For most of the world, Michael Jackson is a figure made of headlines: the superstar, the controversies, the endless noise. But there is a small group of people who knew him as something completely different, and his daughter Paris is one of them.
Paris was eleven when her father died in 2009. She was the little girl who stood up at his memorial, through her tears, and called him the best father you could ever imagine. Now, as a grown woman with her own music and her own voice, she is talking about him again, and the picture she paints is a world away from the tabloids.
Sitting down for a long, honest conversation on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Paris described Michael in a way that stops you in your tracks. She did not call him a legend or an icon. She called him her best friend.
She remembered a dad who was warm and goofy and a lot of fun to be around, a really funny guy who loved being a father more than almost anything. Yes, the childhood was unusual and sheltered in ways most kids never experience. But at the center of it, she says, was a parent who adored his children and gave them a kind of love the public never got to see.
That is the whole point of why she keeps speaking up. Paris has said for years that she wants people to remember the man, not just the myth. And who would know him better than the daughter who actually grew up in his house?
Hear her tell it in her own words:
Paris Jackson: Love, Loss, & Listening to Your Intuition
It is a rare thing, hearing one of Michael’s own children speak so openly about the dad behind the fame. It is just Paris talking, with no publicist steering her and no script in front of her, remembering the man who raised her.
Decades of rumors and documentaries have tried to define Michael Jackson for everyone else. But his daughter was actually there. She saw the father the cameras never did, and when she calls him her best friend, that is not a headline or a defense. It is just the truth as she lived it.
Press play and listen to Paris describe the Michael Jackson only his family knew.