THIS IS IT: THE TRUTH ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON

Original Article here.
finally FACTS--it's long overdue but the media should really start doing this.
like I said we don't need sh!t anymore.

THIS IS IT: THE TRUTH ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON
By Mike Parker||Oct.18, 2009



FROM Los Angeles to London and all points beyond, stories about Michael Jackson have grown wilder almost by the hour in the 114 days since he died from a massive intravenous drug overdose on June 25.

However, for the handful of people who have actually seen his autopsy report, leaked in full to America’s Associated Press, the word the world didn’t want to hear stands out like a sore thumb: normal.

“His overall health was fine,” says Dr Zeev Kain, chairman of the anaesthesiology department at the University of California, Irvine, who was shown the Los Angeles County Coroner’s full report and he adds (brace yourself for the biggest non-scandal of the year): “The results are well within normal limits for a 50-year-old man.”

Here, using key findings from the autopsy, is how screaming headlines around the planet have been largely at odds with a reality that is only now beginning to emerge about Jackson.

FICTION: His body was in “grotesque”, malnourished shape.

FACT: He was suffering from arthritis in his back and a mild build-up of plaque on the arteries of his legs. These are ailments associated with normal ageing, says Pittsburgh-based forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht. Jackson’s body weight of 9st 10lb was, Wecht says, “On the low side of normal, suggesting he wasn’t eating properly.” This is confirmed by former TV Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno, who was training Jackson for his This Is It concerts at London’s O2 Arena.

He says: “Michael only ate one meal a day and could maybe have carried a little more meat on his bones but he didn’t look frail to me.”

FICTION: He was suffering from skin cancer.

FACT: He wasn’t. He almost certainly suffered from vitiligo, a skin-discolouring disease he announced he had but most people refused to accept, preferring to believe he was trying to artificially make himself white.

The L.A. Coroner’s report specifically identifies “depigmentation of his skin around his chest, abdomen, face and arms,” consistent with “the effects of vitiligo”.

Jackson did use powerful bleaching agents, including Benoquin and Eldopaque creams, but “only as a means of trying to counter the vitiligo and create a uniform colour”, according to a Jackson family source.

It appears clear that the erroneous “I want to be white” stories stemmed from an affidavit sworn by Blanca Francia, a former maid at Neverland Ranch, during the first child molestation investigation into Jackson in 1993, centring on his relationship with the then 13-year-old Jordan “Jordy” Chandler.

This case was settled out of-court for a sum believed to be in excess of $20million but much of the opinion surrounding it stuck as “fact,” including Francia’s assertion under oath that Jackson bleached his skin because: “He felt blacks are not liked as much as people of other races.”

Her affidavit was leaked by the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department but even Jackson’s later, completely accurate, assertion that he suffered from vitiligo was dismissed with disbelief in most quarters.

FICTION: Jackson “disfigured” his body because he hated it.

FACT: This is only partially true and probably by accident. The L.A. Coroner revealed that Jackson’s eyebrows, eyelids, lips and head were tattooed.

Jackson was balding and wore wigs as a result of the 1994 fire that severely burned his scalp during the shooting of a Pepsi Cola commercial.

Having studied the coroner’s findings, Wecht believes the singer’s head tattoo “would have masked entirely the scars on his scalp”. In a strikingly simple and sad further explanation last week, a Jackson family source told me: “Michael couldn’t bear his scars, so he covered them with a dark tattoo, the edge of which he used as a kind of guideline to place his wig.”

As for the eyebrows, eyelids and lips, aside from possibly having them tattooed in the mid-Nineties because it was then considered trendy, Jackson may have had those painful areas inked, speculates Cyril Wecht, because he suffered from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD).

This is a condition in which the affected person is excessively concerned about and preoccupied by a perceived defect in his or her physical features. Wecht believes BDD might explain not only the facial tattoos but also Jackson’s obsession with plastic surgery. As far as it was possible to estimate, the L.A. Coroner made reference to “as many as 20 or more procedures” on the singer.

FICTION: He was laid to rest wearing a prosthetic nose.

FACT: Not true, though small scars around his nose indicated to the coroner that Jackson may have undergone as many as four rhinoplasties, not the two “nose jobs” he admitted to while alive.

The coroner’s report also noted that Jackson bore a ¾ inch scar behind his left ear and two three-inch scars at the base of his neck. “These are incisions associated with plastic surgery,” says Michael Baden, former chief medical examiner for New York City.

Some experts have postulated that Jackson may have undergone as many as 30 expensive plastic surgeries but in his new book Unmasked, investigative journalist Ian Halperin quotes a fellow veteran Hollywood reporter, interviewed a month before Jackson’s death, thus: “What’s the harm? Do you really think that makes Michael Jackson different from many other celebrities? Everybody in this town lies about plastic surgery, except maybe Joan Rivers.

“The guy’s an eccentric. He’s obviously got serious psychological issues but, again, who doesn’t around here? I’ve been covering him since he was 13 and he’s also done a lot of good, a lot.”

Asked at the time by Halperin to repeat this to camera for a TV programme he was producing, the reporter shook her head and replied: “I don’t think so. It’s not a great career move to be seen defending Michael Jackson these days, though God knows, he could use somebody to stick up for him.”

Whether or not he suffered from BDD, a condition that could have stemmed from childhood when he was painfully embarrassed by acute acne, it can hardly be denied that a sizeable percentage of household names also reach a certain age before they too, like Peter Pan, want to remain forever young, in looks at least, and turn repeatedly to the plastic surgeon’s scalpel.

FICTION: Jackson’s arms and legs were peppered with needle punctures. He may have been a heroin addict.

FACT: The coroner did find injection marks on both of the singer’s arms and on one knee and one ankle, revealing, says Wecht, “how the drugs in his system got there”.

Those drugs, according to the coroner, were Propofol, acute intoxication of which was determined to be the actual cause of death, and the prescription sedatives Lorazepam, Midazolam, the sedative Lidocaine and the stimulant Ephedrine, commonly used as an appetite suppressant.

All these other drugs were listed as possible contributing factors to the coronary that killed Jackson but there is no evidence that he ever injected or used a “street drug” like heroin.

“He was a chronic insomniac,” a Jackson family source confirmed to me. “He just couldn’t fall asleep normally and this was a constant and obsessive problem he tried to overcome in countless ways.”

One way, if you have the money Jackson did, was to hire a personal physician to use the most extreme method imaginable of being “put under”. That physician, Dr Conrad Murray, was paid $130,000 a month by Jackson and has admitted administering the fatal dose of Propofol. Police did not, however, find the resuscitation equipment at Jackson’s rented Holmby Hills mansion that any hospital anaesthetist would normally use.

Dr Murray’s attorney, Edward Chernoff, has pointedly insisted that his client “was not the only physician who prescribed or administered this drug to Mr Jackson”.

Indeed, the Sunday Express has confirmed that the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office is examining evidence against a number of other doctors in what spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons describes as a “far-reaching” investigation that “covers Mr Jackson’s entire drug history, as far as that is possible”.

Jackson’s older sister La Toya, 53, remains convinced, as do his parents and other siblings, that the singer surrounded himself with sycophants who would pander to his every medical demand. These “enablers,” she claims, simply did what they were told to either feed her brother stimulants, especially as he was rehearsing up to 15 hours a day for the O2 gigs, or put him to sleep in the most extreme manner imaginable.

It appears there is much truth in this, as every family member reports virtually no contact with him in the months leading to his death. An impeccable source, who has known the Jackson clan for more than two decades, says: “Getting anywhere near him, towards the end, was a virtual impossibility and I think it was because he felt ashamed in front of his family for two reasons.

“The first was the extent of his prescription drug taking, fuelled largely by his insomnia and nervousness. The second was that he’d surrounded himself with people who slavishly gave him what he wanted, when he wanted, in return for enormous salaries.

“There were, in the end, two Michaels; the one who amazed his fellow professionals at rehearsals with his seemingly boundless energy and the one who slunk away afterwards needing the strongest drugs imaginable to put him to sleep.

“Michael was always the showman and never cared too much what anyone wrote as long as he was up there in the glare of publicity. He even made up the story about sleeping in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber himself to create a stir.

“Then, there was the human side; the one that didn’t want his family to know he was being in turn propped up and put to sleep by incredibly powerful drugs he knew they’d disapprove of.

“The Michael we all thought we knew isn’t who Michael Jackson was when he went home at night, trying to beat whatever demons wouldn’t let him sleep with potent, dangerous drugs so he’d be able to find the energy to perform the following day.

“He wasn’t a freak, not that he cared too much about the ‘Wacko Jacko’ headlines. He was a sad man who was ashamed of the way he ended up living but couldn’t figure a way out.

“It is an enduring tragedy that the enablers who surrounded him at the end didn’t steer him towards therapy or real professional help to overcome the issues of sleeplessness and whatever else bedevilled his mind. They were too busy lining their own pockets.”