Call My Lover,” and the last time she had any cultural relevance was in February 2004, after Justin Timberlake exposed her breast during their Super Bowl performance.
She’s starred in a couple of Tyler Perry films, but lately her brand has been defined by her yo-yo dieting (she’s a spokeswoman for Nutrisystem) and struggles with self-actualization. Her 2011 self-help book, “True You: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself,” was a best seller, ironic given that she hasn’t been able to detach fully from her destructive family — especially older brother Randy, whom she is said to worship.
“Janet has nothing to do,” her sibling says. “And she is devoted to any cause Randy takes up.”
It was Randy, says this sibling, who hatched the plan to remove Katherine from the Jackson home, challenge Michael’s will, remove the children from Katherine’s legal custody and ultimately gain control of the estate.
“Randy thought that if they were to publicly show that [Katherine] was no longer capable of caring for the children and no longer able to handle the day-to-day responsibilities of the house, then Randy could take her position.”
Randy, now 50, enlisted his sister Rebbie, 62, brothers Jermaine, 58, and Tito, 60, and Janet, the sibling says. The coup’s ultimate aim: to overthrow Michael’s estate executors, John Branca and John McClain.
With that, Randy would control the $70,000 monthly allowance Katherine gets from the estate and the $100,000 the children get.
About two weeks ago, Randy pushed the button on the plan.
Four of the Jackson siblings — Jermaine, Tito, Jackie and Marlon — were doing a concert in New Mexico. Randy coordinated with Katherine’s assistant, Janice Smith, to have the 82-year-old matriarch ready for “a long vacation.”
A doctor hired by the siblings was brought in to visit with Katherine and promptly told her she needed rest, the family member says. The siblings kept her isolated from outside contact, busying her with games of Uno while Jermaine issued statements that his mother had suffered a series of strokes and needed rest.
Janet’s relationship with each of her siblings, and her parents, is complicated.
When she was a little girl, she has said, her brothers teased her mercilessly about her weight and her looks, calling her “Slaughter Hog,” “Cow” and “Pig.” Even now, she has said, they still call her “Dunk” — short for “Donkey.”
The teasing got so bad, she said, that she’d bang her head against the wall. She was often left at home while her dad went on tour with her famous brothers in The Jackson 5. She was 6 or 7, she has said, when her father, Joe, told her to never call him “Dad.”
“I will never forget that,” she has said. “I used to hurt so badly that I’d ask God, ‘Why? What have I done to deserve this?’ ”
Janet had no friends and, instead, talked to the family dogs. She was pushed into acting by her parents, and in 1977, when she was 10 years old, Janet was cast on the sitcom “Good Times.” One year later, producers bound her breasts, and her mother was taking her to get colonics.
When Janet was 16, her father got her a record deal, and her first two albums — 1982’s “Janet Jackson” and 1984’s “Dream Street” — were overseen by her father and brothers.
When Janet hit 18, she rebelled, eloping with singer James DeBarge. By 1985, the marriage was over, but it helped Janet escape her parents and siblings.
Janet found Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis — the duo who would produce her blockbuster third album, “Control” — through McClain, an executive at A&M and the man now executing her brother’s will.
One can only wonder what the Janet of 1986 — scared, free, struggling to carve her own persona — would make of today’s Janet, back in league with her tormenters against McClain.
And yet, not all is well with her siblings. Janet has fought viciously with La Toya, Jermaine and Jackie.
In 2001, Janet bought a Las Vegas home for her mother with the stipulation that family patriarch Joe Jackson never be allowed to live there, according to Rebbie Jackson.
“She never forgave Joseph for what he did to us when we were children. She doesn’t deal with him at all,” Rebbie said.
While Janet has helped pay bills for her mother in the past and paid her brother Marlon’s mortgage for a full year and moved him to Atlanta, she has mostly been careful about helping her siblings with their cash problems.
“They need to get jobs if they think I’m going to do what Michael did for them. They are grown-ass men. I’m not giving them nothing,” Janet said, according to this family member.
While Janet’s relationship with Michael appeared close, the siblings were one another’s biggest rivals. Michael even once asked Janet to stop using her surname when she performed.
It wasn’t until after repeated pleas from Katherine Jackson that Janet went to a Santa Maria, Calif., courthouse to show support for Michael during his child-molestation trial in 2005.
While Janet’s fortune remains stable, she fears for her security should she find herself supporting eight siblings and their families.
While Michael was in hiding in Bahrain following his acquittal, Janet started paying Katherine’s bills and giving her siblings money. But she has begun to cut them off.
Randy and Jermaine, who have children by the same woman, had previously requested that the estate pay their back child support, something Branca ultimately approved. Randy once owed as much as $150,000 to his ex.
Since Michael’s death in 2009, Branca and McClain have worked miracles to alleviate the $500 million debt left by the legend. The estate owns a share in Sony/ATV music publishing, which contains all of Jackson’s hits and the prized Beatles catalog. It is said to be worth upward of $2 billion. The bulk of it will go to Jackson’s three children: Paris, Prince Michael and 10-year-old Blanket.
If Janet doesn’t support her brothers, the estate could.
“It is a fact that the primary reason Janet got involved in Randy’s plan,” says a sibling, “is because she wants to see her brothers control Michael’s money so they won’t come to her anymore.”
After Prince tweeted that his late father had warned him about “certain people,” the family member said one of those people was Janet. Often calling her “evil, selfish and cheap,” Michael warned his children that Janet wouldn’t be the best of aunts.
Last week, California Judge Mitchell Beckloff appointed Tito’s son, TJ Jackson, guardian of Prince, Paris and Blanket.
TJ’s mother, Dee Dee Jackson, was murdered in 1994 by a man she’d begun dating after divorcing Tito. Michael took TJ and TJ’s two brothers under his wing. He was part of the Michael Jackson-inspired music group 3T.
As such, TJ is inclined to take the side of Jackson’s kids in disputes and said either Rebbie or Janet had a fake doctor persuade Katherine to leave California.
“I am taking actions that I have deemed appropriate to protect Michael’s children,” TJ said in court.
Janet, it’s clear, will no longer be a part of their lives, and this thwarted plan has eroded her power.
The three children have been reunited with their grandmother and have vowed to stay as far as possible from their aunts and uncles. Janet’s efforts to give her brothers a financial parachute has backfired.
“[The children] will probably never let this go,” says one sibling. “They certainly won’t forget it. And the ones the family members tried to paint as bad guys are the very ones those children will always see as protectors.”
Stacy Brown is a reporter and longtime friend of the Jackson family.
Additional reporting by Maureen Callahan