LOS ANGELES — Eight years ago, Debbie Rowe, the mother of Michael Jackson’s two older children, told a Los Angeles court that she wanted to give them up.
“These are his children … ,” she testified. “I had the children for him.”
For his part, Jackson seemed to consider Rowe little more than a baby machine. When their daughter, Paris Michael Katherine, now 11, was born, he snatched her and “just went home with her with all the placenta all over her,” leaving Rowe behind, Jackson told ABC News in 2003.
When their son, 12-year-old Prince Michael Jr., told the interviewer, “I haven’t got a mother,” Jackson assented: “That’s right.”
Now, however, Rowe, 50, who lives on a horse farm in suburban Palmdale, is considering whether to challenge Katherine Jackson, the late pop icon’s mother, for custody.
Legal experts have said Rowe has a strong claim to the elder children as their biological mother, and if she attempted to win custody, Jackson’s family would have to convince a judge that it would not be in the children’s best interest to live with her.
But Rowe has yet to signal her intentions. Eric George, her lawyer, said he will be at a custody hearing Monday to represent her but did not know whether she would ask for custody.
