Brandy could feel her heart going before anyone opened the door. “My heart is beating so fast at this point,” she remembered on MTV. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God. It’s happening. We’re about to open the door and he’s going to be in there.'”
“He” was Michael Jackson. She tells the whole story again in her memoir, “Phases,” which HarperCollins published on March 31, 2026.
On paper she had no reason to be starstruck. “The Boy Is Mine,” her duet with Monica, spent 13 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The year before, she’d played the title role in ABC’s “Cinderella,” with Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother, and 60 million people tuned in.
None of that counted for much where Michael was concerned. “Michael Jackson was it, so we studied Michael. Brandy studied Michael,” her brother Ray J said on the same MTV show. Her producer, Rodney Jerkins, “gave me the Michael codes,” she later told Billboard.
Jerkins was also the one who got her in the room. In 1999 he was working with Michael on the songs that became “Invincible.” “He knew how much I wanted to meet Michael Jackson, so he says, ‘Would you like to come and meet him?'” Brandy said. “I’m like, ‘Are you serious? Of course I want to meet Michael Jackson!'”
Ray J spotted him first. “When we first walked into the studio, we can kind of see Michael in the corner and we looked at each other like, ‘Did you see him?'” he said. Brandy looked over and had one thought: “Oh my God. This is Michael Jackson.”
So what happened?
She fainted. “I fainted, blacked out, like seriously blacked out,” she said on MTV. In “Phases” she puts it even more plainly: “I actually blacked out. Legs turned to Jell-O. Down I went.”
Brandy and Ray J tell the story of meeting Michael (fan upload)
This is a fan’s upload of the MTV segment, not an official copy. Brandy reaches the moment she blacked out at about 0:57. Listen for what Michael asks her when she comes around, at about 1:20.
Ray J kept his cool, mostly. He was shaking Michael’s hand, “saying what’s up Mike, what’s up my dude,” while “Brandy was still on the floor.” In the version she gave Billboard, Ray J was louder: “This is Michael Jackson, and you are on the floor! Get up!”
Michael didn’t make a fuss. “Brandy, are you okay?” he asked, and her first thought was, “Oh my God, he knows my name.” To Billboard, she recalled how he calmed her: “It’s okay. It’s okay. This has happened before.” She remembers him as “so nice and sweet,” and he gave her a hug.
Brandy tells Jennifer Hudson she fainted in front of Michael
Brandy and Jennifer Hudson swap stories about working with legends on “The Jennifer Hudson Show.” At about 2:35 she says it herself: “And I fainted when I met Michael Jackson.”
Not everyone in the building tells it the same way. CJ DeVillar, who was engineering Michael’s sessions at the Record Plant, told The MJCast podcast in 2017 that Brandy walked up to him at the front desk “like a fan, wide-eyed.” He knocked on Michael’s lounge door, and Michael’s first worry was how he looked. “Oh my gosh, but I’m so stinky,” he said.
He’d come in that day in a wrinkled T-shirt, “no socks, penny loafers,” DeVillar said. Michael said yes anyway. “He invited her in, and they chatted for a couple hours.”