La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family

FOREWORD

Nearly three years after it was publicly announced, here is my book, the one my family doesn’t want you to read.

When I started my autobiography, I could not envision that it would be the book you now hold in your hands. In fact, many events recounted here occurred only after I began, forcing me to accept truths about my family that I simply could not see before. To say that my six brothers, two sisters, and I lived sheltered lives barely expresses what growing up in the Jackson family was really like. People assume that because of my family’s fame and wealth naturally we’d be more or less cut off from the everyday world.

But in fact, neither I nor my siblings ever led a normal existence, not even as small children, years before celebrity transformed our lives. We were a not-so-typical but classic dysfunctional family. Yes, there was love and happiness, but it was poisoned by emotional and physical abuse, duplicity, and denial.

When I finally left home in my late twenties, I was the proverbial bird freed from her cage. Like a figure stepping out of a family portrait, I could see it clearly for the first time. Now I realice that while we all know the truth about our family, I appear to be the only one willing to admit it.

For most of our lives, none of my brothers and sisters questioned what went on in our home. How could we? A child’s ideas about love, trust, relationships, and right and wrong are formed by her parents’ actions and words. The proscriptions of my Jehovah’s Witness faith, my mother’s seeming love and devotion, and my father’s inability to express any emotion but anger kept us all entangled in a web of guilt disguised as love, brutality that was called “discipline,” and blind obedience that felt like loyalty. Psychologically, we were powerless: so great was my parents’ power that eight children could silently witness another enduring merciless beatings or denigrating insults without feeling compelled or entitled to protest.

We couldn’t identify it, but we all sensed something was wrong in our house. Most of my siblings “rebelled” by essentially running away from home to teenage marriages. This was acceptable, because my parents could pretend it wasn’t our home life that drove them away, but love.

My mother and father recognized that someday all their children would leave, with one exception. Me. I was Mother’s best friend, and the quietest, shyest, most obedient child of all. By moving out on my own, I surprised everyone. I also broke the cardinal rule of a dysfunctional family: I stopped living the lie and playing the destructive game.

My family’s responses were swift and mixed. Early tear-filled pleas that I return to the Jackson home, Hayvenhurst, turned into veiled threats of violence against my manager and former close family friend, Jack Gordon. My 1989 appearance in Playboy magazine provoked a storm of intrafamily controversy that still rages on. Several of my siblings privately offered me their love and support, but others viciously attacked me in the media, one even claiming that I was on drugs or something equally terrible and untrue—both shameless lies. I couldn’t imagine how people who loved one another deeply could be so hurtful. Today I understand that this rallying behind my parents’ position, whether right or wrong, is characteristic of children raised as we were.

Later, when subsequent threats and aspersions failed to stop this book and force me back to the nest, my mother and father plotted to take me against my will. In the distressing aftermath of their two failed kidnapping attempts, I had to carefully reconsider what this book’s publication would mean to me and to them. Yes, I could have appeased my parents, and there’s nothing they would have liked better than for me to abandon this. But the longer I experienced the real world, the more I realized that it isn’t normal for a father to terrorize his kids, or for a mother to shackle them to her with guilt and deceit. Thtruth no way to negotiate in a family where parental love is apportioned on such flatly ridiculous criteria as your number of hit records or willingness to remain a child forever.

Since leaving home over three years ago, I have repeatedly reached out to my brothers and sisters. It’s ironic that we are so closely associated with children’s causes, helping others who’ve suffered, yet we seem incapable of acknowledging our own pain. I’ve learned that as an abused child, I’m not just one of nine but one of millions. Overcoming the farreaching effects of child abuse is a painful, lifelong endeavor. But it has to begin with the first step: the truth.

Rather than dissuade me from this book, my family’s vehement reactions only steeled my determination to see it through. My brother Michael always told me that wishes come true, but only if you make it so.

To my siblings: I love you all dearly. I wrote this book because it had to be written, so that our children and our children’s children won’t have to en dure what we did. If I have achieved this goal, then it all will have been worthwhile. After this, maybe we can do what we’ve always discussed but never seemed able to do, which is to be a family. All we have to do is do it.

      —LA Toya
          London, 1990