By
Emily Leibert,
a staff writer for The Cut.
She specializes in coverage at the intersection of gender and sports, the arts, and our relationship to our bodies.
We already knew that Paris Jackson didn’t exactly have a normal childhood. But now, the singer is publicly sharing more details about what it was like to grow up in the shadow of her famous (and embattled) father, Michael Jackson. On Wednesday, the 28-year-old sat down with Alex Cooper for an episode of Call Her Daddy. The wide-ranging conversation swerved from Paris’s spirituality and her sobriety to ending her engagement with her bandmate Justin Long. Cooper then prompted Paris to talk about losing her dad. (He died 16 years ago at age 50 after suffering from a heart attack caused by a drug overdose.) The singer admitted that at her father’s 2009 funeral, when no one else in the family seemed like they were going to speak in his honor, she decided to give an impromptu speech herself. “No one moved,” she said. “So I was like, ‘Fuck it. We ball.’”
