Paris Jackson was 15 years old when she first met her mother, nurse Debbie Rowe (Washington, 67 years old). The daughter of the late King of Pop, now 28, has spoken openly about it in the latest episode of the famous Call Her Daddy podcast, aired this Wednesday, August 12. According to her conversation with Alex Cooper, she did not think to ask about her mother’s identity until preadolescence. “You know, I remember that I finally asked about it when I was about 10 or 11 years old, and the answers I got seemed sufficient. I simply asked: ‘What’s her name?’. They told me her name and I thought: ‘Okay, great,” she reveals in the interview.
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Michael Jackson, who died on June 26, 2009, at 50 years old, had three children. Paris and Prince, a year older than her, from the singer’s relationship with Rowe. The youngest, Bigi (24 years old), was born via surrogate — an illegal practice in Spain. Rowe and the pop star met when she worked as an assistant in the dermatology office he attended and married in 1996. The marriage ended in 2000, and the nurse gave full custody of her children to Jackson.
“We got in touch when I was about 15 years old and then we started to get closer towards the end of my adolescence,” now recalls the younger daughter of the former couple. Asked by Cooper if she was nervous before that first meeting, Paris Jackson assures it was relatively calm. “I remember going down the stairs and finding her in the room with my grandmother [Katherine Jackson]. I went in and said: ‘Hi, mom,’ and she replied: ‘Hi’. I sat down. We chatted for a moment. Then we went out to spend the day together,” she recalls.
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As she explains, thanks to this experience she has learned that starting a relationship without expecting anything can lead to a more natural connection. “The really cool thing about my process is learning that expectations hurt us, and if I enter a relationship with expectations, I will probably end up disappointed, frustrated, irritated, or resentful, you know? When I enter a place without expectations, it creates a really great space for something organic to flourish,” considers the actress and singer.
After the King of Pop’s divorce, Rowe settled in Palmdale, California, where she dedicated herself to horse breeding away from the spotlight. “She is a Sagittarius, so she has fire. I am an Aries, I have fire… We are very similar,” Jackson reflects. In 2013, when she was 15, a source close to the family revealed to People magazine that mother and daughter had begun to reconcile after years of estrangement. “Paris is going through a stage of a lot of teenage angst and feels a bit unloved. She reached out to her mother and said she wanted to build a relationship with her. Debbie was receptive and Katherine Jackson supports this developing relationship,” the source said at the time.
The mother-daughter bond continued to grow privately and gradually also publicly. In 2017, for example, Jackson congratulated Rowe via Instagram — where she has 6.8 million followers — after she finished chemotherapy following a breast cancer diagnosis. “My mom, a genius, kicking ass and leaving a mark. Isn’t she fabulous?” she wrote in a post showing Rowe holding a sign that said: “Chemotherapy finished!”. More recently, on May 9, the model shared several photos of the two together in stories. “Happy Mother’s Day to the woman they used as my template during the cloning process,” she wrote referring to their physical resemblance.
In 2021, Jackson opened up in another podcast, Red Table Talk — hosted by Willow Smith — about how “very cool” it was to have restored the relationship with her mother. “Getting to know her, seeing how similar we are, discovering what music she likes… It’s so amazing to have her as a friend,” she said. Rowe, away from the media spotlight for decades, also spoke about the support her daughter gave her during cancer treatment in an interview with Entertainment Tonight in 2016. “Paris is my support, she’s amazing. She has been with me the whole time, it took her 30 seconds to contact me when she found out,” she shared. Rowe’s last Instagram post, from 2015, is a photo of her daughter sitting on Michael Jackson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “My girl!”, she wrote alongside a heart.
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