For years, Michael Jackson faced endless questions about how much cosmetic surgery he had undergone.
Michael repeatedly pushed back against the speculation.
In his 1988 autobiography Moonwalk, he acknowledged having his nose altered twice and having a cleft added to his chin.
“That is it,” he wrote.
Years later, sitting across from Oprah Winfrey in 1993, Michael gave essentially the same message.
When Oprah asked how much plastic surgery he had undergone, Michael said it was “very, very little” and suggested the number could be counted on two fingers.
But nearly two decades later, someone extremely close to Michael gave a different account.
His mother, Katherine Jackson.
Katherine Jackson Discusses Michael’s Cosmetic Surgery With Oprah
On November 8, 2010, Katherine appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show for an extensive interview about her son, who had died the previous year.
During their conversation, Oprah brought up Michael’s changing appearance and reminded Katherine that Michael had previously described undergoing only a small number of procedures.
Katherine responded directly.
According to her, Michael had undergone more procedures than he publicly acknowledged.
She believed her son had simply been embarrassed to discuss the true extent of it.
Katherine also described Michael as being deeply insecure about his appearance from a young age.
She remembered him complaining about his nose as a teenager and said she repeatedly tried to convince him that there was nothing wrong with the way he looked.
Eventually, Michael decided to have his nose changed.
According to Katherine, however, it did not stop with that first procedure.
As his appearance continued changing, Katherine became concerned.
She told Oprah that she had heard people could become addicted to plastic surgery and said she believed that was what had happened to Michael.
That point is important: it was Katherine’s personal assessment, not a medical diagnosis.
She said she repeatedly told her son that enough was enough.
At one point, she even approached one of his plastic surgeons herself.
Katherine recalled asking the doctor that if Michael returned wanting further work on his nose, he should essentially leave it unchanged rather than make it smaller again.
Michael had also strongly denied many specific rumors about his face.
During his 1993 Oprah interview, he said he had never had his cheekbones, eyes or lips surgically altered and criticized reports that attributed virtually every change in his appearance to surgery.
That leaves an important distinction.
Michael never denied having cosmetic surgery.
He openly acknowledged certain procedures.
What Katherine challenged after his death was how limited his public account had been.
She did not provide a precise number of operations, and her comments should not be treated as a complete medical record.
But she was unequivocal about one thing:
In Katherine Jackson’s account, Michael had undergone more cosmetic procedures than he had publicly admitted.
More than seventeen years after Michael told Oprah his surgery had been minimal, his own mother sat across from the same interviewer and gave the public a very different version of the story.