The television that landed on the Lewis family’s doorstep was taller than the boy who lived there. Nobody in the house had ordered it, and the delivery had no name on it. The family had one suspect, and he was staying in the spare room.
Emmanuel Lewis was about 12 then, and as the pint-sized star of ABC’s “Webster” he had one of the best-known faces on American television. He was also a close friend of Michael Jackson. On Oct. 13, 2012, he sat down with magician Criss Angel for a live webcast and said something few fans had heard: “Michael used to live at my house.”
It happened while Michael recovered after the accident on the Pepsi commercial set in 1984. According to Lewis, his friend didn’t go home. “Instead of going home he decided to check in at a hotel,” he told Angel. Lewis wasn’t having it. “That’s Mike, you know, that’s my boy,” he said. “I can’t have him recuperate by himself in the hotel, so I was like, we’re coming to kidnap you.”
So the Lewises went and got him. “Me, my mom, my brothers, we all took him into our house,” Lewis said. A bedroom was free, one he said was there for his sister, who was staying in New York with her daughter. Michael moved in, and he didn’t leave after a weekend. “He literally recuperated for months living in my condo,” Lewis said.
The most famous singer on the planet was now sharing a condo with a child star, his mother and his brothers.
Emmanuel Lewis tells Criss Angel about the months Michael Jackson lived at his family’s condo
The story runs from about 0:58 to 3:45 in this clip from Criss Angel’s own YouTube channel. Lewis describes bringing Michael home from the hotel at about 1:29, and the television turns up at about 2:21.
Then came the delivery. “There was a huge, huge gigantic big screen TV came to the house,” he said, “and it was kind of around the time of Christmas.”
The timing made it stranger. Michael had been raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and in Lewis’s words he “didn’t really believe in, you know, doing anything for Christmas.” But who else did the family know who could send a set that size without so much as a card? “It came to our address and it didn’t have a name on it,” Lewis said. “It was taller than I was.”
The whole family went after their guest. Lewis remembered the accusation word for word: “Mike, quit playing, you brought this TV to the house.” Michael’s answer, as Lewis tells it, was a flat “no, I didn’t bring it.”
He was telling the truth.
“Finally, I guess a week later, they finally realized that somebody else put the wrong address on his big screen TV,” Lewis said. The set belonged to somebody else. It had been sent to the Lewis condo by mistake, and back it went. For about a week the family had been teasing an innocent man.
Michael let the television leave, and then he did the very thing he’d been accused of. “He actually bought the screen TV to the house,” Lewis told Angel, “and it was exactly the one that was there.” The same model went back in the same condo, and this time everybody knew who’d paid for it.
Lewis was 41 when he told the story on that webcast, long past his “Webster” days. He still called the man from the spare room “my boy.”