She is the matriarch of America’s most famous, most talented, and most controversial musical dynasty. For decades, Katherine Jackson has been the quiet, steady presence at the center of the Jackson family hurricane, a figure of grace and resilience. She watched her children rise from the “murder capital of the world” [07:32] to global superstardom, and she watched as the pressures of that fame nearly tore them apart.

Now, the woman who was there from the very beginning has broken her silence on the darkest, most persistent shadow to cloud her family’s legacy: Michael Jackson’s claims of childhood abuse at the hands of his father, Joe.

In a raw, unflinching, and complex reflection, Katherine Jackson is not asking for forgiveness. She is offering a defense. She is rewriting the narrative, not as an apology, but as a justification. What the world, and her own son, called “abuse,” [07:11] she calls discipline. And she insists it was necessary.

“Today you can’t do that,” she admits, speaking of the physical punishment her children endured. “They call it abuse” [07:17]. But in her mind, the label is a product of a world that has “gone a bit too soft” [08:44].

Her words paint a vivid, stark picture of a different time and a different world. This was not the idyllic fantasy of a musical family. This was a battle for survival in Gary, Indiana, a place she bluntly describes as a “pretty bad place” [06:22] with “a lot of delinquency” [06:36]. Her husband, Joe, was not a monster, she insists, but a “very strict” [06:02] father trying to keep his children from becoming statistics.

“We cared about our children,” she explains. “We didn’t want them out there in the street running around, breaking in cars, and doing like most of the children did back then” [06:16].

That strictness, which Michael would later describe as terrifying, involved physical force. Katherine speaks of it openly, not with shame, but with a matter-of-fact practicality. “Back in those days, everybody raised their children about the same,” she states [06:59]. “If you did something wrong that was terribly wrong, you got a scolding for it, and you also got a licking, as they called it” [07:06].

When Michael’s own words are brought up, she does not deny them. Instead, she reframes them. “Everybody, when children did wrong, they all… they took the belt to them” [07:51]. She clarifies that Joe didn’t “whip them all the time,” [08:08] but if a punishment was “bad enough,” it might involve a “razor strap or just a spanking on the butt” [08:18].

She flatly rejects the idea that this constituted abuse. “This playing up that he was a very, very… I guess, child abuser? That’s not true” [08:26]. Her confusion over Michael’s public statements is palpable. “I just thought, ‘My goodness, people did that back in those days. Why is he saying this?’” [09:41]. In her version of events, Michael “forgave his father” [09:17], and the family bond, while strained, was never broken.

This fierce defense of her husband’s methods is woven through her most intimate and loving memories of the boy she calls “a loving and a kind, giving person” [02:46]. This, for her, is the ultimate contradiction. How could a child so allegedly broken be so full of love?

She recalls him as a toddler in a diaper, dancing to the “rickety old washing machine” [00:39], his little bottle in hand as he moved to the “rickety moves sounds” [00:59]. She remembers the exact moment she knew he was a prodigy. The other children were singing, and Michael, “about four years old, sitting over in the corner, joined in perfect harmony” [01:42]. “Where it came from, I don’t know,” she muses.

She remembers him in kindergarten, standing on a stage to sing “Climb Every Mountain” [02:07]. The performance was so powerful, she looked over at her own father, Michael’s grandfather, and he “was crying like a baby, this little boy up there singing his heart out” [02:19].

This was the duality of Michael. Offstage, he was “very shy and not too talkative” [03:25]. He felt, he told her, “like an animal in a cage” [04:01] when crowds swarmed him. But on stage, “everything opens up for him” [03:35]. He “felt at home on stage. It was like a second home to him” [03:43].

He was also a relentless perfectionist. He famously bristled at the idea of “album tunes”—filler songs to pad out an LP. “Michael would always tell me, ‘I think every song on an album… should be a hit’” [05:08]. He, she notes, was the first to prove that was possible, with albums where nearly every song went into the Top 10 [05:24].

She even pushes back on the long-held narrative of bitter sibling rivalry, a story fueled by the other brothers’ stalled careers in the face of Michael’s superstardom. “I always felt that there wasn’t any jealousy,” she states firmly. “The children was happy for Michael. They would be excited when his record go number one” [05:42].

But the fame that Joe’s strictness helped forge came at an undeniable cost. Katherine is heartbreakingly honest about her son’s lost youth. When asked if Michael missed out on his childhood, her answer is immediate and pained: “Yes, he did. He missed out on it a lot” [10:24].

“It makes me feel bad,” she confesses, “but Michael did have some childhood. He might not had as much as other children had because he was in show business” [10:29]. He was “always in the studio working and had to go to school after that” [10:48].

But here, too, is a contradiction. While she grieves his lost time, she also insists he “chose to do that” [10:48]. “He loved what he was doing… he could have stopped performing anytime he wanted to, and he kept on doing it” [11:07]. Michael himself, she says, was torn, admitting he “missed his childhood” [11:15] but also that he “wouldn’t have had it no other way” [11:22].

In the end, Katherine Jackson’s great regret is not the discipline. She says clearly, “I don’t see anything that I would do differently” [09:52] in how she brought them up. “They’re well-mannered children. They’re good citizens” [10:10].

Her one, haunting regret is that she couldn’t protect them from the world after they left her house. “I always feel that I didn’t prepare my children for the real world,” she says, a confession that opens and closes her reflection [12:02]. She “kept them in most of the time,” and “right after then, they went into show business” [12:07].

This, she says, is the one lesson she has learned. It’s why she wouldn’t want Michael’s own children, like Paris, who wants to be an actress, to enter the business at “this earlier age” [12:24]. Michael “talked about he didn’t have a childhood,” she says, “and so this is what I wouldn’t do” [12:30].

It is a stunning, complex, and perhaps controversial portrait. It is the story of a mother defending her husband, her family, and an era of parenting that the world has left behind. It’s a narrative that exists in direct conflict with the painful one told by her son. But it is her truth, her final word on the matter, a mother’s unflinching gaze into the past, unblinking and without regret.