Though Paris Jackson made headlines with a June 2013 suicide attempt, the daughter of Michael Jackson revealed that she made multiple attempts to take her own life.
“[I attempted suicide] multiple times,” Paris told Rolling Stone. “It was just once that it became public.”
The suicidal thoughts began after the 2009 death of her pop-icon father.
“They always say, ‘Time heals,’ but it really doesn’t. You just get used to it,” she said of coping with Michael’s death. “I live life with the mentality of ‘OK, I lost the only thing that has ever been important to me.’ So going forward, anything bad that happens can’t be nearly as bad as what happened before. So I can handle it … I feel him with me all the time.”
Paris explained that the highly publicized incident, in which she took 20 Motrin tablets and slit her wrists, was her “third strike,” which led to her residential treatment afterward. Paris also admitted to engaging in self-harm, the scars of which she covers with some of her 50 tattoos, and drug abuse.
“It was just self-hatred, low self-esteem, thinking that I couldn’t do anything right, not thinking I was worthy of living anymore,” she explained. “I was doing a lot of things that 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds shouldn’t do. I tried to grow up too fast, and I wasn’t really that kind of a person.”
She also survived a sexual assault at just 14 years old. “I don’t wanna give too many details,” she said, “but it was not a good experience, at all, and it was really hard for me, and, at the time, I didn’t tell anybody.”
Internet trolls didn’t help, either. Paris said of cyber-bullying she experienced, “This whole freedom-of-speech thing is great, but I don’t think that our Founding Fathers predicted social media when they created all of these amendments and stuff.”
She later received treatment at a therapeutic school in Utah during her sophomore and junior years of high school.
“It was great for me. I’m a completely different person,” she said. “I was crazy. I was actually crazy. I was going through a lot of, like, teen angst. And I was also dealing with my depression and my anxiety without any help.”
Paris also said that she was prescribed the same anti-depressants as Michael, who also suffered from depression, though she’s currently not taking any medications.
Still, there are things that disturb Paris — notably, the death of her father, who she believes was murdered by “The Doctor” Dr. Conrad Murray, in addition to being a victim of false accusations in his child molestation charges.
“Picture your parent crying to you about the world hating him for something he didn’t do,” she said of the allegations. “And for me, he was the only thing that mattered. To see my entire world in pain, I started to hate the world because of what they were doing to him. I’m like, ‘How can people be so mean?'”
Ultimately, Paris says she “absolutely” believes Michael was murdered, pointing a finger not just at Murray but also at promoters AEG Live, who she (and his estate) says worked him “to death.”
“It’s obvious,” she said. “All arrows point to that. He would drop hints about people being out to get him,” she said. “A lot of people [wanted him dead]. And at some point he was like, ‘They’re gonna kill me one day.’ It sounds like a total conspiracy theory and it sounds like bulls—t, but all real fans and everybody in the family knows it. It was a setup. It was bulls—t.”
Despite being convicted of involuntary manslaughter for causing Michael’s death via a fatal overdose of anesthesia, Murray adamantly denies the murder allegations, previously saying Paris and her brothers had been “brainwashed” to believe that foul play was behind it.
As far as getting justice for the premature death of the King of Pop, she explained, “It’s a chess game, and I am trying to play the chess game the right way. And that’s all I can say about that right now.”