Who is Michael Jackson’s ex-wife, Debbie Rowe?
DEBBIE Rowe was married to the king of pop, Michael Jackson, for three years from 1996 to 1999.
A new TMZ documentary will feature exclusive interviews with Rowe and will look into her ex-husband's death.
Who is Debbie Rowe and how did she meet Michael Jackson?
Michael Jackson met Debbie Rowe while he was being treated for his vitiligo skin condition at the dermatology office where she was working in Beverly Hills, California.
Rowe talked about their initial meeting in a 2003 interview with . She told the outlet: "I go 'Hi'. And he goes 'Hi,' and I said, 'You know what? Nobody does what you do better, and nobody does what I do better. Let's get this over with.' And he laughed, and we just became friends. It was just right away."
Jackson was married to Lisa Marie Presley when he met Rowe, but Presley was reportedly not worried about the relationship because she believed Rowe was not glamorous enough for Jackson.
When Jackson and Presley divorced only 19 months after they were married in 1996, he turned to Rowe.
"I was trying to console him, because he was really upset," Rowe told ABC News. "He was upset because he really wanted to be a dad. I said, 'So be a dad.' He looked at me puzzled.
"That is when I looked at him and said. 'Let me do this. I want to do this. You have been so good to me. You are such a great friend. Please let me do this. You need to be a dad, and I want you to be.'"
Within weeks of his divorce from Presley, Jackson married Rowe in a ceremony at the Sheraton on the Park Hotel in Sydney, Australia in November 1996.
Rowe said she knew Jackson wanted to be a father, and she wanted to be the one to give that to him.
"I believe there are people who should be parents, and he's one of them," she told the outlet.
She continued: "And he is such a fabulous man, and such a good friend, and he's always been there for me, always, from the day I met him."
Who are their children?
Rowe was already pregnant with their first child, Michael Jr, when she and Jackson got married, saying it was necessary to ensure their son wasn't born out of wedlock.
"The kids were going to have it hard enough as it was, and they didn't need to have that label upon them like their father has had so many placed upon him, they shouldn't," Rowe told ABC News.
Earlier that year, Rowe had already had a miscarriage and feared she wouldn't be able to have children, but on February 13, 1997, Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., also known as Prince Michael, was born.
It was another year before the couple's second child, Paris Jackson, was born on April 3, 1998.
Rowe hadn't wanted to have the children for herself, she had done it solely for Jackson, she said, knowing he would be a great father.
And when they got divorced in 1999, Rowe relinquished custody and full parental rights of their two children.
While in court, Rowe testified that she hadn't had much contact with Michael Jr or Paris and wanted to stay out of their lives.
"I did it for him to become a father, not for me to become a mother," she said during her testimony. "You earn the title parent. I have done absolutely nothing to earn that title."
The lawyers asked Rowe if she had "ever considered the possibility if Michael should die, what would happen to the children?"
She replied: "I'm sure he has a wonderful person in mind to take care of them."
Rowe was awarded $10million in the divorce and Jackson took sole custody of their children, however, in 2006 she applied to resume contact with her children and obtain visitation rights.
They reached an agreement and Rowe started visiting with her children again, and when Jackson died in 2009, Michael Jr and Paris went to live with his mom who then obtained custody.
A new arrangement was made and Rowe was granted visitation rights while her children lived with their grandmother.
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What is the TMZ Michael Jackson documentary?
FOX is releasing a new documentary titled TMZ Investigates: Who Really Killed Michael Jackson.
The documentary will reveal exclusive interviews delving into Jackson's death and will be released on Fox at 8pm on September 6, 2022.
TMZ's documentary features Rowe, and the Los Angeles Police Department as it shines light on what really happened the night Jackson died.
The head of TMZ, Harvey Levin, spoke about his new documentary with , saying: “There were a lot of people who have never had a reckoning over his death, and that’s what we get into. That’s what we focus on.”
He continued: “We broke the story of Michael Jackson’s death and followed it for a long time, and there were things about this for us that never sat right.”
For the first time, Rowe has suggested she believes she is partly to blame for her ex-husband's untimely death.
Speaking in an exclusive interview for the documentary, Rowe said: "I should have done something and I didn't. There is a number of people that died from addictions and in some way I was part of it."
Jackson died at only 50 years old in June 2009 from a drug-induced cardiac arrest at his Los Angeles home.
Dr Arnold Klein was the dermatologist Jackson was seeing at the time he met Rowe and he had continued to treat him by prescribing strong painkillers, and wrinkle filler drugs like Botox and Restylane.
In the new documentary, Rowe said: "I was basically as bad as him [Klein] and I am so sorry I participated in it."
The documentary suggests there may have been more than one person involved in Jackson's drug use, but specifies that Jackson was not innocent in the outcome.
“Michael was gonna get what he wanted," Levin told the outlet, adding: "and if you said no he would find somebody who would do it for him.”
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