Michael Jackson is behind the wheel. His little sister Janet is in the seat next to him, and the car is full of dinners from a restaurant called Loves. They aren’t taking the food home. They’re driving around, looking for the right people to give it to.
Janet told that story on CNN in February 2011. Piers Morgan sat down with her in Beverly Hills for “Piers Morgan Tonight” and introduced her as someone who “never talks about her private life really.” She warned him early that interviews weren’t her thing. “I’m not much of a talker,” she said. “I’d rather just stay very quiet and listen to what’s going on.”
She had a new book out, “True You,” and Morgan had read the passages about her childhood. He brought up how much Michael used to tease her when she was small. Janet didn’t argue. “I heard he was bad,” she said, before adding that “he was a good kid, though.” Looking out for her brothers and sisters, she told him, felt “like it’s part of my job as little sister.”
Then Morgan asked how the two of them got along as they grew older. “We were very close. Mike and I were very close,” she said. “We used to go to this restaurant called Loves.”
They’d pick up what she called “a ton of dinners” and head out in the car with them. Michael did the driving. Janet sat beside him and handed the food out.
Janet tells Piers Morgan about the dinners with Michael (2011)
This is a fan upload of the full CNN interview, not an official CNN copy. Janet starts the story at 27:25, and it runs for about half a minute, right up to the moment she starts laughing.
The dinners weren’t for them. Janet and Michael were driving around “looking for homeless people to give them to,” she said.
Morgan sounded surprised. “Did you?” he asked.
“Yes. We did it. We used to do it all the time,” Janet told him. “We’d just give them food.”
Not everybody wanted it. “One guy threw it at us,” she said, and she started laughing at the memory. He had a few rude words to go with it, and Janet didn’t wait around to argue. “I was like, Mike, let’s get out of here.”
Morgan guessed that Michael must have been the one who panicked. Janet put him right. “Well no, he was driving and I’m the one that’s passing out the food,” she said. “We got out of there though.” In all the times they did it, she said, that was “the only time” they ever ran into “any sort of rejection.”
A little later in the interview, Morgan asked which memories of Michael she goes back to now. The dinners came first. “About passing out the dinners to the homeless,” she said. She also mentioned looking after the animals together and “the talks that we had.”
The story traveled fast. Two days after the broadcast, the fan site MJWN (Michael Jackson World Network) ran it under the headline “Michael & Janet Fed Homeless,” crediting the Daily Star in the UK. Its write-up called the dinners her favorite memory of her brother and said the two of them handed out the hot meals in Los Angeles.
Janet never said what was on the plates, and Morgan didn’t ask. She did remember the name of the place they came from, though she wasn’t sure it was still around by 2011. “I don’t think it’s in existence any more,” she said of Loves.