In publishing this book not only have I not broken any confidences, I have fulfilled the desire of a man who wanted his heart to be known to a public whom he understood was deeply suspicious of him. The transcripts this book is based on come from tape recordings of approximately thirty hours of conversations that Michael Jackson and I conducted between August 2000 and April 2001 with the express purpose of having them published in book form and shared with the public.

The conversations focused on a wide range of topics all with the intent of revealing—and explaining—the man behind the mask.

So eager was Michael to have people understand who he was that for many of these conversations he held the Dictaphone we used directly to his mouth so not a single word would be lost. On other occasions he made me stop our conversation so he could turn down the air conditioning in his hotel room, because he was afraid the noise would drown out his voice on the recordings. If his children Prince and Paris, who were about three and two when we began and present for many of the recordings, got loud, Michael made sure to gently shush them so not a word would be missed.

Michael asked me to write the book because we were very close friends and because I was already an experienced author and values-based broadcaster and lecturer, and more importantly because the conversations would naturally parallel the steps he needed to take, with my direction and encouragement, to regain his health and equilibrium and redeem himself not only in the eyes of the public but also in his own eyes. In the months ahead it became a desperate spiritual journey to consecrate his celebrity to a higher end. He wanted to share a deeper side of himself that our friendship had begun to uncover.

I completed a working draft of the book in the year or two after our conversations ended. People who read it said they never knew Michael could be such a deep and inspiring personality. Many of my most well-read friends told me they cried through the manuscript. Like many others, they had earlier dismissed Michael as a mindless and shallow celebrity materialist who was hopelessly weird. The sensitive personality revealed in the conversations, however, was introspective, knowledgeable, forgiving, and deeply spiritual.

But events overtook the making of the book and I withheld it from publication. My relationship with Michael had deteriorated because I no longer felt I could influence him positively. He was closing off from his deeper soul and returning to the profligate ways of the self-destructive superstar the world had determined he already was. I felt he was losing the battle between dissipation and excellence, between going to waste and making a contribution, between being a caricature of himself and being an artist.

If an opening still existed to publish these interviews, it was slammed shut when, in November 2003, Michael, who had settled sexual abuse allegations out of court in 1993, was accused for a second time of child molestation. There was no way his views would be taken seriously on any subject.

It would be impossible for Michael to be heard talking about his views on the needs of children, innocence, and the childlike spirit he believed contributed to the greatness of so many people without his thoughts simply being dismissed as the rationalizations of an accused pedophile. Plus, anything that was published would simply become more fodder for the publicity frenzy surrounding the case, defeating the purpose of the interviews, which was to cut through the hype and hysteria to reveal the deeper man beneath the (albeit extreme) public image.

And then, eight years after the interviews, Michael suddenly and tragically died. My dormant feelings of sadness, anger, resentment, disappointment, and even love were awakened and intensified by the insanity surrounding his death and the distorted portrayal of his legacy. I was spurred to finally publish this book. Michael’s wish should be fulfilled. The tapes needed to see the light of day. Whatever people think of Michael, there was good in him and it deserved to come out.

Michael was far from a saint and I for one have never whitewashed his sins. But there was a gentility and nobility of spirit that I found humbling and inspiring in a man so accomplished. I realized that the extraordinary things Michael shared with me in these conversations would serve to fill the three giant holes left open by the often tabloid and circuslike media coverage: The first, who was the real Michael Jackson? The second, what pain did he live with that he tried so hard to medicate away and which ultimately consumed him? And the third, what moral lesson could be extracted from his tragic death that could bring redemption to a life cut short?

The final question especially tugged at me. I watched only parts of his memorial service at the Staples Center. I dismissed it as an outrage, a moral affront. Here was a man who had almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Yet, rather than convey even a fragment of the degree of the tragedy, they made his funeral into a concert.

America had to read our conversations and learn about the real Michael Jackson. They had to understand he was never a freak. He was not born to be weird. Rather, fame—his drug of choice—and a rudderless life had destroyed him completely. His was a terrible loss of both innocence and talent. His senseless death cried out for redemption.

The principal tragedy of his life was to mistake attention for love, fame for family, material acquisition for true spiritual purpose. I will never forget how, when we first began our conversations that are the soul of this book, Michael said the haunting words that I used for the epigraph of this book:

I remember being stunned as a listened to him, his tear-ridden voice hauntingly describing the abject loneliness of his life. One cannot read his statement without feeling a tremendous sadness for a soul who was so surrounded with hero-worship but remained so utterly abandoned. Because Michael substituted attention for love he got fans who loved what he did but he never had true compatriots who loved him for who he was.

The ancient rabbis of the Talmud proclaimed that words which emanate from the heart penetrate the heart. Michael’s admission to me of how all he ever wanted from his career was the love that had so eluded him as a child pierced my heart like a dagger and drew us closer as spiritual soul-friends. I was being summoned into his loneliness.

Yet I was not shocked to get the news. I had dreaded this day and knew it would come sooner rather than later.

During the two years that I had attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to help Michael repair his life, what most frightened me was not that he would face another child molestation charge, although he did. It was that he would die. As I told CNN on April 22, 2004, in an internationally telecast interview, “My greatest fear. . . is that Michael’s life would be cut short. When you have no ingredients of a healthy life, when you are totally detached from that which is normal, and when you are a super-celebrity, you, God forbid, end up like Janis Joplin, like Elvis . . . Michael is headed in that direction.”

Michael’s family publicly disputed any insinuation that he would die. As CNN reported in response to my interview “Jackson’s family has denied suggestions that the pop star’s life is unhealthy, insisting he is doing very well, particularly for someone who faces his unique pressures.”

I was also rebuked in that same interview by Raymone Baine, Michael’s spokesperson through the trial and for several years thereafter, who said I was being wreckless and irresponsible for saying that Michael was going to die. On May 6, 2009 Raymone Baine sued Michael for $44 million. Six weeks later it didn’t matter much because Michael was dead.

I am no prophet, and it did not take a rocket scientist to see the impending doom. Michael was a man in tremendous pain and his tragedy was to medicate his pain away rather than addressing its root cause. He confused an affliction of the soul with an ailment of the body. But all the barbiturates in the world could never cure a troubled soul that had lost its way.

Yes, from the media’s infatuation with every prurient detail of the aftermath of his death one would think that it was a cartoon character, a caricature of a real man, who had died rather than an actual person. Michael always had a mutually exploitive relationship with the American people. He used us to feed his constant need for attention and we used him to feed our constant need for entertainment.

Still, it would have been hard to believe that Michael’s story could be more bizarre in death than in life. But from the mother of Michael’s two older children “deciding” whether or not she wanted her kids; to his dermatologist leaving open the possibility that he is the father of Prince and Paris; to Joe Jackson talking up his new record label as his son’s body lay unburied; to nurses coming forward to claim that Michael asked them to inject him with quantities of painkillers that would have felled a water buffalo; to doctors being pursued by the Feds for acting as medically sanctioned pushers, clearly the impossible has been achieved.

And just when you thought this theater of the absurd had reached its zenith, the news came that Michael’s memorial service would take place at a basketball arena complete with twelve thousand fans and that the Ringling Brothers Circus would be occupying the same arena the very next day.

Were there no adults present to bring proper sobriety to the moment, to actually remind us that a human being had died, that a tormented soul had finally lost its battle with life, and that three innocent children had been orphaned? Was there no one to say that what actually destroyed Michael’s life and what brought such untold misery to the Jackson family as a whole was an inability to cope with fame? Was there no one who saw that something important and lasting could be learned from Michael’s passing by sending him off in a quiet, dignified, truly religious ceremony that focused on the silent acts of kindness he performed rather than the albums he sold?

To my mind his death is not just a personal tragedy but an American tragedy. Michael’s story is the stuff of the American dream. A poor black boy who grew up in Gary, Indiana, ends up a billionaire entertainer. But we now know how the story ends. Money is not a currency with which we can purchase self-esteem. Being recognized on the streets will never replace being loved unconditionally by family and true friends.

When Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the explosion of the atomic bomb he had worked so hard to develop, he famously quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Anyone who witnessed the tragic implosion of the life of Michael Jackson and its circus aftermath in the weeks following his death might amend the saying to read, “I am fame, destroyer of lives.”

Michael was anything but a monster. He was a thoughtful, insightful, deeply scarred, and at times very profound soul who was so broken that he could find no healing. No amount of fame or screaming fans would ever rescue him from his inevitable descent into the abyss.

Michael deserved a different kind of attention, and the public deserved and needed to hear a different kind of message, a eulogy that could bring redemption to Michael’s life. In my sadness and self-questioning, I wrote and published the following words on July 5th, two days before the funeral and memorial service:

In the summer of 1999, I was a scholar in residence for a program in the Hamptons with my entire family as we prepared to move back to the United States. Uri called me up and simply said, “Shmuley, you should go and meet Michael.” I had known that Uri was acquainted with Michael Jackson and he explained that he’d told Michael about me and that Michael wanted to meet me. By that time I had authored more than a dozen books on marriage, relationships, parenting, and spiritual healing and I guessed that Uri felt Michael needed some guidance in his life and it would be good for him to connect with me.

So, arrangements were made. Although I was interested in meeting Michael, I did not feel awed at the experience. I had counseled many people who lived life in the spotlight and was already of the opinion that fame did more harm than good in their personal lives. On the day of my visit, I remember knocking on the door of the beautiful Fifth Avenue townhouse Michael was renting by Central Park. Frank Tyson (whose real name is Frank Cascio), who served as Michael’s manager and who would later become a dear friend, opened the door, said hello, and let me know that Mr. Jackson had allocated thirty minutes for our meeting. Michael, who was languishing in his career and ostensibly working on a long-delayed album that finally emerged in 2001 as Invincible, was very different from what I expected—quieter, shyer, yet more open and more accessible than his public image would suggest. He introduced me to his children, Paris and Prince (then about one and two), showed me pictures that had arrived that day from a concert in Germany, and openly talked about a host of topics including raising kids, the challenges of living in a fishbowl, and my life and work as a rabbi.

The conversation was more pleasant and substantive than I had expected for a man I believed to be inordinately materialistic. Our meeting went well beyond thirty minutes and by the time I left I felt that, for reasons I could not explain, Michael, a famous recluse, was becoming close to me.

After that we spoke on the phone a few times and made plans for a second meeting. This time Michael himself answered the door, but only after checking that no paparazzi were standing outside. I had brought two small gifts with me. The first was a mezuzah, the roll of Biblical parchment that Jews affix to their door which brings the divine presence into one’s home. Normally, only Jewish homes display them, but I said to Michael, “God is the source of all blessing. Let this mezuzah always remind you of that.” He was moved by the gift and we jointly affixed it to his front doorpost. I also brought him a Chanukah menorah as a symbol of God’s light that should illuminate his life and home.

Again our conversation was open, warm, and surprisingly trusting for a man I was told was so private. He showed me a full-page picture in The New York Post of him walking out of a meeting with the Dalai Lama the day before. He said that he found his conversations with me more enlightening than those he had had with the Dalai Lama. Flattered and a bit embarrassed, I responded that the Dalai Lama was a truly great man and that I was not in his league, not a guru of any kind, but simply a man who had chosen to be a rabbi as a direct consequence of his parents’ divorce and that I was trying to figure out the labyrinth of life using the profound moral code found in God’s law, the Torah. Along the way, I sought to share with others what I had discovered about mastering life and establishing an ethical and spiritual foundation into which we could all anchor our lives.

As I was leaving his townhouse, Michael suddenly said, “You know I’d really love to go to synagogue with you.” Surprised at the statement, I asked him if he was serious. “Yes, Shmuley, could you please take me to synagogue?” I replied, “Sure Michael. It would be a pleasure. I will take you to a synagogue I love.”

The next week was the major Jewish festival of Simkhat Torah, the happiest day on the Jewish calendar. I took Michael to the most musical of all the synagogues in New York City, the Carlebach Shule founded by legendary Jewish folk artist Shlomo Carlebach, whose beautiful and soulful melodies have become justly famous.

No one except the rabbi knew that Michael was arriving. Jews do not activate electronics on holy days, so we took no pictures, made no recordings, informed no press, and tried to make it a truly personal and spiritual experience. When he turned up, the congregants were excited to see him and welcomed him warmly. He, in turn, put away his shyness and seemed to feel at home, humming along with the music, swaying with the rhythms, shaking the hands of all who greeted him, and blushing all the while. In his speech, the rabbi said that he hoped “Brother Michael” enjoyed this somewhat different kind of music. Michael, looking blissful, seemed enraptured by the atmosphere. This was clearly a man with a spiritual bent who hungered to be reconnected. He later told me that that evening at the synagogue was one of the happiest of his life. And he told Frank, his mother, and others the same thing. That evening made a mark on him.

A week or so after his wonderful experience at the Carlebach synagogue, Michael invited me and my family to his home for dinner. I explained that we’re kosher and he went out and got a kosher caterer. When we all had dinner with him, I really started to notice just how shy he was.

Sitting there altogether, I found it almost impossible to imagine him as a superstar. He seemed so utterly ordinary. He remained shy even in his own (albeit temporary) home and I noticed that he hated existing at the center of attention in an intimate setting. Having people look at him up close made him feel like he was being evaluated and he became reticent. I surmised that perhaps this was due to the fact that he believed people were looking at him as a freak. But then, as we were getting up from dinner, which he barely ate, he hummed a tune from one of his songs and in that instant the beautiful voice reminded me of his vast talent that was usually nowhere apparent.

On Thanksgiving, Michael invited my entire family to see Disney’s Toy Story at a regular theater. Michael’s family and mine came in once the movie started and everything was dark. The last few rows had been blocked off and the theater brought all of us popcorn and drinks. I sat one row in front of Michael as he laughed uncontrollably throughout the movie. At first it struck me as juvenile. After all, this was a kid’s film and I was attending it only for the sake of my children. But to be honest, hearing Michael in fits of laughter in the seat behind me was liberating, like it was okay for adults to let their guard down and see the world through the innocent eyes of a child. Soon I was laughing as well. This episode made Michael more human and further endeared him to me. Just before it was over we left. We missed the very beginning and end, but no one ever knew Michael Jackson was in the theater.

Some other family “adventures” didn’t feel as innocent and uncomplicated. There was a shopping trip to FAO Schwartz that Michael intended to be the toy spree of a lifetime for my kids. He said he often went there and they closed the whole store for him. “I love it there,” he said “We’ll go, just us, and the kids can get whatever they want.” So my wife and I discussed it and decided we would join Michael but with an important caveat. We sat our kids down and explained that they could each spend 25 dollars maximum—two gifts, 12 bucks each.

The trip was an adventure. When we got to the store Michael came to life. He seemed to know it intimately and took us to every floor, trying toys, demonstrating how they worked, encouraging the kids to fill up their carts. Our children were showing the toys to us saying, “Ma is that too much?” Michael was watching and said to us it wasn’t fair since they closed the whole store and we were barely going to spend 150 dollars. Some other kids came from another family and they didn’t have the same constraints. But I was adamant. I said to Michael, “There’s no negotiation on this. Everyone has sucked you dry. Believe me, there’s a part of me that can be as materialistic as the next guy. But we’re never going to have that type of relationship.”

And this attitude was critical. I had already noticed that one of the biggest problems in Michael’s life was the gravy train of hangers-on. If I were to ever become one of them, my very morality would be compromised, which would be terrible for me but even worse for Michael. He needed people with values in his life, not sycophants who could be bought. And I also detected Michael’s inclination to buy friends, which was a sure sign of insecurity. He had to know that he was enough, just the way he was.

All in all, our families had become fairly close throughout the fall, having several Shabbat dinners at our house, and once a week Michael and I would get together to study and talk. Michael expressed his thanks for the inspirational dimension he said I brought to his life. In turn, I thought him the consummate gentleman, that rare Hollywood celebrity who actually cared as much for other people as he did for himself.

As a brief aside, I should mention that I never attempted to proselytize Michael to Judaism. Believing in the authenticity of any faith that leads people to God, Judaism is not a faith that seeks converts, and we are commanded, even if someone approaches us to become Jewish, to turn them away at least three times. I repeatedly encouraged Michael to return to his Christian roots, in particular to the Jehovah’s Witnesses Church, where he had been raised. I brought him into our Jewish rituals, philosophy, and Friday night Sabbath table as a means to help him reconnect with the beauty of prayer and the moving sound of worshipful music, all in the wider context of inspiring him to bring spirituality back into his life. I certainly believed that Judaism, with its focus on family, community, and righteous action, could play a very positive role in Michael’s life. But one does not need to be Jewish to be enriched by Judaism.

Before the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, without having accomplished any real progress on his new album, Michael left New York and went back to California. We kept in contact by phone, talking about family and relationships.

I think Michael sensed that I had something he needed—perhaps it was a sense of purposefulness. I knew what I wanted to do with my life; I had been a rabbi at Oxford and had built an organization that had an effect on its students, Jewish and non-Jewish alike; and given my parents’ divorce, I had dedicated a large part of my life to counseling couples and writing books seeking to increase the passion and intimacy of couples. I had a sense of mission, and Michael seemed to have lost his.

Michael rolled out the red carpet for us. When we arrived he was outside with his children, accompanied by animal trainers with deer and even an elephant, a horse and buggy, and chefs and footmen dressed in appropriate attire. Michael was out to make an impression and he succeeded. We were overwhelmed by this fantasyland we had just entered.

My impression as soon as we arrived at Neverland was that by building this magical paradise Michael was making a statement. He had created his own private universe, a world of children’s laughter, fun and games, cartoons, and candy. A world with no pain.

Every human being and every culture has a different vision of paradise. A year later on September 11, 2001, the world would discover that for an Islamic suicide bomber it could be an afterlife filled with wide-eyed virgins. For a shallow materialist it might be a place where money grows on trees. For Jews it is a future where the predatory instinct has vanished and the wolf lies down peacefully with the lamb. For Michael Jackson it was a place where no one ever grows up.

Michael was a gracious host. He gave my family and me an extensive tour of the almost-three-thousand-acre ranch, showcasing his home, which was not all that large, the rides in the amusement park, the animals in the zoo, and the video and arcade room. I remember vividly how he took us to the reptile house and instructed the zookeeper to take out a poisonous rattlesnake, which Michael held with tongs. Contrary to all the press reports that Michael was a germophobe, afraid of his own shadow, clearly this was a man who was not easily shaken. He took us all around the property on his train, after which we toured much of the giant ranch on all-terrain four-wheel quads, with Michael in the lead wearing a large white helmet. We had dinner together that evening, and he told us how happy he was to have us at Neverland. But what interested me most was that even at Neverland, amid his graciousness, Michael, although more relaxed, still appeared shy, uncomfortable, and troubled.

A few days after we arrived, another family also came to stay on their first visit to Michael’s ranch. I got the feeling that Michael invited the boy, Gavin, to Neverland solely to impress me with how devoted he was to children with cancer. Michael was hoping that I would vouch for him to the world. So I had to witness his commitment to the needy with my own eyes. Gavin was wearing a hat because chemotherapy had made him lose his hair. I watched Michael as he spoke to Gavin and encouraged him never to be ashamed of his baldness. I found it commendable that Michael would try so hard to give the boy a sense of his own beauty amid the ravishing effects of the treatment.

The whole atmosphere was relaxed with all the children enjoying each other’s company. It seems incredible, in retrospect, that Michael’s relationship with this family would lead to his arrest three years later when he would be accused of having molested that boy. Most of the time, Michael ignored both the boy and his family and I even found myself gently rebuking him for the neglect.

My children remember Gavin and his brother as being shy, and they remember how excited the boys were to have a sleepover in Michael’s bedroom. My children were invited to join too, but being girls, and religious ones at that who are allowed limited contact with boys until marriageable age, they dismissed it outright and said no without further thought. I’m surprised parents would have allowed it, especially on their first visit, but nothing that happened during those few days seemed eventful. We were at Neverland the same night that the first abuse allegedly took place, in a room that was in the same guest suite as Gavin and his family. And it’s equally hard to imagine that Michael was showing the boy pornographic materials while I was staying there with my family.

We soon discovered that our visit coincided with Michael’s forty-first birthday, on August 29th. I was very surprised to see that nothing was being done to commemorate it. I wondered if being estranged from his family and with few close friends, he had invited us in order not to spend it alone.

I went to see him in his room. He told me, “In my family we didn’t celebrate birthdays,” explaining that it was a Jehovah’s Witnesses belief not to make too much of oneself because it could lead to conceit and arrogance. I responded, “Well, in the Jewish religion celebrating birthdays is very important. It is the day you came into the world. It celebrates your existence. We have to grow on our birthdays, and growth, since it is always painful, should never be a solitary experience. It has to be shared.” The kids of both families thereby went about arranging a small party that would take place that night for Michael’s birthday.

My concern for Michael wasn’t about his birthday, though. Something about the atmosphere of Neverland, combined with the long gap since I’d last seen him, raised my alarm. His lethargy was so pronounced it might have been described as lifeless. He wasn’t so much sad as completely burned out, indolent, almost lazy, like a man who believed that life held no further mysteries or challenges. The only things that seemed to animate him were his children. He came across as a shell of a man, strangely incongruent with his electrifying stage presence and larger-than-life persona.

Michael’s staff brought in the massive birthday cards and collages that his fans had either sent through the mail or left at the gates of Neverland. They were put up in the large kitchen for Michael to see, but he did not so much as look at them. He would wake up in the very late morning or early afternoon. Although he told me he was working feverishly to complete Invincible, I almost never saw work of any kind take place. A musician who had worked with Michael on several previous albums had come up from Los Angeles to work with him on new songs for the album, but he too spent very little time with Michael.

In the evenings he did become somewhat more animated. In his large, private theater, where we ate TV dinners, complete with small trays built for the occasion, he screened his old music videos for us. Often, my wife and my kids would make their way to bed, but Michael would continue to show me his past with relish.

I began to draw a number of cursory conclusions about his malaise.

First, whatever its merits, Neverland was not a good place for Michael. It was too isolating, too remote, making him into a hermit. It was an unhealthy escape that allowed him to run away from his responsibilities, even his professional ones. Indeed, it seemed that Michael was mostly wasting his life there. Neverland got stale for me and even my kids pretty quickly. It’s one thing to visit Disneyland. It’s another thing entirely to live in it. For the first few days the rides and attractions were fascinating. But after that they lost their novelty and Neverland came to feel like a giant cage.

Second, far more than the environment was affecting Michael Jackson. The great superstar was experiencing a malady of the soul, a sadness of the spirit. All the material blessings that surrounded him seemed to mean little, including Neverland. Only Prince and Paris were able to get him out of his room and give him some energy.

Third, Michael was at a critical point in his life. He seemed to be slipping quickly, dropping into a melancholic stupor of lethargy and inactivity. If he did not pull himself out he might never recover.

Fourth, while Michael might believe that a revival in his career would bring him happiness—as was evidenced by his nostalgia in persistently screening music videos from the height of his fame, back in the Thriller and Bad days—I was fairly convinced that this was not the case. I sensed that rather than more of the same, however glitzy and grand, what Michael needed was to take his life to the next level.

This would be a huge, perhaps insurmountable endeavor for Michael (should he have even a modicum of interest), given the crushing weight of negative judgment and lack of love he was experiencing. A surprising meeting gave even more weight to these thoughts.

On about the third day of our visit, an elderly gentleman arrived at the house for a meeting with Michael and Frank. It turned out he wasn’t a record label executive as I had surmised. In fact, he was a low-level diplomat from an obscure European country whom Michael had surreptitiously met and whom he thought could help him get a UN Ambassadorship to fulfill his vision of being a kind of international spokesman on children’s issues. Michael had asked me to join the meeting, I assumed, to vouch for his character. But in chatting with the man it quickly became clear that he was at such a junior station in the UN hierarchy that he had no means to really help. The whole situation was professionally sloppy and depressing.

Michael came across as desperate, thus conveying the impression even he acknowledged: given the 1993 allegations of child molestation (for which he never went to trial and was never found guilty), he was damaged goods and no one would be interested in him. But the meeting was extremely revealing in an important way.

I suddenly realized that this weight, this feeling of shame, was the major source of Michael’s sadness. The 1993 allegations had compromised his integrity and squandered his credibility, especially in the area of children. Like all of us, Michael Jackson wanted to be thought a good person. Indeed, in my book The Private Adam, I point out that few things cause a man or woman more pain than to be thought of as wicked. We all attempt to tenaciously protect our reputations. Michael was crushed by the fact that people believed he was a pedophile. The pain was made all the greater because he wanted to consecrate his fame to a cause larger than himself. His celebrity, like Neverland, was a form of incarceration. He desperately wanted to use his fame to help the world’s kids but was prevented from doing so because many thought him a monster.

Michael Jackson was no different than other men (and women) of accomplishment who suffered from the pain of a tarnished reputation. For example, Senator John McCain said that although he was a prisoner of war for five years in the Hanoi Hilton, suffering torture and the most inhuman deprivations, the pain was nothing compared to the accusation that he was one of the “Keating 5,” a group of senators who had been accused of using their position to give favors to a savings and loan executive, although he was subsequently fully acquitted.

Thomas Jefferson, who led a life riddled with suffering, including the death of his young wife and all but one of his children, similarly said that the worst pain he ever faced was when he was accused of cowardice as Governor of Virginia during the American Revolution. Even the famous gangster Meyer Lansky, who wanted more than anything else to be known for his goodness in his service to society, once boasted that “Everyone who came into my casino knew that if he lost his money it wouldn’t be because he was cheated.” Lansky made sure to give large amounts of money to charity.

It was clear to me that Michael understood that he lived a profoundly contradictory existence. On the one hand, he was arguably the world’s best-known entertainer and famous for loving children. On the other hand, average American parents would never trust him with their own kids and found his interest in children suspicious at best and criminal at worst. With the junior diplomat paying him a visit at Neverland, he was trying to restore his reputation.

On the day of Michael’s birthday, I felt compelled to tell him that something seemed really wrong; some key ingredient of his life seemed missing. Going a step further, I said: “I was thinking what to get you for your birthday and I have discovered it’s quite a conundrum. What do you give to the man who seemingly has everything? All I came up with is that you’re not in need of any material gifts, but you are hurting deep down. If I could, I would offer you what I believe you need most—the gift of inspiration.”

That comment was an icebreaker. Michael opened up to me more than ever before. The shyness and reticence disappeared. He began to tell me that I was correct about his deep pain and permanent sadness. “All I have ever wanted in life was to do something for the world’s children. Fame, money, they mean nothing to me. I want to devote my life to helping kids.”

While he did not say it outright, it was clear he realized that there was little involvement he could have with kids after the serious events of 1993, including the multimillion-dollar settlement with his accuser, which, while never officially made public, the whole world seemed to know about, down to the most intimate details. Those allegations, he said, were a lie. He repeated it over and over. They were designed to extort money. He could never harm a child. People were jealous of his success and tried to bring him down. His lawyers told him to settle because the media circus surrounding the allegations was destroying his life and ruining his career. And he repeated that he did not care about the money. He cared that people thought ill of him.

Up until that comment I was convinced that Michael could relate only to people who deferred to him or even fawned over him with a steady diet of compliments. While we had had many interesting conversations, and I’d given him some cursory spiritual direction and counsel that I hoped was helpful, I never expected our friendship to penetrate to a deeper level. It had been a year since we’d met, but until our trip to Neverland, I hadn’t penetrated below the surface or broken any significant ground.

Soon I would return with my family to the East Coast, and Michael would go back to his life as well. Yet suddenly, Michael Jackson had opened up to me in a way that, I suspected, he had rarely done with anyone else before. I decided to rise to the challenge, beginning by sharing some of the distasteful truths about his life.

I looked at him and told him that, if he wanted to be a credible global spokesperson for children, he was going about things in entirely the wrong way. “You need a new approach to your project of helping children and to the entirety of your life,” I ventured. “What you lack above all else is credibility. You are famous, sure. As an artist, they give you credit for your immense talent. But as a human being, the world thinks you are strange at best and a bit crazy at worst. They think there is something really fishy about you and kids and many even think you’re guilty of the 1993 accusations. Only through a major lifestyle shift—a moral makeover—can you gain back the respectability you’ve lost.”

At any moment, I expected to get the glazed look I had seen before when subjects came up that were either unpleasant or too much of a strain for Michael to handle. But I did not get that. On the contrary, he listened to every word I said and then eagerly asked, “Would you be able to help me do this?”

Whoa! Was he really listening?

“If you are serious, and you take it seriously,” I said, “then, yes. I will be prepared to help you. I think you can do a lot of good with your life. God has given you a microphone to the world that few people in history have ever possessed. But you have got to get your life together if you are not to squander your potential. Today is your birthday and the clock is ticking.” Right then and there I began to outline a program that Michael would follow for the next nine months.

I told him that the first thing he needed to do was get people to take him seriously. “Your life did not end in 1993,” I said. “Even though the allegations against you were very serious, you were never arrested, charged, or convicted. If serious people take you seriously, and you undertake respectable actions and get away from your more frivolous pursuits, then the world will overlook your past and respect you again. If you’re going to be a spokesperson for children, you need to surround yourself with respected thinkers, authors, statesmen, and, especially, childrearing experts. And you can never be alone with a child that is not yours, again. Ever.”

Michael immediately agreed with me. He verbalized his commitment to never being alone with kids.

I had a click of insight that the solution for Michael was to work with parents and caregivers rather than kids. After all, the problem for many kids was that they were being raised by proxy because parents were too busy, too stressed, or too uninterested to give children what they needed most—time and love, family dinners, bedtime stories. “Work on bringing your message to the world’s parents,” I said. “You will help the kids and the world will be grateful.”

I then told him he had to get his energy back. “Neverland may be beautiful, but it is way too isolated. You have got to get out of here and be around people who inspire you. You are a person who thrives on that adrenaline rush that comes from crowds but here you are in this beautiful paradise. But you have to ask yourself, are you here because you love it or because you are hiding?”

Then I talked about the obstacles he faced. The world simply did not get what he was about. “Every day there are a thousand lies about you in the papers,” I said. “I myself read that you have ten nannies for the kids, and that if one of their toys so much as touches the floor you immediately throw it in the garbage because you’re a germophobe. From being here, of course, I have seen that all that is a lie.” (Michael had one nanny, Grace, a sweet and highly intelligent woman from Rwanda who was responsible for sparking my considerable interest in the terrible Rwandan genocide of 1994, about which I would later write many columns.)

“And there are tons of other lies, as well. You have done a very poor job of explaining yourself to the world or responding to these incessant attacks. You have never explained why you have chosen to remain so childlike and people do not understand it. In light of the 1993 allegations, and in the absence of such explanations, people are bound to conclude that a forty-something adult who refuses to grow up is either spoiled or has a screw loose.”

Finally, I told him that he had to make sure that he had the ingredients of a wholesome life. I could see that they were mostly absent. On his birthday, no family members came to visit. There was no regular Sunday church attendance. Indeed, aside from his personal faith, God seemed to be entirely absent from the life of Michael Jackson. He had no interaction with loving friends and seemed to take little satisfaction from his work. His children had no other kids to play with and their degree of isolation was anything but healthy.

Michael indicated that this would be a wonderful birthday present. “My whole life is about doing things for kids. If I can’t help children, I don’t want to live. I’m desperate and I think you’re the only one who can help me. You’re my friend. I love you, and I know you can help me.”

To be sure, it was extremely seductive and flattering to have a man as influential as Michael telling me that I was the only one who could help him. It didn’t so much feed my vanity, because my issue has always been insecurity much more than vanity (although the argument can be made that they are intimately intertwined). But it certainly made me feel special.

Was this a cosmic drama that was playing out? Could it be that a rabbi and a rock star could team up to help make the world a better place? Could the dream that I had harbored, ever since I watched my parents’ divorce at the tender age of eight, of healing and strengthening families, come to fruition through the agency of Michael’s fame and extend the effect of the writing and speeches I’d already been giving around the world? Or was my natural, internal brokenness, coupled with my desire to be recognized as an exponent of values, simply grabbing onto a rickety foundation to anchor itself? Only time would tell.

What was certain was that this was a unique challenge. An opportunity to help a man change and to help rehabilitate a person who was becoming a friend, who was a star, and who shared my love for children and the need to value them in our culture. I, after all, had seven (we now have nine, thank God). If Jay Leno owned seven antique cars, he was to be lauded for his impressive collection. But I went around apologizing for having overpopulated the world with seven kids. I was part of a religion that cherishes the innocence of children as the most spiritual of qualities. Why, even the Cherubim, the twin angels who sat atop the Holy Ark in the Holy of Holies, the most sacred part of the Temple in Jerusalem, had the faces of children. As a rabbi, I am the representative of a culture that values family and children above all else. And now I was being asked by one of the most recognizable names on earth to assist him in his work to improve the lives of children around the world.

I went back to my room and got my laptop, and, with Michael and Frank at my side, I started typing out a plan of action that could turn Michael’s life around, leverage his fame to heal families, expose him to some of the world’s most respected people, and bring sound healthy foundations back into his life.

Before I departed Neverland a few days later, Michael and I had further agreed that at some point soon he would come to New York for a few months and we would work hand-in-hand to help him regain his equilibrium and implement a plan of action to improve the lives of children and parents.

Most significantly, sitting in his bedroom and library before I left, we began the tape-recorded conversations that serve as the very soul of this book.

Throughout that late fall, we saw each other almost every day. Much of the time we were busy meeting with people who might help us or participate in a series of public events where Michael could show a much more serious side of himself. I brought Professor Stanley Greenspan, one of the top childrearing experts in America, to get to know him. I introduced him to my hero Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, and his wife. I took him to see a few friends of mine in finance to try and help him get his financial life under control. Nothing came of it, but they at least sat him down and told him his true situation, which basically was that he was bankrupt and on his way to financial oblivion. It was a complete effort on his behalf.

In addition, Michael stopped what I saw as his destructive secrecy. The trust between us was total—at least that’s what I was led to believe. My access to him was unlimited. If I walked into his hotel room when he was taking a shower, he would pop out in a towel and yell, “I’ll be out in a minute.” Often I would arrive at his hotel suite and wake him up because I told him how important it was for him to break out of his pattern of staying up most of the night and sleeping most of the day (something for which Elvis was famous as well).

For those few months Michael probably came as close to living a normal life as he ever had or would. My objective was to stop getting him to see himself as an aloof deity who was beyond reproach. He was a man who happened to sing and dance better than almost anyone else alive. But he was a man nonetheless. He was not to be worshipped and he required the healthy ingredients of a normal life like anyone else. To achieve this end, we saw each other nearly every day, even on the Sabbath, when Michael would come to our home across the Hudson River in New Jersey with his two children for the Friday night Sabbath meal. Those Sabbath dinners were extremely important because Michael not only immersed himself in a nourishing, spiritual environment but also mixed comfortably with the other guests who regularly attended our Sabbath meals. This may sound like no big deal, but for Michael, who had rarely been treated as a mortal, sitting next to other people and simply conversing was a very big deal.

We would tell our Shabbos guests beforehand that a well-known personality would probably be joining us for dinner and would they mind simply treating him like everyone else. It was interesting watching Michael making small talk with people around the table. And after a few awkward starts—Michael was always very shy in public—he did a respectable job and charmed our guests. Friday nights I usually have a prayer service for members of our community at our home, and one Friday night when Michael came we were dancing and singing in a giant circle—about thirty of us—and Michael joined the circle and danced with everyone else. I remember how much he smiled that night, like it was liberating just joining, rather than always being aloof from, the crowd.

We’d also spend time talking about the basic requirements of a healthy life. I would say to him, “You have to get up at a normal hour, and you have to go to sleep at a normal hour. Life needs structure. Your kids have to play with other people’s kids, and they have to go to parks and to school. Even if you are divorced, your children need access to both parents to grow up as secure and well-balanced as possible. You cannot isolate yourself. You need normal friends who can tether you to the earth and to whom you are accountable. You need family who will love you unconditionally, and you must reconcile with them if you have fallen out. Most of all, you need God, the architect of humanity and the source of all blessing, who gives us rules by which we all thrive. You have to stop making the rules up as you go along.”

I talked to Michael about the importance of struggling to do the right thing, of replacing his desire for attention with a hunger for righteous action, and of understanding that the effort was as important for happiness as some perfect result.

I talked to him about one of the things that most distinguishes Judaism from Christianity. It is not the belief in Jesus as God or deity. Rather it’s the belief in the perfection of Jesus. When Christians ask, “What would Jesus do?,” they are using a model of perfection to guide their actions. And I think that makes a lot of people feel that they can never attain that high station of perfect action. I think in America we don’t like ourselves. We harbor a high degree of self-loathing because we’re not realistic about, and we dismiss, our humanity. What a shame that I have an ego; what a shame that I’m married and I’m attracted to people who are not my spouse.

In Judaism there are no perfect figures in the Bible. They are all flawed. The greatest of prophets, Moses, can’t get into the Promised Land because of sin. We all struggle to do the right thing amid a predilection to do otherwise.

Christians define righteousness as perfection; Jews define righteousness as struggle. We wrestle with our nature; we try to do better always. We acknowledge from the very outset the tendencies within us that are altruistic, that are greedy, that are giving, that are self-absorbed, and that are selfless. There’s a constant struggle and we do our best to make the right choice simply because it’s right—even when we sometimes are falling very short of our own expectations. In that sense we are more forgiving of ourselves, although we are not forgiving of our unacceptable actions.

My point to Michael was that yes, he had demons, probably more than most. But that was okay as long as he wrestled to overcome them.

I quickly noticed that there were two Michael Jacksons: the shy, soft-spoken humble child from Gary, Indiana, whose only desire in life was to be loved and cherished and the raunchy, bizarre, aggressive, and aloof King of Pop whose principle desire was to retain the adoration of the masses at any cost. Michael need not feel defeated in having a bifurcated personality, and in Jewish thought much is made of the constant inner struggle between “the good inclination” and “the bad inclination.” If Michael chose to struggle and ensure that what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” were mostly triumphant, he would not only be vindicated with a wholesome and blessed life but would also be righteous.

Strange as it may sound to the reader, I also believed strongly that Michael needed a wife, a soul mate who could share his journey and steer his broken existence back to a place of healing and redemption. My belief was that he could not rehabilitate his life outside of a meaningful relationship with a woman. I wished greatly for him to marry. Some would say that it was naïve to presuppose Michael’s heterosexuality. But I never saw any indication of his being gay, and it is not for me to question a man’s sincerity when he firmly avows to me that he is attracted to women and is fully capable of a loving relationship with a woman.

The Michael I knew and observed frequently remarked on the attractiveness of women and was open to thinking about the possibility for a better marriage in the future. Additionally, he never expressed interest in men or made any kinds of comments that would indicate he was homosexual or that there was some hidden truth about his sexuality. What I now believe is that Michael didn’t trust women and thus did not feel safe with them. When I learned of Michael’s use of pornography (which came out in his 2003 trial), and combined this knowledge with everything he told me about his childhood exposure to adult sexuality of a largely degrading, overwhelming kind, I could see how he may never have experienced a sense of innocence around sex or never matured beyond an adolescent sexual self.

I realize that one of Michael’s most recent biographers claims to have evidence that Michael was gay. I never saw anything that would lead me to that conclusion. Michael never even hinted that there were any men around to whom he felt attracted and I never saw any man who could possibly have been Michael’s lover. Michael knew that I have a gay orthodox Jewish brother whom I love and respect and he met my brother on several occasions, so he also knew that I would not have been shocked had he shared with me that he was gay. But he never did. I therefore pursued what I saw as my responsibility of encouraging Michael to rebuild his family with a wife. For the sake of his children as well, I was adamant that a maternal presence be introduced into his life. But he told me that while he was not averse to marriage—he had tried it twice and failed—he was very concerned that most women would marry him for his money.

There was one woman in particular who struck a positive note with Michael that fall, and his experience of meeting her gave me hope. I had known Katie Couric from the Today Show. She has interviewed me for two of my books and we stayed in touch. She asked if I would introduce her to Michael, so I arranged a lunch for the three of us that took place at Michael’s suite at the Four Seasons.

The meeting was warm and pleasant and as soon as Katie departed, Michael turned to me and said, “Shmuley, you’re always encouraging me to date. But the women I meet aren’t right for me. Someone like Katie might be perfect. She was smart, natural, and wasn’t intimidated being around me. She’s obviously very special.”

“Well Michael,” I replied, “I guess they don’t call her America’s sweetheart for nothing. But are you seriously suggesting that you want to go out with her?”

“Yeah,” Michael said, “maybe for coffee or something.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

Michael giggled nervously. “Shmuley, you know how shy I am.”

“Okay,” I said, “do you want me to ask her for you?”

“Yes, would you?”

Wow, I thought, what do I do now? No doubt, Katie would find the invitation kind of strange, but what the heck. As a relationships counselor and author I had always done matchmaking. That night, I reached Katie at home. I said to her, “This is going to be one of the strangest calls you’ve ever received, Katie, but guess what, Michael wants to know if you want to go out with him for coffee?”

Now it was Katie who giggled nervously. “Shmuley, I guess you don’t read the celebrity magazines. I’m dating someone.” I knew, as everyone did, that Katie was tragically widowed and was raising her two daughters as a single mother. But indeed I had no idea that she was in a relationship. “I guess not,” I said sheepishly, and I apologized for the call. “No, don’t apologize,” she said. “You had good intentions.” And I would not have revealed this story if not for the fact that Katie told the story on the David Letterman show in August 2009. But clearly this and many other demonstrations of Michael’s heterosexual leanings gave me a strong belief that Michael was attracted to women.

Then we spent our second Thanksgiving together. He came over to our house just with his kids. Imagine, he had nowhere else to go, no family, no old friends. After dinner, I noticed something interesting. Michael had brought a goofy video for the kids to watch on TV. He sat down, and me, my wife, and my kids sat next to him. Michael practically sat on his hands, almost to show me that I had nothing to fear. And I felt bad for him. True, I never left him alone with my kids, but I didn’t think he would ever have harmed them, God forbid. But to see that even in the full view of the parents he was trying to prove his uprightness was to see how damaged he’d been and how suspicious he thought the world was of him. It made me pity him.

In December Michael attended, at my invitation, his first big public event in many years where he was a participant—not the headliner. It was the Angel Ball fundraiser for research into cancer, with lots of A List guests in attendance. (Denise Rich’s daughter, Gabrielle, a gifted and beautiful young woman whom I knew at Oxford when she was a student, died of leukemia at age 27, and the ball raises money to help fight the disease.)

We met President Clinton, and Elie and Marion Wiesel and Professor Stanley Greenspan came with us as our guests.

In the rush of celebrities who came over to meet Michael, at one point Michael was pushed so hard he claimed he injured his back and unfortunately was forced to leave the dinner early. When we got back to his hotel, I discovered for the very first time the drug problems that would later claim Michael’s life. Coming back with us to the hotel were the Wiesels and members of my family. It was a great honor for Michael to have one of the most respected humans alive, and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, befriend him and accompany him back to his hotel suite with his wife. We were all going to have coffee and chat. But Michael told me he had to lie down due to the terrible pain in his back.

Professor Wiesel offered to call his personal physician to attend to Michael, and about half an hour later one of New York’s most prestigious doctors walked through the door. He went into Michael’s room and spent about a quarter of an hour there. When he came out, he looked ashen-faced. He stood by the door of Michael’s bedroom and said to us, “Michael has just asked me for a quantity of drugs that would kill a horse.”

I was shocked. I ran into Michael’s room. “Michael, the doctor just said that you asked him for enough drugs to kill a horse.” Michael seemed very calm. “Shmuley, he’s wrong. I have a very high tolerance. I’m used to this. I’ll be fine.” He was defending what he just asked for.

“Look Michael, what you think doesn’t matter. Years ago you admitted to an addiction to prescription painkillers. Maybe your tolerance level is extremely high. But even the doctor doesn’t want to administer the level of painkillers you’re requesting. You’re playing with your life here. This stuff is poison. You have to get off it. You’re just going to have to get used to the pain. We live with our pain and we grow from our pain. You’re not supposed to just medicate it away. You can’t pay people to take it away. You can’t dull it with doctors. And this doctor is a real doctor and he won’t give it to you, and none of us will let you have it.” The doctor departed and Michael did not get the medication he requested.

The next day Michael came to my home for Sabbath dinner with Prince and Paris and made a point of telling me that the reason he was standing, rather than sitting, at the table was that he did not take any painkillers for his back, as per our conversation the night before. He was trying to impress me with his capacity for growth. He wanted to show that he got it.

As the weeks progressed Michael and I continued to work on promoting our Heal the Kids initiative, which focused on inspiring parents to have regular family dinners together, read bedtime stories to their children, and provide them with a loving and protective environment. We met with many dignitaries who could be helpful to the organization and made plans for two major public events right after the New Year. The first was a seminar in parenting that would take place at Carnegie Hall and which would be introduced by Michael, and the second, a joint lecture Michael and I would deliver about a children’s Bill of Rights at Oxford University in England.

Just before Christmas, Michael went home to Neverland for the holidays. That’s when I got my first real view of how careless Michael was with money. He had a whole floor at the hotel, one of the most expensive in New York. He kept the floor for the three or four weeks he was away. When he came back, I asked him why he didn’t give the rooms back. And he said, “What were we supposed to do with our stuff?” I said, “Michael, you pack it in suitcases and put it in hotel storage. Then it’s ready for you as soon as you come back.” It was yet another glimpse of the kind of recklessness that was undermining Michael’s life and leading him down the road to bankruptcy.

And this financial picture is significant. One of the main factors that killed Michael was the crazy schedule of fifty concerts for 2009 in the O2 Center. Michael was not in the psychological, emotional, or physical position to get through one concert, let alone fifty. But he was forced to agree to it due to his horrendous finances, accumulated through years of reckless spending. And when Michael panicked under pressure, he turned to ever larger doses of prescription drug medication for salvation.

When you can’t devote your celebrity to a higher cause it becomes a terrible weight. You become a burden to yourself. You’re the biggest star in the world, but you’re imprisoned and can’t even walk outside. To make matters worse, you become Elvis even in your own mind. You can no longer think of yourself in natural, organic terms. Rather, you see yourself from the perspective of your fans. You begin to lose your innate humility and regard anyone who doesn’t treat you with due reverence as someone unworthy of your friendship and trust. Those who criticize you are quickly shunted aside. You gravitate toward sycophants. Now if you can liberate yourself by devoting that burden to something higher then you’re free. But if you can’t you get crushed under its weight. And that’s what was slowly happening to Michael.

Michael returned to New York in January and we got into gear for the several major events we’d scheduled for February and March to launch Heal the Kids.

The first, on Valentine’s Day at Carnegie Hall, was a large event where Michael and I invited leading childrearing experts, as well as personalities such as Johnnie Cochran, Judith Regan, and Dr. Drew Pinsky, to discuss how the romantic love between husband and wife should lead to the building of a stable family with children being nourished from the foundational devotion of loving parents. Then, less than a month later, on March 6th, we gave a major address together at the main debating chamber of the Oxford Union at Oxford University, where so many luminaries had spoken before him. The speech was largely on the theme of forgiveness and the importance of children refraining from judging their parents. I had written it for Michael based on our interviews for this book and his own thoughts about his desire to change and heal.

When people first heard that Michael was going to give a lecture at Oxford they laughed. But he received a standing ovation from over a thousand enthralled students and it was extremely well-received in the press. I worked harder writing that speech than almost anything I had ever written because I so badly wanted the world to see Michael in a positive light. Interestingly an excerpt from the speech was used in the opening to Ian Halperin’s bestseller, Unmasked.

To my mind, his words can almost be seen as Michael’s and my hope and wish for the new direction in his life. I had decided that the lecture should focus largely on the theme of children refraining from judging their parents so that Michael himself would seek to purge himself of all the unhealthy anger he harbored toward his father. If the broken parent-child bond was to be rebuilt, it could not be done against a backdrop of bitterness, disappointment, and recrimination. Children would have to learn how to put themselves in their parents’ shoes, empathize with the challenges they faced as people and as parents, and try and understand why they made the bad mistakes they did as parents.

I told Michael that he would have to embody the lesson by not just preaching it but living it. He would have to reconcile with his father, with whom he had a famously tortured relationship. Michael had on many public occasions criticized his father and I had told him it was inappropriate. He owed his father gratitude rather than hostility, in accordance with the Fifth Commandment, in which God had commanded him to honor his father. Even if he didn’t always feel love for him, he still had to honor him.

On the way down to Oxford, while we were just hours away from the lecture, I told Michael that the time had come. His lecture would be meaningless if he did not call his father before the event and tell him that he loved him and that he should never have judged him. That, because he hadn’t lived his father’s life, he couldn’t possibly understand why his father did the things he did. He took a cell phone and called his father and reached him in Las Vegas.

Several of us in the car bore witness to Michael telling his father, perhaps for the first time, that he loved him and that his speech at Oxford that night would be all about him and how he now recognizes that he had no right to judge him. Michael always called his father Joseph, rather than Dad. When his father first answered the phone, Michael said, “I’m giving a speech at Oxford University tonight. And it’s about you.” His father immediately said, “Uh oh!” And Michael corrected his misconception. “No, it’s nothing bad. It’s to tell the world that I love you.”

Michael’s speech conveyed an important message of healing:

With the world press extolling his speech at Oxford and with his life making strides toward normalcy, things were looking up. Michael came with me to synagogue and regularly attended Shabbat dinner. He seemed directed and content. He listened to what was being planned and what the purpose was, and he’d agree.

There were also simple times when I witnessed Michael’s extremely moving acts of humility and kindness. A neighborhood friend asked me if he could bring his thirty-something brother with Down syndrome to meet Michael. Michael was one of his idols and the brother could even do the moon walk. Michael was focused on finishing his album but told me he could do a short meeting. The man arrived and sang some of Michael’s songs for us, did the moon walk, and in general imitated Michael on stage. Michael could not have been kinder to this special man with special needs.

After the man departed with his family I thanked Michael for his kindness. “You did a very beautiful thing today,” I said. “I am truly grateful.”

“No Shmuley,” he replied. “You did me a favor by bringing him. I so enjoyed his company. I’m jealous of him.”

“Why would you say that, Michael?”

“Because he will never grow up. He will remain forever young and innocent. I envy him.”

There were many stories like these, special acts of kindness granted by a soft and gentle human being who had a soft and gentle heart.

I heard later that Michael had been introduced to concert promoter David Guest (best known for marrying Liza Minelli and the messy lawsuits that followed) on a trip to meet Shirley Temple Black. David started saying to Michael that they should do a concert together to mark his thirtieth year as a performer. Michael was afraid to tell me because he knew I would oppose the idea until he’d found a sense of spiritual renewal. I’d tell him: Don’t go back half-baked. It killed you the first time; don’t do it the second time.

Of course I knew some meetings were going on, but what I didn’t know, and learned a few months later from Michael’s parents at their home in Encino, was that some in Michael’s professional team had started telling Michael that I was demystifying him and making him too available. The attitude was that the rabbi is well-intentioned, but he is cheapening your brand by getting you to do free lectures at places like universities when your real place is in front of hundreds of thousands of paying fans in stadiums.

During this time the British journalist Martin Bashir had his office call me as an intermediary about a possible documentary on Michael because one of the producers he worked with knew me from my years as rabbi at Oxford University. I told Michael it would be a disastrous mistake. “Don’t even think of doing this documentary,” I warned. “First, your life is not yet ready to be opened to scrutiny. Second, you don’t need to be more famous and invite cameras into your life. You need to heal and to become more credible.”

I didn’t even bother calling Bashir’s people back and thought the project was dead. Two years later, our mutual friend Uri Geller would persuade Michael to do the Bashir project, which would be aired in 2003 under the title Living with Michael Jackson. It would prove to be one of the single greatest catastrophes ever to befall him. Michael’s comments about “sleeping with children” would be seen by millions worldwide and would lead directly to his arrest on charges of child molestation.

Uri and I remain good friends and I know he cared for Michael deeply. I never would have met Michael if it weren’t for Uri. And it was for this reason that I made a point of showing constant gratitude by including Uri in everything that Michael and I did together, including and especially our trip to the UK for the Oxford lecture, where Uri joined Michael and me on the stage at the Oxford Union. I honored Uri’s request to bring Michael to Uri’s wedding as best man, and as Uri’s rabbi I myself was honored to be asked to perform the wedding. Uri is one of the warmest and most loving people I know. But even with the best of intentions, his arranging for Michael to do the Bashir documentary was tragically misguided and catastrophic.

Michael’s life was a complete mess. He was a celebrity spendthrift who had an as-yet unexplained relationship to children. Additionally, his many fears for their safety compelled him to hide his children behind veils. He had little communication with the normal, everyday, outside world, let alone his own family, and was desperately in need of healing in virtually every aspect of his life. Amid promising me that he would never again be alone with children, clearly this was a practice Michael was continuing, at least with Gavin, the boy we had met at Neverland. Michael desperately needed spiritual guidance and moral direction, not another camera crew. Never in my life have I seen a single TV program so completely polish off a man’s future as did Living with Michael Jackson, which is not to fault Bashir and the people who made the documentary but rather Michael and his team for ever agreeing. It was most unfortunate that people who cared so deeply for Michael advised him so poorly.

As Michael moved back into his identity as a star, he became more secretive and secluded from me. For example, he had promised me that he would never again have plastic surgery. Yet I was told by people in his circle that he had had another procedure that he hid from me. It was partly out of embarrassment—he was ashamed to show me that he was not strong enough to keep to our goals and plan for him—and partly because, by now, he could not suffer my criticisms, which increased with time. Most significantly, whereas before he looked to me as a trusted guide and loving friend, he was now treating me as an irritant.

As I saw him falter—wake up late, miss meetings, spend money he didn’t have—I began to offer ever-increasing rebukes. They were offered gently and lovingly, but they were rebukes nonetheless, and Michael had absolutely no idea how to handle them.

The day of our last planned event was March 25th. It was a community-based literacy and health initiative in Newark, New Jersey, and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My dear friend Cory Booker was our partner in the event. At the time he was a councilman and today is the mayor of Newark and one of America’s most admired, accomplished, and inspirational leaders. Although an African-American non-Jew, Cory was president of my student organization, the Oxford L’Chaim Society, when he was a Rhodes Scholar at the university. He is one of the most special, loving, and uplifting human beings I had ever met, and together at Oxford we hosted great world leaders, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, to lecture to our students on values-based themes.

Cory and I continue to be like brothers and Michael had met Cory several times at our home for the Friday night Sabbath dinner. Michael immediately saw in Cory what I had seen all those years before and many times commented to me how inspired he was by my soul-friendship with Cory. Michael agreed to distribute children’s books to parents in Cory’s ward of Newark. It was to be a beautiful opportunity to highlight the importance of reading children a bedtime story.

But by the time we actually went to Newark, Michael was already getting weary and wary of all the events he had to show up for—it had been a whirlwind six weeks of being in the public eye in an entirely unfamiliar role. I knew we were on our way out. He seemed to be slowly leaving the work we had launched together. He was going back to being a superstar.

The event at Newark with Councilman Booker was a huge success and hundreds of families were in attendance. We distributed thousands of books. But on the way back to his van, Michael barely spoke to me. I could tell he was angry. Always the gentleman, Michael never showed overt hostility and I never once witnessed him lose his temper. Rather, if he was annoyed he would simply withdraw. He would punish you by taking away the one thing that meant the most to him: attention.

We arrived back at Michael’s hotel suite and I underwent one of the most painful experiences in my friendship with Michael. One of Michael’s principal managers sat me down, with Michael looking on, and began explaining to me why Michael was upset. “Yes, Shmuley, Michael loves you but he is annoyed. You just don’t get it.” Carnegie Hall and Oxford were one thing. But a bunch of families in Newark? Michael is the biggest star in the world. He doesn’t do things like that. A councilman in a small New Jersey city? Michael is around presidents and prime ministers. I was debasing his fame, abusing his celebrity.

Then the manager said something to me that I shall never, for the rest of my days, forget: “You want to make Michael normal. What you don’t understand is that he’s famous because he’s not normal.”

Michael was silent as he listened. Clearly he had found someone to do his dirty work. This was a planned and sanctioned speech. So there it was. Two sides of Michael Jackson, forever in conflict, forever at war. The normal, cute, adorable child from Gary, Indiana, who just wanted to sing and make people happy versus the reclusive superstar who was prepared to walk with a giraffe, befriend a chimp, mask his face, and disfigure his countenance, all in an effort to be mysterious and aloof so the public would never stop focusing on him.

I pondered the words. He is famous because he’s not normal. And in that statement I saw the full tragedy of Michael’s life. Here was a man so bereft of love, so dependent on attention, that he would do almost anything to get it. If it meant becoming the world’s biggest freak show, he would pay that price too. The public’s opinion of him be damned. Just so long as they were still talking about him.

When I took him to Newark, New Jersey, to give out books to parents from low-income households to read to their children, I did so in the belief that he was more interested in doing good with his celebrity than pursuing fame. But the superstar had won out. The wholesome boy had been buried alive. And a superstar doesn’t do mundane things like distribute books to a bunch of nobodies. And he doesn’t do so for a mere councilman who is trying so hard to improve the lives of working families. (What a tragic irony to see all these years later that Michael is now sadly no longer alive and Cory Booker is hailed today as one of America’s most accomplished mayors and is being spoken of in many circles as destined for national leadership).

So our relationship slowly unraveled and I finally decided that it was time to call it quits. I was there to help Michael improve his life and consecrate his celebrity to a cause larger than himself. If he could not sustain the effort, if I was to be told he only involves himself with causes that behooved his fame, if I was expected to become another silent hanger-on, I was going to move on. I left Michael’s hotel knowing that in all likelihood we would never be close again. That the right thing to do when one could no longer assist someone in crisis was at the very least not to bless his decline by sitting and watching in complacent silence.

It was the last time I saw Michael.

Two weeks later Michael called from Miami. He said, “I’m sending a plane for you” and then he spent a half hour on the phone trying to get me to come, telling me he still wanted to do our work together. He blamed our rift on the people who surrounded him. I felt the tug. Plus, I was raised in Miami and still had family there I could visit at the same time. I said I would think about it, and I did. But ultimately, I decided not to go. If Michael was serious about rededicating himself to the work we had begun, it would manifest itself through tangible action rather than empty words.

I waited for him to return to New York, but time went on and the announcement was made for two thirtieth anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden that were to take place in September.

I was disappointed in Michael. I felt he had misrepresented himself to me and misrepresented himself to the world. He made me believe that his first priority was to help the world’s children and live a life of unequalled altruism. And while he may have believed that, in reality Michael could never fully overcome the gravitational pull of superstardom. More than anything else, Michael misrepresented himself to himself. He had two sides, the giver and the narcissist, but was blind to the latter.

My relationship with Michael wasn’t quite finished, however. Summer came and my family was together on an RV trip. Frank called and said, “Michael asked me to call you. We can’t do the concert without you. You’re his closest friend, Shmuley. He wants you and the kids to be there. It just wouldn’t be the same otherwise.” I pulled off the highway to talk it over with my wife. I knew I had to decide right then and there. Thank God my wife was there. I wasn’t sure I had the power to resist the magnetic attraction of a superstar. My wife, who is the most wholesome person I know and who has a complete immunity to all things involving fame and celebrity, helped me over the mountain and I decided that I would decline.

I was Michael’s friend and rabbi, not his fan. My purpose was to redirect his life with a moral and spiritual foundation, not to clap when he moved his feet. I would not be a sycophant. I would never go back to our friendship unless I could influence him positively. I would not sit passively and watch his decline. I could never allow myself to be compromised in this way. I called my office and dictated the following message to be faxed to his personal assistant:

In the end it was a painful but necessary moment. I was acknowledging that something about Michael was beyond redemption and that if I returned to his orbit I would sink too. I later explained to Frank that I was never the friend of Michael Jackson the superstar. I loved and cared for Michael Jackson the man. Since he had buried that side of himself, I was moving on. I wanted to go back to what I had been before Michael Jackson: a rabbi who tried to spread the glory of God rather than bask in the glow of a superstar.

To justify sharing a bed with children, he told boldface lies. For example, his telling Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes that Gavin Arvizo arrived at Neverland in a wheelchair and had to be carried to places such as the game room was preposterous. The boy I saw that day in August 2001 was extremely active, running around from ride to ride, and might even have been construed as wild. It’s not, I think, that Michael consciously wished to deceive. Rather, he was so insecure about himself that he had to always sound like more of a saint than he was. Michael’s insecurity led him to being an extremist. It was not enough to be a humanitarian. He had to be the greatest humanitarian on the planet. It was not enough to give hope to a child with cancer. Always the martyr, he pictured himself carrying the child on his back through a parched desert with no promised land in sight.

With the passage of time, I watched Michael’s unhealthy Messiah complex grow, no doubt egged on by ingratiating fans who never rebuked him for behavior, which was clearly self-destructive. He refused to accept responsibility for his actions and blamed others’ jealousy for his incessant problems.

The Bible’s word for an adulterous wife is sotah. It literally means “to stray, to turn aside, to depart the path of love and righteousness.” It is a word that is relevant to the sins of Michael Jackson. For his sins—aside, of course, from the extremely serious allegations of child molestation— were never crimes he committed against someone else. They were primarily crimes against himself, a departure from the way of light, a detour into an ever-thickening darkness.

He could never see that a man who spends tens of millions of dollars on himself per annum, sulks in the most lavish lifestyle, and even has his security people holding his umbrella for him while he is on trial (where you would think he might finally have learned to exhibit some humility) is hardly the Messiah. He’s just another damaged and self-absorbed celebrity.

Michael’s drug use was difficult to detect because of how spacey and out-of-it everyone expected him to be. Plus, it was easy to assume that Michael took strong painkillers only when he was in physical pain. In the time that I knew him, he always seemed intent on me having a positive view of him and nothing untoward was ever done in my presence.

In retrospect, there were more signs that he was on something than I or anyone around him recognized or acknowledged. Michael was very forgetful. He sometimes seemed woozy. His head once drooped completely at the home of a friend that I had taken him to meet. But I just thought that with the kind of crazy hours he kept—Michael was going to sleep at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning—he was just always tired. Michael often called me and spoke as if he was either tremendously inspired or a bit off. “Shmuley, I’m just calling to tell you that I love you. I looovvveee you. IIII llloooovvveee yooouuu. . . ” “I love you too, Michael,” I would say. But by and large, those conversations were very short, and I thought to myself, yes, that’s strange, but that’s Michael. He’s different. He’s eccentric.

What perhaps should have made me most suspicious was Michael’s constant physical ailments. He was always complaining that a part of his body was hurting or had been injured. This, of course, became a central staple of his trial. But the Angel Ball was my earliest exposure to it. Michael claimed that he had been slammed against a wall by fans and fellow celebrities trying to get his autograph. But even if that had happened, it seemed as though the smallest knocks could completely incapacitate him. And that was either true—Michael did have a very fragile disposition—or he was using these ailments, which in his mind were real, as an excuse to take more painkillers.

A few weeks before the major address Michael was to give at Oxford, when he was back in California and I was in New York, Michael called to tell me he had broken his foot while practicing dancing at Neverland. “Are you going to cancel Oxford?” I asked. “No,” he said. “It’s way too important.” In due course, Michael arrived in Britain in a foot cast and on crutches. I heard him give a number of conflicting stories about how he had broken his foot, but again, I made nothing of it, thinking that Michael was forgetful.

A doctor traveled with him to England from the United States and stayed in Michael’s hotel. Whenever he would complain of terrible pain from his foot, they would go together into his room and emerge, about a half-hour later, with Michael looking glassy-eyed. I asked the doctor about his background and his practice, and as I recall he seemed to give inadequate responses. He was a personal physician who practiced in New York. I wondered why he had accompanied Michael all the way from overseas just because of a broken foot. There were doctors in England if Michael needed one. But if he was being administered more painkillers for his broken foot, which is what I suspected, Michael was still nowhere near being so out of it that he couldn’t function.

Michael did come three hours late to Oxford, which meant that he did not attend the dinner that was staged by the Oxford Union in his honor, and he did arrive three hours late at our mutual friend Uri Geller’s wedding ceremony the next day where I officiated and Michael served as best man. But other than that, the trip to Britain went off without a hitch.

As I was about to embark on my return flight home, Michael, who was staying on in Europe, reached me on my mobile phone. “Shmuulleeeey,” he dragged out the word, partially slurring it, “yesterday at the wedding, I was just staring at you conducting the ceremony. I was staring at you because I love you, because you’re my best friend. I just loooovveeee you.” I responded as I always did, “I love you too, Michael.” “But no,” he said, “you don’t understand. I loovvveeee yooouuuu,” dragging out the words for effect. It was a flattering phone call, but it made me alarmed that Michael was on something very strong. I would continue having conversations with him about staying off the poison of prescription drugs. He never fought me and always agreed.

When Michael was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that March, he invited me and my wife, Debbie, as his guests to the dinner at The Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Although he was still on crutches, he seemed completely lucid. I spent a few hours in his suite helping him write his acceptance speech and he seemed cheerful and in good spirits. The next time we did a public event together was a few weeks later when we went to Newark, New Jersey. Michael’s foot had healed and he was out of the cast. On that day, Michael seemed fine. Confident, chewing gum, and irritated with me as I explained earlier, but nothing more. I was certain that whatever medication he was taking had been connected with his broken foot and was now in the past.

It was a few months later, after I had severed all contact with Michael, that reports started to filter back to me from one of Michael’s closest confidantes that he was hooked on prescription medication and imbibing large quantities of them. It was getting much worse, this friend said, and it was destroying his life. Demerol and Xanax, among others, were mentioned. “Is there a quack doctor giving this stuff to him?” I asked. “No,” I was told. “The doctors around him seem okay. He seems to be getting his own supply; no one knows from where. Michael is injecting himself with the drugs intravenously.” “Well,” I said, noting that Michael and I had no interaction and I could therefore offer little assistance, “you guys better do something and save him before he completely self-destructs.”

Michael’s parents, Katherine and Joseph Jackson, were also concerned and invited me to their home in Encino, where they asked me to reinvolve myself in Michael’s life. Michael’s parents related to me that Michael had deteriorated significantly since I had last seen him. His state was bad enough for them to have attempted a family intervention to break the drugs’ hold on him. Michael’s brothers, a few weeks earlier, had arrived at Neverland unannounced to try to get him into rehab, where he had gone almost ten years earlier after admitting to an addiction to prescription drugs. Michael, however, had heard that they were coming and fled.

His parents were concerned, and I felt for them. But this just reinforced my decision. Not only was I sure that Michael would not listen to me, I knew next to nothing about helping people in this situation except to get them into rehab. Perhaps I could inspire Michael to make that decision, and his parents thought I could at least help. But I knew they were wrong. Michael had long since ceased taking my counsel. He found my advice too demanding. I was an irritant and was treated as such. Katherine, who was the anchor of Michael’s life and whom I knew from the long interview I had done with her for this book, and Joseph Jackson, who I was meeting for the first and only time, had much more sway with their son than I did, and it was imperative for them to save their son’s life by becoming available parents in his greatest hour of need. And if his own parents could not persuade him to get help, how could I?

Joseph Jackson also raised the subject of Michael’s management with me. He said he didn’t approve of the people running Michael’s career at present and that he wished to reinvolve himself in Michael’s management. I told him sternly, if respectfully, “Mr. Jackson, your son doesn’t need a manager right now. He needs a father. You should relate to him as the father he feels he never had.”

I left that meeting shaken. How tragic for Michael, and how similar this was all beginning to sound to Elvis, a fallen star, in terrible emotional and mental anguish, turning to drugs for relief, until they eventually destroyed him. Would Michael end up dead at an early age as well?

According to someone very close to Michael, the year before his arrest, Michael got clean. This person told me that Michael had, by himself, “gotten off the stuff. . . he’s completely clean.” I was incredulous. “He didn’t go for rehab?” I asked. “You’re saying he got himself clean on his own?” “Yup,” he said, “We’re really proud of him. He’s clean. I swear it’s true.” Well, that was good news.

I was therefore extremely troubled to hear, from the same person again, that shortly after the arrest Michael had gone back on “the same stuff. He’s delusional. That’s how he’s coping with the case. He’s out of it a lot of the time.”

“Have you tried to get him to stop?” I asked. “Yeah, I had a meeting with him. I told him I was positive he was back on the stuff. He denied it, but I know what he’s like when he takes that stuff. But he responded by sort of cutting me off from him. Now, I can’t get access to him.”

This, sadly, was a typical response to Michael hearing people criticize his behavior. He just shut them out. “Do the people around him know?” I asked. “I don’t see how they can’t,” he responded. “He’s drinking a lot of wine and mixing it with all this stuff.” This last comment especially surprised me, because, to my knowledge, Michael never drank alcohol. Indeed, even when he came to our home for the Sabbath meals, he would reject the tiny quantity of sacramental wine I offered him, telling me that he never drank “the Jesus juice.”

The fact that Michael Jackson had been taking large doses of prescription medication explained much of his erratic behavior. Why would the man who was so famously overprotective of his kids suddenly dangle his own new baby from a balcony in Berlin? Why would the man who was so famously reclusive agree to a British journalist virtually living with him for a tell-all television documentary? Michael always told me how much he hated the British press more than any other. He told me that “Whacko Jacko” had started in England. So why would he have allowed Martin Bashir to essentially live him for so many months? Indeed, Michael’s decision to grant full access to Bashir will forever remain the professional decision that most unraveled his life.

When I watched the 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley that preceded the trial, in which Michael accused the Santa Barbara police of locking him up for forty-five minutes in a feces-covered bathroom and roughing him up so badly that they dislocated his shoulder, it seemed so improbable that I suspected that Michael’s reality had been impaired.

Sure enough, twice in the interview they showed Michael stopping the interview to complain about how much his back hurt. The old opportunities (excuses) to take more prescription medication were back. I called my friend. “Did the police do all those things?” “No,” he said. “They were really nice to him. Michael is delusional.” Now this report may have been inaccurate, but I doubt it.

In 2004 I wrote in a public article, “If the people around him don’t save Michael from himself, Michael may be yet another superstar who dies young, God forbid, due to the quintessential celebrity-oriented diseases of drug and substance abuse. But a wall of silence around this problem, while it might protect Michael’s image, will do nothing to protect him.”

I have consistently said that I never saw Michael do anything that would lead me to believe that he molested children. But since his trial uncovered that Michael was apparently absorbing large quantities of pornography, I understood something that had previously puzzled me. Michael Jackson, in the time that I knew him, had no real relationships with women. And this hurt him terribly because it meant that he had few nurturing relationships in his life.

When I was around him, his inner circle consisted entirely of men. Indeed, with the exception of Elizabeth Taylor, whom I never met and never saw in Michael’s company, Michael seemed highly suspicious of women. He would tell me that many women are interested in money and that some of his brother’s wives, whom he believed were motivated by greed, had torn the once close-knit bonds of the Jackson family asunder. To be sure, Michael loved and respected his mother, Katherine, immensely, and for good reason. A woman of great religious piety and principle, she was arguably the only truly positive influence in Michael’s life. But she, sadly, had little control over her son and Michael shunned her advice.

Men who constantly feed their minds with porn quickly lose respect for women. Pornography depicts women not only as sleazy and vulgar but as greedy and parasitical. The porn watcher never forgets that the women who are stripping for him are doing so for cash. He concludes, therefore, that there is nothing women aren’t prepared to do for money. Unlike men who at least have some standards, women are motivated entirely by greed.

With Michael, unfortunately, such toxic imagery actually started early, as our conversations revealed. It was Michael’s recollection that from a young age he had witnessed women stripping in nightclubs where the Jackson 5 performed. Michael came to equate adult sexuality in general, and women in particular, as prurient, manipulative, and even unclean. It may also explain why Michael may have, as some have alleged, gravitated toward adolescent sexuality, which was so much more innocent by comparison.

No doubt the pornographic images of women he was consuming helped to solidify that impression. Indeed, Michael’s 2005 trial revolved around the question of whether the mother of his fifteen-year-old accuser was a gold digger who coached her children to lie about Michael to rip him off. The effects of pornography on the male psyche is something that I dealt with extensively in my book Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex. But as it applies to Michael Jackson, these exploitative images could only have reinforced a preconceived notion that people in general, and women in particular, are out to use him and he’d better be wary.

King Solomon declared in Proverbs that “He who has found a woman has found goodness,” and Michael’s inability to have healthy attachments to women could only have contributed to his steady and sad decline.

I will, however, confess to having been severely jolted by the testimony of Jordy Chandler’s mom, the mother of the first alleged victim, in Michael’s 2005 trial. It did seem from her testimony that Michael was erotically obsessed with her son. It is also possible, as I said earlier, that Michael was psychologically scarred by the damaging images of women performing striptease acts that he witnessed at such a young age at nightclubs, which may have led him to be turned off women in general and adult sexuality in particular. He may have come to associate adolescent sexuality with purity and innocence. But none of this is anything more than uncorroborated speculation. What is certainly unnerving is Michael’s multimillion dollar settlement with Jordy Chandler, even amid Michael’s constant protestations to me that he settled the case because his advisers forced him to for fear that a trial would destroy his career.

But while Michael may or may not be guilty of the accusations against him, he was certainly guilty of feeling that different rules applied to his relationship with kids, or worse, that there were no rules at all.

I thought often of those first days in Neverland after reading news accounts of Tom Sneddon’s opening statement in Michael’s trial in Santa Barbara. The chief prosecutor maintained that Michael Jackson invited his accuser and his family to his Neverland Valley Ranch in August 2000, and that the first night, at dinner, he asked the boy to ask his mom if he could spend the night in Michael’s bedroom. Later, according to Sneddon, together with his employee Frank Cascio, Michael showed the accuser and his brother pornographic photos off the Internet.

All this may be true, but when I first heard it, it sounded completely suspect. Michael was desperate to have someone of reputation vouch for him and serve as his mouthpiece. He wanted me to serve in that role and wanted to make a positive impression on me, and I even surmised that he had purposely invited the Arvizos to Neverland while we were there to show me how much he cared for children stricken with cancer. Would he really have begun showing the boy pornographic materials while I was staying there with my family? It is possible, but he would have to have been a complete fool to do so. But perhaps it was I who was the fool in overestimating what my opinion of Michael meant to him.

Frank Cascio, who remains one of my dear friends, was named as an unindicted coconspirator who allegedly participated in showing the kids pornography on that first night. (Frank told me after the trial was over, and subsequently stated in an ABC television interview, that pornographic images were pulled up on the computer, but they were pulled up by the boys, who were acting wildly.)

I know Frank well and he features prominently in this book because he served as Michael’s closest confidante and personal aide. No one was more devoted to Michael than Frank. I liked Frank very much and tried at the time and ever since to play a role as a mentor to him, feeling as I did that he was a young man, with good intentions, adrift in the chaotic and frenzied life of Michael Jackson. Frank was in his early twenties when I first met him, yet he was basically in charge of nearly every aspect of Michael’s life. I would regularly lecture him about the need to remain firmly connected to God, to go to church (he was from a Christian family), to put his own parents and siblings before his relationship with Michael, and to try and help protect Michael from himself.

One of my main points to Frank was to ensure that Michael was never alone with children, given the 1993 allegations, and Frank, caring deeply about Michael and being around him constantly, promised to always be present when Michael was with children. Perhaps that is why he was there that first night when Michael’s accuser and his brother were in Michael’s bedroom.

The idea, as later alleged in the trial, that Frank threatened the boy’s family with harm should they testify against Michael, was always improbable to impossible. Frank was always extremely well-mannered and went to great lengths to be the counterbalance to Michael’s narcissism. From my knowledge of Frank, he could not hurt a fly, and from the time I met him I endeavored to positively affect Frank, making sure that his life did not go down the tragic route that Michael’s did, being destroyed by the vacuous and unprincipled world of empty celebrity circles.

Frank, who came to run Michael’s career, was never malicious, and I never once saw him even lose his temper. He always behaved with maturity and impeccable manners. After the trial ended, Frank called me and offered something of an apology. He told me that he now appreciated how I tried to rehabilitate Michael when the three of us were close, regretted that he was too young to understand it at the time, and that later, after I departed, he gave Michael much the same advice that I had given him four years earlier.

Was Michael not the man who had squandered so many blessings? Was he not the friend who, after I had invested two years of my life into helping him rehabilitate his, treated me as if I were a nuisance because I dared to push him to fix his shattered existence? I would overcome my feelings of pity with a spirit of defiance. No, I would not cry. He hadn’t earned it.

But then the news of his death came and I was devastated. Michael was accused of pedophilia. But my children and his children were playmates. Yes, I made sure to supervise. But the children did not see him as a monster. Michael brought cartoon videos for his kids and my kids to watch. We sat in my living room laughing and joking. And the children remembered him and missed him.

Once, when my son Mendy was eight years old, he accompanied Michael and me to a kosher restaurant in Manhattan. Mendy tried to order. The waiter focused on the adults. Mendy felt ignored. He kept on repeating his order. Michael heard him. He interrupted the waiter. “Excuse me, but this child is trying to order. Can you please listen to him?” It was not something you’d expect from a superstar. They were supposed to be utterly self-absorbed, right?

I did not think I would cry when Michael died. It was only when I went back and listened to the many hours of our taped conversations for this book that I peered once again into his soul. Hearing his voice, hearing him say, in his long drawn-out way, “Shmmuuulleeeey,” that did it. The tears flowed. Yes, I was angry at him. Truly. He threw away his life. He had lived recklessly and orphaned his children. He had medicated his various psychosomatic illnesses until his body could no longer tolerate the abuse. He had played the victim, blamed all his problems on others, and squandered his limitless gifts and God-given potential. But he touched me nonetheless.

He made me softer and gentler. He was highly imperfect and was perhaps guilty of serious, terrible sins for which there might not be any redemption. But God, was he tortured! And that is no excuse because you dare not visit your pain on an innocent party. And he would have to be held accountable for his actions. However, did that cancel out the good he tried to inspire in others?

He used to watch me tell my children I loved them. He did not approve. “Shmuley, when you tell your children you luuuvve them, you have to look in their eyes. They have to know that you mean it. You have to focus only on them. You can’t tell them and look somewhere else.” And ever since then, I peer into their eyes.

Michael illuminates some of the most important questions of his existence, such as his spiritual life, his relationship with family, fame, why he hated his appearance, and the abject loneliness in which he lived. Why only other childhood stars could understand him and why he learned to be wary of women’s motives. He addresses how he came to love strange pets and what led him to become so dependent on attention from fans. He talks about historical incidents, current events, and emotions such as jealousy and hatred. Michael also discusses the differences that came between him and his first wife, Lisa Marie Presley, and the chasm that eventually developed between him and the Jehovah’s Witnesses Church. Most ominously, he speaks of his fear of growing old, his preference for an early death, and his plans to one day disappear.

The second book is devoted in its entirety to Michael’s view of children. In it Michael develops a complex and sophisticated philosophical system of what adults can learn from kids and argues that the most successful adults are those who have never lost their inner child. Michael delves deeply into the innocence of children and explains how he could never harm a child. He addresses why he always wished to be around kids and why did he not want to grow up himself. He gives surprisingly compelling answers but they only further enhance the question as to whether his interest in children was an unhealthy, even criminal, obsession or whether we were the ones guilty of ascribing impure motivation to someone who just wanted to help needy kids. His take on children and childlike qualities will leave you, depending on your perspective, either amazed at his profundity or disturbed at his capacity for intelligent rationalization.

The conversations presented here include the verbatim words Michael said with only the most minor, occasional edits for clarity. My questions and comments have been edited as needed, both for brevity and to enhance the experience and understanding of Michael. The conversations themselves are for the most part presented intact, but arranged thematically, and in a few instances, some conversations were divided thematically.

Together, the two volumes will present a Michael Jackson you never knew existed. They may also cause you, as they did me, to shed a tear not for the death of a superstar or cultural icon but for a tortured and broken soul who once had highly developed insight and sensitivity but who in the end represented a colossal waste of life and potential.

I trust that the conversations contained herein will lead you to see Michael’s beauty, Michael’s pain, Michael’s insights, and Michael’s ugliness all in equal measure, but that you will also learn to judge him far more charitably once you come to know the depth of his anguish. Because for all his money and all his fame, Michael Jackson lived with a level of unhappiness that most of us can scarcely comprehend. And now that he is dead, now that the demons of his life have finally consumed him, now that we know that he lived in such torment that he downed bottles of pills nightly and still had no rest, perhaps we can find it in our hearts to show him a morsel of compassion.

Here, I started to get worried about what Michael meant by “disappear.” It’s one thing to leave show business. It’s another to harbor a death wish. So I said. . .

And his voice had the ring of truth. His comments were alarming in the extreme. Did Michael just tell me he would choose death? I couldn’t believe it. So I asked him to clarify.

I was startled and shaken. I had to bring him back to his senses, so I said. . .

I know that I shouldn’t have been cutting Michael off in the midst of such a seminal subject, but his hinting at suicide was extremely troubling, and I felt the immediate need to inspire him to choose life. So I said. . .

Yes, we could talk about hide and seek, but not when Michael was discussing the possibility of his suicide. So I brought him back again to the possibility of growing old yet remaining youthful and vibrant.

I was trying to remind him that no matter how painful it was to grow old, dying a young, tragic death was much worse.

I should have said at this point that the Bible, in Deuteronomy, indeed compares humans to the trees of the field, and developed the metaphor. A tree may eventually crumble and die, but it sows the seeds for the next generation of trees and plant life. It lives on through its offspring and through its oxygenation of the air, in other words, what it does for the environment, what it does for others. So too, we may die, but our good deeds live on. Humans may not be immortal, but they exist forever through the people they love and through the good deeds they do. But for some reason, even though I have written extensively on the subject, I didn’t think of it.

In light of Michael’s subsequent death just a few years after this conversation, these are obviously disturbing and haunting remarks. He said clearly that if he could no longer work with, or on behalf of, children, he would find some way to take himself off the planet. After Michael’s arrest on the second allegations of child molestation on November 20, 2003, it was clear that he could never again work with children. So did Michael commit suicide? No. I firmly believe he did not. He loved his own kids too much to ever contemplate an active form of death that would orphan them. Rather, I believe that in the wake of the 2003 allegations, although he was later vindicated and found innocent, Michael lost the will to live. The vast increase in his drug intake shows that he lived much of his remaining years in a drug-induced stupor. There was no way he was unaware that consuming this huge amount of drugs could kill him. Michael often told me that he knew all about prescription drug medication, and he took enough to become an expert. So Michael did lose the will to live, and he slowly shriveled as a human being. He agreed to do his final concerts not because he had any intrinsic interest in his music or career but because he needed the money. The only question that still remains and which I cannot answer is why Michael’s love of, and dedication to, his own kids was not enough to in-still within him a continued passion for life. But alive or dead, it did not much matter to Michael, just as long as he could numb the pain with the poison that eventually killed him.

When Michael died I also faced a profound moral dilemma as to what to do with this conversation in which he says he wants to be buried near children. In the end, after consulting with people whom I respect, I decided that revealing it in the immediate aftermath of his death would not influence the family decision as to where he would be buried and would just subject Michael to public ridicule. I also do not believe that he should be buried next to children, whatever his wishes. Still, I was saddened to see plans being discussed to bury Michael at Neverland. The ranch was isolating and damaging to Michael enough while he was alive. Why condemn him to that eternal loneliness and oblivion just to increase Neverland’s commercial appeal?