2010-11-08
BY//CASSANDRA WEST
CHICAGO — Michael Jackson’s mother says she believes her famous son was addicted to plastic surgery and that not a day goes by without her thinking of him.
Katherine Jackson says she even once asked her son’s surgeon to pretend that he’d operated on the pop singer’s nose if he ever asked for another surgery.
Jackson appeared on Monday’s episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in her first public interview since her famous son died in June 2009 of an overdose from a powerful anesthetic.
Jackson said that her son thought he was ugly when he was an adolescent and later “one day made up his mind to get his nose done.”
She said she talked to the surgeon because Michael Jackson’s nose kept getting smaller from repeated operations and looked “like a toothpick at one time.”
The late singer’s father, Joe Jackson, also appeared alongside his wife on the show. Seated around a table in an outside garden of the Jackson family Encino, Calif., compound, Winfrey said, “Mr. Jackson, I’m surprised to see you here. The word in the world is you’re divorced [from Katherine Jackson.]
Both Jacksons denied they are divorced.
Winfrey also referred to the 1993 interview in which Michael Jackson told her his father had beat him. On Monday’s show, Joe Jackson said, “I never beat Michael like the media tried to say.”
Joe Jackson told Winfrey he took issue with the use of the word “whip.” But Katherine Jackson said her husband did use a “strap” to discipline their son. “You might as well admit it, that was the way black people raised their children,” she said.
Earlier in the interview, Katherine Jackson told Winfrey that not a day goes by that she doesn’t think about Michael and that she has never once thought he was guilty of molesting children.
— The Associated Press contributed to this report
