For decades, the narrative has been set in stone: Michael Jackson was the singular genius, and his brothers, particularly Jermaine, were left behind, consumed by jealousy. It’s a story of rivalry, bitterness, and a family fractured by unprecedented fame. But what if that story, the one repeated by tabloids and even other family members, isn’t the truth?

In a series of candid, reflective interviews, Jermaine Jackson, the original lead singer of the Jackson 5, is setting the record straight. He paints a picture that is far more complex, painful, and human than the simple caricature of sibling rivalry. It’s a story of a bond forged in a tiny Indiana house, a desperate fight against “outside forces” that sought to isolate his brother, and a frustration not with Michael’s success, but with the world’s attempt to erase the family that built his throne.

This is not a story of jealousy. It’s a story of a family’s desperate, and at times failed, attempt to hold onto its own.

“Ridiculous”: The Myth of the Jealous Brother

When confronted with the claim, most notably made by his sister LaToya, that he is “very jealous of Michael,” Jermaine’s response is swift and sharp. “That’s ridiculous,” he states. “Who has not had success in my family?”

His argument is not about personal envy; it’s about historical fact and a fight for credit. “We were the Jackson 5,” he explains, his voice filled with a mixture of pride and exasperation. “Every song Michael sung on, I sung on. We helped build what’s going on right now.”

For Jermaine, the public’s obsession with the “Jermaine vs. Michael” narrative is a deliberate slight. “They want to forget,” he says. “But the Jackson 5 is what gave Michael and Janet the platform to do what they did.”

He reminds the world of their unprecedented, and still unmatched, achievement. “The Jackson 5, to this day, there’s no other act in the history of the business that was unknown and came out with four number one records in a row. Not the Beatles, not Elvis.”

This, for Jermaine, is the crux of the matter. It’s not about being jealous of Michael’s solo flight; it’s about the world trying to pretend the rocket ship was built by one person, when five of them provided the fuel.

From a Washing Machine Beat to Global Stardom

The bond Jermaine speaks of was forged long before Berry Gordy and Motown. It was formed in a house in Gary, Indiana, “the size of a two-car garage… not even that big,” with nine kids and one bathroom. It was a life of bunk beds—Tito and Jermaine on top, Michael and Marlon in the middle—and chores.

He recalls the origins of their sound with crystal clarity. Michael, just a baby in a diaper “sucking his bottle,” would stand by the old washing machine. “This washing machine would make this noise… kind of beat,” Jermaine remembers. “He was just shaking to the beat of the washing machine. My mother used to watch him, she said, ‘He’s got rhythm.’”

The group itself was an accident born from discipline. “Tito was sneaking in the closet playing my father’s guitar, and then he broke one of the strings,” he says. When their father, Joseph, came home, he demanded to know who did it. “Tito said, ‘I did.’ So he said, ‘Well, show me what you know how to do.’ So he started playing… and then we started singing. And that’s how it all started.”

Joseph, seeing the potential, began pouring money meant for house repairs into equipment. Jermaine was the original lead singer. Michael, the little kid with the rhythm, “was just wanting to be in the group, and we said, ‘You’re too young.’” It was their grandmother who insisted. “She said, ‘Let him in the group.’ We put him in the group… and it was over.”

Jermaine, with no trace of bitterness, describes witnessing the “perfectionist” emerge. “He started watching James Brown, and Joe Tex, and Sammy Davis, and Jackie Wilson… He could watch something and do it. And that’s how he patterned himself.”

The Heavy Hand of a Father

That meteoric rise was not left to chance. Jermaine is clear: “My father is responsible for that.” Joseph’s mandate was simple and brutal: “Rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed. You have to be the best.”

This legendary work ethic came at a profound cost, one that Jermaine still struggles to articulate. He speaks of “whippings” and his father’s intense need for “respect… at an early age.” He rationalizes it as a father’s protection: “He wanted to show us, ‘I care about you. Even if I have to whip your butt, I care about you. I’m gonna keep you off those streets.’”

But Michael experienced that “discipline” differently. Jermaine describes his younger brother’s reaction to being hit not as fear, but as “the excitement of him not understanding what it means.” This trauma, however, clearly lingered. Jermaine recounts a chilling moment years later when Michael asked him, “Would you cry if Joseph died?” He says Michael “didn’t know if he would or he wouldn’t.” It was a question that haunted Jermaine, a glimpse into the complicated pain his brother carried.

The Rift: “He Never Responded”

The public narrative suggests the rift began when Jermaine stayed at Motown while the other brothers left. But Jermaine points to a different, more painful period: the post-Thriller explosion.

As Michael became the biggest star on the planet, he became the most isolated. Jermaine reveals that between 1984 and 1992, “I saw Michael maybe three times a year.” He sent letters and packages. “He never responded to any of them.”

Jermaine insists this wasn’t Michael’s doing, not really. He blames the wall of “outside people” that had suddenly materialized. “Once that act gets so big, there’s so many people that come around,” he says. “The legal people, and everyone… they started to almost pull you away.”

This is the core of his pain. It wasn’t just a brotherly drift; it was a hostile takeover of his family. He and his brothers had to schedule meetings just to warn Michael about the new entourage. “It brought on all these other people who wanted to become his brothers, his sisters, his mother, his father,” Jermaine says. These new voices, he claims, were whispering poison in Michael’s ear: “Your family is going to hold you back.”

“I wanted him to not get so far away from the family because of the success,” Jermaine says, his frustration palpable. “We’re a family. And I just like it when they try to separate him from us… we all started together.”

The Parable of the Tree

This fight, Jermaine reveals, was what his father had warned them about from the very beginning. He shares the two parables Joseph used to keep them unified. The first was the bundle of sticks: “He put five sticks together, you couldn’t break them. He took one, he broke it. He said, ‘This is you guys, if you don’t stay together.’”

The second, more poignant analogy was that of a tree. “We came out to Hollywood as a tree,” Jermaine explains. “He fought so hard to keep us together. He said, ‘I’m the root system, and we’re the different branches.’ Hollywood did not look at the tree for its beauty. They looked at the tree for individual branches for their own selfish greed.”

That, Jermaine says, was his father’s true fight: to keep the branches from being broken off the root. It’s the same fight Jermaine waged, writing letters to a brother who had been pulled so far away he could no longer hear him.

Today, Jermaine frames the “rivalry” as nothing more than brotherly squabbles. “Sometimes they get on my nerves, I get on their nerves. It’s just brothers.” What matters is the root system.

“Michael comes from a family. He comes from the Jackson family,” Jermaine states, a final, definitive correction. “When he hurt, we hurt… No matter how far we go in life, we’re still one big family. We’re still the Gary, Indiana… success is not the most important. It was the most important fact that we had each other before success.”