Did we ever discuss these conversations shortly after June 25th?
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Grace Rwaramba who cared for King of Pop and his children has shocking secrets of his addictions and bizarre nomadic life
Daphne Barak
I was in the bar of a London hotel on Thursday night with a senior television executive when a figure in a jumpsuit ran in screaming: “Daphne, Daphne, Michael is . . . Michael is . . . dead!” My startled guest whispered: “Isn’t that the nanny — the wife?” The distraught woman was Grace Rwaramba, who worked for Michael Jackson for 17 years, starting in his office, then looking after his three children and sharing his ramshackle life after his sexual abuse trial — though never being his wife. Recently, he sacked her.
She was with me in London to talk openly about him for the first time before he began his concerts at the O2. Instead we were hit by the news of his sudden death.
Over the next 24 hours, Grace desperately attempted to contact the children — Paris, Prince and Blanket, who she says regard her as their mother — before flying back to Los Angeles to try to see them.
Caring for her in this distraught state, I had an extraordinary insight into how Jackson’s family and the Nation of Islam — Louis Farrakhan’s black Muslims — were moving swiftly into the vacuum left by his death.
Early on Friday, Jackson’s mother, Katherine, contacted Grace from his house. Shockingly, she wanted to know where his money was. Grace recounted: “Katherine just called me. She said, ‘Grace, the children are crying. They are asking about you. They can’t believe that their father died. Grace, you remember Michael used to hide cash at the house. I am here. Where can it be?’
“I told her to look at the garbage bags and under the carpets. But, Daphne, can you believe this? This woman just lost her son a few hours ago and she is calling me to know where the money is!
“I asked to speak to the children. She said they were sleeping. But she just said they were crying. She never let me speak to them. She said, ‘Grace, where are you? Come. I will pick you up from the airport.’ She sounded so strong. So strong!”
Within a few hours, all her dignity gone, Grace was on the phone again begging a “brother” from the Nation of Islam at the Jackson house to let her talk to Paris, Prince and Blanket. The answer was no.
Grace felt vulnerable. She expected to be contacted by the coroner as soon as she arrived home in LA, because she knows many of the secrets of the star’s desperate final years and had already confided them to me. She had unravelled his bizarre nomadic life running around the world — Bahrain, Ireland, Germany, New Jersey — with the three children but no cash flow.
She confided: “When Paris had her birthday this April, I wanted to buy balloons, things, to make a happy birthday. There was no money in the house. I had to put everything on my personal credit card. I brought people to clean the house. The room of the kids needed to be cleaned. But they weren’t paid.”
Revealed within her account of their love-hate relationship was Jackson’s everyday life as a father and drug addict. Grace told me of pumping out his stomach after he took too many drugs and of how dirty and unkempt he became towards the end. Her stories of his attitude to the children shocked me.
Here, thanks to her, is the real world of Michael Jackson behind the masks, the wigs, the make-up and the surgery.
Grace has long been the mystery woman in Jackson’s life as far as the media are concerned. Ugandan but with family connections to Rwanda, she went to America as a young woman and studied there. She also married an American from whom she is separated but not divorced. She is now in her forties.
I met her during Jackson’s trial in 2005, when I was filming television specials with his parents and she spoke loyally for him. A few weeks ago, she started to communicate with me from Los Angeles, saying that — not for the first time — he had sacked her. Her telephone conversations, text messages and e-mails sounded unhappy and
erratic, perhaps even suicidal, because she could not see the children.
“I took these babies in my arm on the first day of their life,” she insisted. “They are my babies.”
At one point she cried on the phone, saying: “Daphne, I don’t know what to do. He doesn’t let me see my babies. I have written to him. He doesn’t answer. I can’t call him because he changed his phone number. These poor babies . . . I am getting phone calls that they are being neglected. Nobody is cleaning the rooms, because he didn’t pay the housekeeper.
“I just got a phone call that Michael is in such a bad shape. He is not clean. He has not shaved . . . His nails . . . He is not eating well. I used to do all this for him.
“They are trying to lure me to go back. But each time it happened before, he got rid of me. Then he made promises if I would come back. All these promises . . . After few days, it was the same abuse all over again.”
She had moved into a place “next door” to Jackson’s home but was afraid of what would happen if “I bump into my babies”. She talked of getting away to Rwanda and was clearly desperate, so I invited her to stay with me.
And that is how eight days and sleepless nights started, listening to Grace unload about her life with Michael Jackson, her abuse by Michael Jackson, her anger with Michael Jackson, the problems with Michael Jackson’s family.
“I love my babies,” she told me. “I miss my babies. I used to hug them and laugh with them. But when Michael was around, they froze. He didn’t like me hugging them. But they needed love. I was the only mother they knew.”
She described Prince as “very smart” and said that Blanket, the youngest, “makes me laugh so much. One day before I was fired he decided to do a concert for me. He was so cute, singing to me Billie Jean and others of his father’s songs. I was laughing so hard. Prince and Paris were playing around. It was such a happy moment”.
“Then suddenly Michael walked in. He surprised us. Usually, the security would alert me that he was about to come. Blanket immediately stopped. The kids looked frightened. Michael was so angry. I knew I would be fired. Whenever the children got too attached to me, he would send me away.”
Grace said the children disliked the masks they had to wear in public. “It wasn’t my idea. I hated it as well. So whenever I had a chance, I misplaced the masks or forgot to pack them. Michael always got angry and asked, ‘How come we keep losing children’s masks?’ He didn’t notice that we were losing them only when I was around.”
Grace was a witness to Jackson’s abuse of prescription drugs. She said he took a mixture of them — in her words, “he always ate too little and mixed too much”.
“I had to pump his stomach many times . . . He always mixed so much of it. There was one period that it was so bad that I didn’t let the children see him.”
She claims he was furious with her for getting his mother and sister Janet to help. “We tried to do an intervention. It was me, Janet, his mother. I co-ordinated it. He was so angry with me.
“He screamed at me, ‘You betrayed my trust. You called them behind my back.’ I told him, ‘Michael I didn’t betray your trust. I try to help you.’ But he didn’t want to listen. That was one of the times he let me go.”
She fears that the family will now blame her for his drug-taking — just as, she says, he tried to make her the scapegoat for his overspending.
Her account of the money and hospitality he received after his trial from Sheikh Abdullah, the son of the King of Bahrain, reveals a man who had no understanding of of money.
“During the trial Jermaine (his older brother) suddenly connected him to Sheikh Abdullah. I was happy because he was so down. He was scared. Nobody else called. So Michael was spending hours on the phone with Abdullah. He is the one who is sending the money for the lawyers.”
Abdullah, she said, called her one day and asked for her bank account. “I said why? He said he was sending money to Michael through my account. He sent $1m. Then another $35,000.
“Katherine needed money too. So Michael told me to give her my ATM card. She was cashing out of the machine every day. I checked it.”
Last year, Abdullah sued Jackson in the London High Court for £4.7m for reneging on a music contract that would have paid back this and other loans. Grace told me: “When Abdullah sued Michael last year, Michael said in the beginning, ‘Oh, I never got money from him.’ He tried to frame me that I took the money.”
She said she pointed out to his mother that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) might find out. “I said, ‘You, Michael and I — we will all go to jail! You know that we didn’t report to the IRS about that gift.’ I told her I had all the documents. That worked. She immediately called Michael and he stopped denying he knew about the money.” Grace added: “When we lived in Bahrain, we had no money at all. Everything was paid by Abdullah, and Michael owed so much money to people.
“Suddenly — I can’t remember now how it came — he received some money. Instead of buying a small house, so that we won’t go from one hotel to another or stay with friends, he told me, ‘Grace, you have to go immediately to Florence to buy antiques.’ He wanted me to spend £1m.
“I flew on my credit card. When I arrived in Florence and saw these antiques, I called him and said, ‘This is not worth anything.’ Michael never listened to me. He said, ‘Buy it. Buy it.’ We didn’t even have a home to live in so we had to put the antiques in some storage.”
She revealed the full story of the Bahrain episode: “From the time we flew to Bahrain, we actually didn’t have a home. At the beginning they put us in the palace. The
idea was that Michael would create a charity and a CD with Abdullah.
“But when Michael failed to do it, I felt that the atmosphere changed. After several weeks, we were told that the uncle of Abdullah was coming back and needed to have his house.”
She said they flew to Oman, staying in a hotel at Abdullah’s expense.
“Then he wanted us back. He was still hoping that Michael would come through with his promises.”
Jackson demanded that the sheikh build him a house in a Bahrain and refused to believe there would not be one waiting for him. He was mistaken
and they were put in another hotel.
All the time, they had the three children in tow. Grace was getting tired of “running with them from hotel to hotel” so she accepted an invitation to take Jackson and the children to stay with friends of her own near Dun Laoghaire on the outskirts of Dublin in Ireland.
“They own a recording studio. They were so nice to us. They did a favour for me. Michael left them bills, he never paid them back.”
By then it was mid-2007. The entourage’s next stop was in New Jersey, the modest family home of Frank Tyson, a Jackson aide named as one of the five “co-conspirators” during the sex abuse trial.
Grace said: “Frank’s family is not rich. They have a small house. We stayed there for weeks. Michael stayed there downstairs alone.
“The kids slept with me in one room. I didn’t mind because I tried to make it fun for them. But I felt so bad that we were staying such a long time at this family’s small home.
“I tried to develop a friendship with Frank’s mother just to tell them thank you but when Michael saw we were getting friendly he said, ‘Don’t trust her. She is not interested in you. She just talks to you because of me.’
“It was just so exhausting to pack and unpack three kids from one hotel to another friend’s home, back and forth. And we were running out of friends.
“Michael had no idea about money. He got a proposal to make an appearance in Japan for $1m.
“I knew how many people were involved.
“I told him, ‘Michael, by the time everyone takes his cut you will end up with a very small amount.’ He didn’t want to hear. He flew to Japan. By the time everyone took their share, he ended up with $200,000.
“Then he got a second proposal to go to Japan. This time there was only $200,000 on the table. I refused to go.” Jackson went and then decided suddenly to fly to the birthday party of Prince Azim, the son of the Sultan of Brunei. By the time he had paid his huge hotel bill, “all the Japan money was gone”.
Back in California, Jackson rented a house from the Nation of Islam. According to Grace, he was grossly overcharged.
“The Nation of Islam was telling him that the house we had in Los Angeles, after Neverland was sold, cost $100,000 a month. I checked with many real estate agencies.
“To rent this house should not have cost more than $20,000-$25,000. He had no clue.”
Equally, he did not read his O2 contract before signing it and did not realise he had committed himself to 50 concerts. “Fifty performances! I told him, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I signed only for 10.’ He didn’t know what he was signing. He never does!”
My sense of shock increased when Grace showed me documents proving not only that Michael had not paid her salary and expenses since October 2008, but according to her, that he had not paid her medical insurance since she was with him and the children in Bahrain.
“Michael owes so much money to so many people. And why does he not pay them? Is it because he thinks of those working for him as an owner (would)? He always told me, ‘Grace, nobody cares about you. They only talked to you about me’.”
The point about the medical insurance is that Grace suffers from a life-threatening form of the auto-immune disease lupus. My doctor told me after examining her that it was chronic, adding: “I have never seen somebody with such a badly neglected condition.”
Grace believes the disease is caused by stress, but she said Michael refused to take it seriously. Once when she had been in hospital for chemotherapy he had accused her of abandoning him and the children, she said.
“To Michael, to go to a hospital was never about being ill. It was all about avoiding a court appearance or a performance or some other commitment he didn’t want to respect. You know, during the trial, the only peaceful place we could escape to and sleep was a hospital room. We used to go to the hospital and relax.”
As Grace worked through her phone calls to LA on Friday, desperately trying to ensure that the children were comforted after losing their father, she sobbed and screamed and became more incoherent.
“Yes, this is it . . . because (crying) this is it . . . because he started avoiding everything. We were trying to help him and they fired me because of this (sobs).”
Her next target was a woman from the Nation of Islam whom Jermaine Jackson had brought into the house to look after the children in Michael’s final weeks.
“Yes I am really distraught (sobs). Oh my God, the kids. Who has got the kids? He’s allowed this woman from the Nation of Islam . . . he has this woman . . . but she’s so cold and she is cold and doesn’t know how to hold them or how to hug them.”
Grace said the children had been anxious about their father and had been trying to care for him — “he hasn’t been eating and the kids have been so scared for him”.
Worried by the endless goings on in the Jackson compound Grace turned to me at the end and said: “The youngest one has been saying, ‘God should have taken
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