Paris Jackson was 22 and promoting her first solo album when she sat down, over video, with Naomi Campbell. The supermodel had known her for most of her life. On the episode of her YouTube series “No Filter with Naomi,” which came out on March 30, 2021, Naomi remembered meeting Paris when she was very little, so polite that she offered Naomi cakes.
They covered a lot of ground: modeling, acting and “Wilted,” the album Paris had put out the November before. When the talk turned to her musical influences, she went straight to her dad. “He loved classical music and jazz. And hip-hop and R&B and obviously the Motown stuff,” she said. She added radio’s Top 40, soft rock and the Beatles. “So we grew up around all of that.”
From the outside, her childhood looked like a fairy tale. Neverland, the Santa Barbara County ranch Michael called home from 1988 to 2005, had a 65-foot Ferris wheel, a petting zoo and its own steam train. Paris and her brothers, Prince and Bigi (then called Blanket), spent their early years there. When the family traveled, they stayed in the kind of hotels most people only see in magazines.
Paris doesn’t pretend otherwise. On the show she called it a privilege “to be able to experience so much at a young age.” But she said the hotels were only part of it.
“My dad was really good about making sure we were cultured, making sure we were educated,” she told Naomi, “and not just showing us like the glitz and glam, like hotel hopping, five-star places.”
Then she told Naomi what else he did. “It was also like, we saw everything. We saw third world countries. We saw every part of the spectrum.”
Michael, one of the most famous men on earth, took his children to poorer countries on purpose. He wanted them to see how the rest of the world lived, not only the view from a five-star suite. Paris put it simply on the show: they saw “how the other life lived.” And she explained why seeing it mattered more than reading about it. You can teach that through books, she said, “but if you can see it, there’s nothing more valuable than that.”
Paris tells Naomi Campbell how her dad raised her
This is the full episode, just under 30 minutes long, uploaded by Naomi’s official channel. Paris starts talking about her dad’s lessons at about 4:59, and the “every part of the spectrum” line comes within half a minute. At 5:40 Naomi tells the story of meeting her as a little girl.
The same idea ran through the rest of their talk. At one point Naomi suggested that Paris shouldn’t have to go to model castings at all. Paris didn’t agree. “I’m also a full believer that I should earn everything,” she said.
So she does it the long way. “I go to auditions, I work hard, I study scripts, I do my thing,” she told Naomi.