On 10 February 1993, Michael Jackson sat down in his own living room at Neverland Ranch and did something he had refused to do since 1979. He gave a proper television interview. It went out live, Oprah Winfrey hosted it, and around 90 million people worldwide watched it.
It remains the most-watched television interview in American history. And he did not agree the questions in advance. Oprah could ask him anything, and she did.
To understand why this was so important, you need to look at what happened to him in the 10 years before.
For a long time, the gossip newspapers called him “Wacko Jacko” and made up crazy stories because he never defended himself. They said he slept in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and tried to buy the Elephant Man’s skeleton. Because he stayed quiet and never denied these rumors, people assumed they were true.
So he started knocking them down, and some of it is genuinely funny. On the Elephant Man’s bones, his answer was pure deadpan: “Where am I gonna put some bones?” On plastic surgery, he claimed you could count his procedures on two fingers, admitting to his nose and denying everything else. Oprah asked him to sing something without music, and instead of just singing he beatboxed an entire song — performing the drums and the bassline at the same time with his mouth. Elizabeth Taylor, appearing earlier in the same broadcast, had warned viewers about exactly this side of him: asked what people should know, she said he was “wildly funny.”
Michael Jackson’s Oprah Winfrey Interview from Neverland Ranch 1993!
Then came the moment the whole interview is remembered for. Oprah asked about his skin, which, by then, was one of the most speculated-upon subjects on earth. People genuinely believed he was bleaching himself because he did not want to be Black.
He told the world, for the first time, that he had vitiligo — a condition that destroys the pigment in your skin, which ran in his family. And you can see him get sharp about it, which he rarely did on camera. “It is something I cannot help,” he said. “When people make up stories that I don’t want to be who I am, it hurts me. It’s a problem for me. I can’t control it.” Then he pointed out the double standard: nobody, he said, has anything to say about the millions of people who lie in the sun to become darker than they are.
He followed it with the sentence that should have ended the argument permanently. “I am a Black American. I’m proud to be a Black American. I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am.”
There was one more piece of generosity in there that people forget. Asked about the moonwalk, the move that made him a global phenomenon, he refused to take credit for inventing it. He said it came from “these beautiful Black kids who live in the ghettos in the inner cities, who are brilliant,” and added: “All I did was enhance the dance.”
Oprah has since called it the most exciting interview she ever did. But there is a sad footnote. He had walked in hoping to correct the record about his skin, and the headlines the next morning were mostly about plastic surgery. Seven months later, the first allegations against him became public, and the man who had finally started talking went quiet again.