Janet Jackson Denies Having a Secret Baby With Ex-Husband James DeBarge and More Documentary Reveals

Pulling back the curtain. Janet Jackson is known for being fiercely private, but her new documentary allowed her to address longstanding misconceptions about her family and career.

The Grammy winner, 55, began filming the two-part Lifetime series in 2017 when she invited a production crew to document her State of the World tour. They stayed with her for a full five years.

Part one of the documentary premiered on Friday, January 28, and included interviews with her mother, Katherine Jackson, her brothers Tito and Randy Jackson and her sister Rebbie Jackson, as well as collaborators Debbie Allen, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Missy Elliott and Paula Abdul.

As the baby of the family, the “Black Cat” singer was a small child when her brothers rose to fame as the Jackson Five. She performed on stage for the first time in 1974 when she was just 7 years old, as part of her family’s Las Vegas show. “I don’t ever remember being asked,” the Indiana native recalled in Janet Jackson. “I just remember being put into it.”

Over the years, other Jackson siblings have been vocal about how their father, Joe Jackson, pushed them into show business, and some of them have alleged that his methods included abuse. In 1991, La Toya Jackson claimed that Joe, who died in 2018 at age 89, sexually abused her and her sisters when they were children. (The Jackson family denied this allegation at the time.)

Michael Jackson, for his part, once said that “just a look” from his father could scare him. “When he’d come to see me, I’d get sick,” the late “Bad” singer, said in 1992. “I’d start to regurgitate.” Joe later responded by telling the BBC: “He regurgitates all the way to the bank.”

Janet didn’t address the abuse accusations in part one of the films, but she emphasized Joe’s heavy focus on the children’s careers. “I remember stories about my mother allowing my brothers and sisters to play outside, and then they’d see my father’s car coming down the street and run into the house and pick up their instruments and start playing like they were rehearsing all along,” she said, adding that they’d yell, ‘Joseph’s coming, Joseph’s coming!’”

The “All for You” songstress went on to say that her parents “disciplined” all of their kids, but she claimed that they always followed it up with love. “Discipline without love is tyranny. And tyrants they were not,” she explained. “They just loved us and wanted us to be the best that we could possibly be. Obviously, it worked.”

Keep scrolling for revelations from Janet Jackson.

Her Father’s Influence

After the Jackson Five fired their father as their manager, Joe began to focus on Janet’s solo career. “Growing up, I feel like I didn’t really experience my father the way I wanted to,” she explained. “The way I saw other kids experiencing their father.”

The Jackson family patriarch spearheaded the creation of Janet’s first two albums and helped her land a role on Good Times, but the True You author didn’t think any of that truly reflected her as an artist. Her father chose the cover photo for her 1984 album, Dream Street, against her wishes, and he pushed her to join the cast of Fame that same year. “I did it for my father,” she said of her involvement with the show.

Janet decided to fire her dad before recording 1986’s Control, which made her a bona fide pop star. “It’s hard to say no to my father, so in order to do the things I wanted to do, I guess he would have to be out of the picture,” she said in the film. “I knew that I had to take control of my life. I wanted my own identity. I wanted to go on my own.”

What She Really Wanted

When she was a child, the “If” singer joined her family in Vegas while they were there for her brothers’ show. Though she got to meet celebrities and watch her brothers perform, she longed for a slightly more mundane life. “None of us had a normal childhood,” she explained. “My friends, they went to gymnastics class. They were part of the Girl Scouts or Brownies. And I wanted to do those things. But yet, we had to go to work.”

Janet’s dad discovered how well she could sing after she taped herself at home and accidentally left the recording in the family’s studio. Once her father heard the tape, he decided she should pursue a career in music.

“I wanted to go to college and study business law,” she recalled. “And he said, ‘That’s not gonna happen,’ basically in a nutshell. What parent doesn’t want you to go to college? But he said, ‘No, you’re gonna sing.’ Not long after that, I had a meeting at A&M and signed my recording contract.”

Her 1st Marriage

Janet began dating her first husband, James DeBarge when she was 16. They eloped in 1984 when she was 18, with DeBarge’s uncle marrying them in a secret ceremony in Grand Rapids, Michigan. On their wedding night, the Poetic Justice actress began to suspect that something was amiss when her then-husband, now 58, left her alone in their hotel room for three hours.

Taking care of the Michigan native began to affect her work on Fame because she would show up late after searching for her spouse all night. “I eventually learned that he was into drugs,” she recalled. “I remember times when I would find the pills and I would take them and try to flush them down the toilet, and we would be rolling around the floor fighting for them. That’s not a life for anyone. I sit and I say, ‘Were you stupid? Were you dumb?’ But it wasn’t that. I cared so much for him.”

Janet and DeBarge annulled their union in 1985 after one year of marriage.

The Infamous Rumour

The Diff’rent Strokes alum finally addressed — and denied — the longtime rumour that she had a child she kept secret both from DeBarge and the public. “I could never keep a child away from James,” she said. “How could I keep a child from their father? I could never do that. That’s not right.”

The Why Did I Get Married? star partly blamed the rumour’s spread on the fact that she gained weight while she was filming Fame — not from being pregnant, but from taking birth control pills.

Janet and Michael

As a child, Janet was closest to Michael and Randy, who called themselves the “three amigos.” Early in Michael’s solo career, he drove his youngest sister around in his car while playing his albums so she could tell him what she thought. That began to change, however, around the time that Thriller debuted in 1982.

“For the first time in my life, that’s when I felt it was different between the two of us,” she recalled. “That a shift was happening. He would always come in my room and we would talk, and this particular time he came in my bedroom, neither one of us said a word to each other. And then he got up and left. That’s a time where Mike and I started kind of going our separate ways, we weren’t as close. And it may have been just because he was so massive, so huge.”

The “Together Again” singer occasionally tried to distance herself from her family, saying that she didn’t even want her last name on her first two albums so that people wouldn’t associate her with her brothers. At the same time, she looked to Michael for inspiration, attending his Bad tour in 1988 before launching her own inaugural solo tour in 1990.

Meeting René

Janet got engaged to her second husband, René Elizondo Jr., in 1987. “I needed to just be free of being with somebody that did drugs and all of that,” she said of the choreographer, now 59. “I needed it, I needed a lift. René was funny. We just always had fun together. And he was very, very charming.”

The dancer gradually became involved in Janet’s career, directing some of her music videos and cowriting some of her songs. Asked in the documentary if she thought the marriage would be “it” for her, she replied, “I wanted it to be it. But I thought that every time.” The duo divorced in 2000.

– US Weekly