Jacksons The Family

Article Headline: LaToya Jackson on: fame, family and her future in Paris – Interview – Cover Story
Article Date: July, 1992
Article Source: Ebony Magazine

For months she seemed to be everywhere–exposing everything and shocking almost everybody.

Week after week, you couldn’t look at a newspaper, magazine, or TV talk show without seeing LaToya, flanked by her manager/husband, defending her decision to pose nude and write that book, Growing Up In The Jackson Family, the best-selling autobiography in which she calls her upbringing “stifling and manipulative” and accuses her parents of abusing her mentally and physically.

Not surprisingly, the book enraged her parents, who fervently denied all of their daughter’s accusations and blamed Jack Gordon, her manager/husband, for “brainwashing” their middle daughter and turning her against them. “Writing this book was therapy for me,” LaToya says today, insisting that not only did Gordon not influence her to write the book, he had nothing to do with her decision. If LaToya could have anticipated the scope of her parent’s fury, she was unprepared for the reaction of the Black community which was swift and severe. “Black people were very angry with me for writing the book,” says LaToya, who moved first to London, then Paris, following a “stressful and difficult” promotional book tour. “A lot of people didn’t believe me, or didn’t want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.”

Eventually, however, LaToya says she grew to understand the public’s anger. “People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image,” she sighs. “But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me. Now that it’s out, I feel free–like a bird that’s been let out of a cage. For the first time in my life, I feel free to live my life, my dreams.”

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Tagged as: Articles, controversy, Husbands and Boyfriends, Jack Gordon, Jackson Latoya, Jacksons The Family, Mag: Ebony Magazine, Playboy

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