Paris Jackson shares how ‘rough’ it was after father Michael died when she was just 11

Paris Jackson has opened up about her upbringing for the first time in years in a new interview, and spoken in detail about how “rough” it was when her father, Michael Jackson, died when she was just 11.

The 28-year-old lived at her dad’s California estate called Neverland until she was seven, before moving around a lot. Michael passed away in June 2009, and his children Paris, Prince and Bigi were living under his care at the time.

Michael died at 50 from acute propofol intoxication after his personal doctor, Dr Conrad Murray, gave him the powerful hospital anaesthetic to help him sleep. He was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Speaking about the Thriller singer’s death on the Call Her Daddy podcast this week, Paris said: “That was rough, dude.” After his death, she realised that she had no social skills, because she had been homeschooled and hadn’t interacted with other children much.

Credit: Call Her Daddy

“I didn’t have social skills. I had been hanging out with cousins and my brothers and adults so I didn’t know how to interact with peers very well,” she said. “I had a crash course in gaining social skills, for sure.”

After their father passed away, Paris and her siblings went to live at Hayvenhurst with their grandmother Katherine Jackson, and she “wanted to grow up fast”.

“There was something in me that wanted to live as much life as possible and I think maybe that contributed to some poor choices in my young adulthood but I just think I wanted to experience everything,” Paris said.

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She famously spoke at her father’s funeral, but it wasn’t planned. “It kind of just happened in the moment,” she said. “I was on stage… They looked, and they were like, ‘Are one of the kids going to say something?’ And no one moved. It just happened. It felt like it happened very slowly. It felt like, ‘Someone’s gotta say something. Little bro’s not gonna do it. Older bro’s not moving. Alright.”

Credit: POOL/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

So, Paris got up on stage with other family members, picked up the microphone and said her dad was “the best father you could ever imagine”. She added: “I love him so much.”

In eighth or ninth grade, at around 14 years old, Jackson’s daughter began suffering from substance abuse as she felt “restless, irritable, discontented and not very comfortable in [her] own skin”. However, she said these tendencies actually started when she was a lot younger, but nobody knew because she “hid it well”.

“I think I was maybe around like seven, eight, nine when I started to just like kind of reach for things outside of myself, whether it was a person or food or, you know, just survival skills I would say,” she recalled. “Like self-harm, for exampl,  is probably not a living skill, it’s a survival skill. Just things like that. It’s kind of always been present, just this idea of like, I think I need something to help me manage.”

Paris and Michael shared a great bond, and she told Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper he was a “really funny guy” and her “best friend”.

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Featured image credit: Paris Jackson/Instagram and POOL/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock