In the last years of his life, Michael Jackson had two girlfriends. Almost nobody knew. Not his managers. Not his family. Not even his own children. The only people in the world who were aware of them were a small handful of bodyguards, and even they never learned the women’s real names.
They knew them only by the code names Jackson used. “Friend” and “Flower.”
The story comes from Bill Whitfield and Javon Beard, who worked as Jackson’s personal security during the final two and a half years of his life, from December 2006 until shortly before he died in 2009. They wrote about it in their 2014 book Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days. Both men have been clear about their motives, saying they turned down cash offers from tabloids seeking dirt and that the book is simply an account of what they personally saw and heard.
Michael Jackson Bodyguards Speak About His Secret Life
By that point, Jackson was living an extraordinarily isolated life. He had refused to return to Neverland after the 2005 trial and was moving between Las Vegas, Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey with only his three children and their nanny. His finances were in chaos; his credit cards were sometimes declined; and the guards occasionally went months without pay, using their own money to keep the household running.
Then, in the summer of 2007, while the family was staying on the East Coast, the women appeared. The guards say the two never visited at the same time. “Friend” was described as a strikingly beautiful woman, about five feet four inches tall, with an Eastern European accent who stayed at a Hampton Inn in Chantilly, Virginia.
“Flower” stayed separately at the Red Fox Inn in Middleburg, Virginia. Neither woman was ever brought to the house.
Michael Jackson Had Secret Girlfriend: Ex-Bodyguard
The visits followed a strict pattern that tells you everything about how carefully he managed it. Jackson would wait until Prince, Paris and Blanket had gone to sleep, then have the guards drive him out. And he would always be back home before the children woke up in the morning.
The women never met them. On one occasion the guards drove Jackson and “Friend” out to see the Washington Monument at night, with a curtain drawn across the back of the SUV. Whitfield and Beard’s description of that drive is very funny and very discreet at the same time. “All we heard was smackin’ lips behind the curtain.”
For the two bodyguards, it was genuinely revelatory, because they had spent years hearing the world speculate about the man they worked for. Beard’s reaction says it all. “When we actually saw that he really does like girls, we were high-fiving. We knew it! To be able to see him kissing it was ‘Yes!’ Seeing it for our own eyes.”
Neither woman has ever been identified. The guards say they believed both were European, but they never learned surnames, never took names down, and never asked. Both women arrived, spent a short time with him, and left. And after Jackson died in June 2009, neither of them ever came forward. Whatever those relationships were, the two people who knew the most about them are two bodyguards who never even learned who they were talking to.