The Tragedy Of Bigi 'Blanket' Jackson Explained

Late in his life, and after his career as the biggest musical superstar on the planet had considerably cooled off in the wake of multiple allegations of crimes against children, Michael Jackson started a family. With his former wife Debbie Rowe, Jackson fathered two kids, and then welcomed a third with the aid of an unidentified surrogate. Despite a feud between Jackson and fellow '80s superstar musician Prince, the King of Pop gave both of his sons that name. His eldest child, Prince Michael Jackson, often goes by Michael Jackson, Jr., while his youngest, Bigi Jackson, was named Prince Michael Jackson II upon his birth in February 2002.

Bigi Jackson is among the parties who inherited Michael Jackson's money after he died in 2009, but he'll likely always be best known as Blanket. Both before and after the death of his famous father, the youngest Jackson has lived a tragic life often beset by turmoil and stress.

By November 2002, the public was only vaguely aware of Michael Jackson's third child. It was known that the child had been born in early 2002, and that his name was Prince Michael, same as that of Jackson's other son. Then, at the age of 9 months, the child was a passive participant in a headline-making act of what was widely considered child endangerment. To a group of around 200 fans who had gathered outside of his room at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, Jackson took his baby, and while loosely holding towels over his face, lightly held him over the side of a balcony overlooking the crowd, four stories below.

After the news quickly spread around the planet, Jackson issued an apology to quell the outrage. "I got caught up in the excitement of the moment," the singer said in a statement (via BBC). "I would never intentionally endanger the lives of my children."

In June 2009 Michael Jackson was living in a mansion in Bel Air, California, while he rehearsed for an upcoming concert residency in London. He rehearsed all day on June 24 and returned home late, then asked his private physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, to administer medication to help him sleep. Multiple doses of different anti-anxiety drugs and a sedative proved ineffective, and Murray gave in to Jackson's sustained requests for propofol, a powerful, surgical-grade painkiller and anesthetic. Murray had refused at first because he believed the musician had developed a dependency on the medication, just one of the many things that came out about Jackson after his death.

Jackson finally fell asleep around 10:30 a.m. on January 25 through the aid of an IV of propofol, and within minutes, Murray noticed Jackson had stopped breathing. CPR couldn't revive Jackson, and the actions of first responders were equally fruitless: The singer was declared dead at UCLA Medical Center around 2:30 p.m. Jackson was 50 years old; his children, Prince Michael, Paris, and Blanket, were 12, 11, and 7 years old, respectively. In 2011, a court found Murray responsible for the death of Jackson, finding him guilty on a charge of involuntary manslaughter and sentencing him to a four-year prison term.

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A year and a half after Michael Jackson died in 2009 from an overdose of medication, dispensed by Dr. Conrad Murray, the musician's family filed a wrongful death lawsuit. Jackson's mother, Katherine Jackson, brought forth the case, representing her late son's then-minor children, Prince Michael, Paris, and Prince Michael Jackson II, aka Blanket, who was 8 years old at the time of the filing. 

The family alleged that concert producer AEG Live was to blame for Michael Jackson's death, because in the run-up to a planned slate of shows, it had hired Murray, who had acted in a criminally negligent and ultimately fatal manner. "AEG had legal duties to Michael Jackson to treat him safely and to not put him in harms' way," the suit said (via The Hollywood Reporter). "But AEG, despite its knowledge of Michael Jackson's physical condition, breached those duties by putting its desire for massive profits from the tour over the health and safety of Michael Jackson."

Initially asking for $1.5 billion in damages, a figure determined by speculating on how much the musician could've earned had he survived into the 2010s, the Jackson family engaged in an exhaustive 21-week trial, which they lost.

Katherine Jackson helped raise Bigi Jackson from shortly after his father's death until 2017, when she allowed for legal guardianship of the then-15-year-old to pass to T.J. Jackson, the child's uncle. Seven years later, Bigi Jackson, now a legal adult responsible for his own affairs, sued the dominant maternal figure in his life. Bigi alleged that his grandmother was using money that ought to be his in order to pay for legal services that he didn't wish to pursue.

The executors of the estate of Michael Jackson, John Branca and John McClain, reached a tentative deal with Sony Music that would give the conglomerate a 50% stake in Jackson's extensive catalog for the sum of $600 million. Katharine Jackson filed documents to stop the sale, but a judge allowed the deal to happen anyway. Katherine Jackson appealed, funding the move by attempting to tap into Jackson's estate, of which Bigi Jackson is a main beneficiary. The youngest of Michael Jackson's children had to get a court involved to prevent his grandmother from taking his money.

For the first 13 years of his life, Bigi Jackson was known by another name: Blanket. That was merely a nickname that took off publicly and privately shortly after birth, on account of how the child's father, Michael Jackson, protected the identity of his then-baby son by concealing him in blankets. The given name of record for Blanket Jackson, as it were, is Prince Michael Jackson II. That "II" was included to differentiate from the first Prince Michael Jackson,  Blanket/Bigi/Prince Michael Jackson II's older brother.

Unsurprisingly, the kid named Blanket Jackson was singled out for mocking by his peers. "His school mates have always been slightly mean to him because of their jealousy over who he is and going by Blanket made him a much easier target for ridicule," an associate of the family told Radar Online (via AZCentral). "He always thought that the name Blanket sounded so stupid and resented his father for calling him that." When Jackson began attending The Buckley School in Los Angeles in 2014, he asked to be called by a new name: Bigi.