Jacko's World: Voodoo, Blood Baths?
The onetime King of Pop Michael Jackson is back in the news ... by way of a scathing article in Vanity Fair.
According to the magazine, Jackson wanted Steven Spielberg and David Geffen dead — and reports he got a witch doctor to put a curse on them.
The magazine says Jackson paid $150,000 to an African voodoo chief named Baba who chanted "David Geffen be gone! Steven Spielberg be gone!" Jackson reportedly spent another "six figures" to be bathed in sheep's blood because that was supposed to make the curse stronger. It didn't work, obviously. Spielberg and Geffen are still alive.
Jackson reportedly hired the voodoo chief because he thinks Geffen helped ruin his career and is mad at Spielberg for refusing to let him star in a movie about "Peter Pan."
In an article for its March 11 issue, reports that he has a fake tip stuck on his nose because he has no more cartilage from years of plastic surgery. The magazine says one person who's seen Jackson without the tip of his nose describes him as "a mummy with two nostril holes."
In recent months, Jackson has been dogged by controversy: First, over his odd appearance in a California courtroom in November, then later that same month over his bizarre behavior in Berlin where he stunned fans by briefly dangling his young son from a hotel balcony.
In February, a British television documentary caused a stir when Jackson told his interviewer that he slept in the same room, and sometimes the same bed, as young boys.
In interviews with the prosecution team from the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara District Attorney's offices, the Vanity Fair examines why Jackson was never prosecuted for the sexual abuse of 13-year-old Jordie Chandler. One prosecutor tells Vanity Fair they had identified "tender young boys, called Michael's — 'special — friends,' — who ran back a decade." —
A member of the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, which investigated Jackson in 1993, tells the magazine, "We had a 'special friend' identified every year for 10 or 12 years. — They were all pre-pubescent boys between 8 and 12 years old, and as soon as they started sprouting whiskers — whoosh —they were out the door." — He went on to say "they were generally cute boys, along the lines of the Macaulay Culkin variety. He says that while some refused to talk, others lied.
A member of the prosecution team tells Orth, "Silence was purchased with regard to at least one of those boys — Michael Jackson's wealth buys an awful lot of favors."
The article also looks at Jackson's extravagant lifestyle and precarious financial situation.
It reports that in a few years the principal on a $200 million bank loan will come due. In order to pay that off without selling his most valuable asset, the Beatles song song catalogue, he will have to earn about $400 million before taxes, a virtual impossibility.
Vanity Fair also reports that Jackson has his skin bleached because he doesn't like black people; and that he has had special names for blacks, including "spabooks."
It reveals a rare court affidavit detailing several skin conditions that Jackson treats including Jackson's use of a powerful bleaching cream called Benoquin, because, according to his maid, "he does not like being black and he feels that blacks are not liked as much as people of other races." The affidavit also shows that Jackson was diagnosed with vitiligo and discoid lupus, which causes skin blotches.