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Joe Jackson dies

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 28 June 2018

Joe Jackson, father and former manager of Michael and Janet Jackson, and the Jackson Five, has died. He was 89.

In a statement confirming his passing, co-executors of the Michael Jackson estate, John Branca and John McClain, said: “We are deeply saddened by Mr Jackson’s passing and extend our heartfelt condolences to [his wife] Mrs Katherine Jackson and the family. Joe was a strong man who acknowledged his own imperfections and heroically delivered his sons and daughters from the steel mills of Gary, Indiana to worldwide pop superstardom”.

The father of eleven children, Jackson was recently reported to have been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Until as recently as last week, he was refusing to allow his family to visit him, although he did eventually agree to see them.

There was also some confusion last week when a tweet appeared on Jackson’s Twitter account appearing to say goodbye, reading: “I have seen more sunsets than I have left to see. The sun rises when the time comes and whether you like it or not the sun sets when the time comes”.

However, his granddaughter Paris Jackson stated that, while it was “a beautiful tweet”, there was “no possible way” Jackson Senior had sent it, as she had been with him at the time it was posted.

Joe Jackson is credited with driving the early success of his musical children as their manager. But those children also spoke of an angry and violent father. Michael in particular recalled being regularly beaten, as well as being bullied by his father for his “fat nose”.

Michael fired his father as his manager in 1979. In an interview in 1993, he told Oprah Winfrey that he had been so frightened of Jackson Senior as a child that he would sometimes vomit when he saw him. Although he also said in the same interview that he forgave him. In an interview shortly before his own death in 2009, he said that his father had become a better person as he aged, and was a good grandfather.