Why Joe Jackson Hated His Daughter Rebbie So Much?
Late in 1968, an 18-year-old girl from Gary, Indiana, walked down a wedding aisle without her father.
He wasn’t sick.
He wasn’t out of town.
He simply refused.
His name was Joe Jackson, and within a year, the whole country would know it.
She was the first of his ten children, the one who helped raise the boys and the only one who walked out of that house before the money came.
Twenty-three years later, her younger sister went on morning television and told America why she really left.
Two years after that, on a network news program, the bride gave her own answer.
And two decades on, the sister who made the claim was asked about it again twice on live TV.
It started at 2300 Jackson Street.
You know the legend because you were sold it.
A steel town on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, a tiny house on a corner lot.
A father who worked at the mill by day and played guitar in a rhythm and blues band at night, and who, as family lore tells it, came home to find his sons had snuck that guitar out of his closet.
Instead of punishing them, he built them into the Jackson 5.
Then came Motown and California and a mansion in Encino.
Five boys in matching outfits on the cover of every teen magazine, a run of number one records, and by 1976 a prime-time variety hour on CBS called The Jacksons, where the sisters finally joined their brothers on camera in sequins and smiles.
Joe Jackson was the architect.
That’s how the family’s own estate described him the day he died, calling him a strong man who acknowledged his own imperfections, the man who carried his children out of the steel mills of Gary and into worldwide stardom.
And somewhere in the back of that legend, usually in the second row of the family photograph, stood the eldest child, Maureen Reillette Jackson.
Everybody called her Rebbie.
She was the quiet one, the devout one, the one who married her high school sweetheart, stayed married for forty-four years, and stayed about as far from scandal as a Jackson could get.
Rebbie was the proof, if he wanted proof, that the Jackson house had produced at least one perfectly normal adult.
Hold on to that picture.
Because in the autumn of 1991, her own sister would stand in front of the cameras and describe that house as something closer to a crime scene.
And the eldest daughter, the one who’d already left, would be dragged right back into it.
Maureen Jackson was born on the 29th of May, 1950 in Gary, Indiana.
Her parents, Joseph and Katherine, had married the year before.
Joe worked in the steel mills and played guitar on the side.
Katherine was the faith in the house, and in time, she brought her children into the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Rebbie took to it more seriously than almost anyone.
The babies kept coming.
Jackie in 1951, Tito in ’53, Jermaine in ’54.
Then on Rebbie’s sixth birthday, the 29th of May, 1956, a sister arrived, La Toya.
Same birthday, six years apart.
Two girls who’d share a birthday cake.
And decades later, a headline.
Then Marlon and his twin brother Brandon, who died shortly after birth.
Then Michael, Randy, and finally Janet in 1966.
Ten children in all, nine living in a house most of us would call a starter home.
With that many kids and a father working shifts, somebody had to be the second mother.
Rebbie later described herself exactly that way in a magazine interview, the babysitter, the cook, the one who kept the little ones fed and out of trouble, often alongside Jackie.
She also learned early what happened when the rules were broken.
Joe Jackson never pretended otherwise.
Years later, defending himself against stories about how he raised Michael, he told reporters, “I whipped him with a stick and a belt.”
In 1993, Michael told Oprah Winfrey that as a boy, he was so frightened of his father that the sight of him sometimes made him physically sick.
And in 2010, when Oprah asked Joe himself whether he regretted the beatings, he said no.
He said it kept them out of jail and kept them right.
So the discipline itself isn’t really in dispute.
The family has argued about how far it went and what it did to them, but not whether the belt existed.
By the mid-’60s, Joe had a plan for that belt and those voices.
He drilled the boys for hours in the living room.
He wanted every child in the act.
And according to her brother Jermaine, Rebbie could sing.
She’d even won local contests duetting with Jackie.
But the eldest daughter wanted something else.
Not a stage, a home, a quiet one.
And in 1968, she found the man she wanted to build it with.
His name was Nathaniel Brown.
He was a year older than her, born in 1949.
And by every account, they’d been sweethearts since they were kids.
That should have been simple news in most families.
In this one, it was a declaration of war.
Rebbie graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary in 1968.
That same year, she told her parents she intended to marry Nathaniel Brown.
She was 18.
Family biographers say she wanted to move away with him out of Indiana entirely and start over somewhere quiet.
Joe said no.
His reason, as nearly every account of that year puts it, wasn’t Nathaniel.
It was the act.
Joe believed a wedding ring would end his daughter’s chance at show business.
He had five sons he was turning into a group, and he saw no reason his eldest daughter shouldn’t follow them.
A husband meant a kitchen.
A kitchen meant she was gone.
Accounts say the arguing went on for weeks.
Some say Katherine quietly took her daughter’s side.
In the end, Joe relented after a fashion.
He would allow the marriage.
He would not participate in it.
When Rebbie Jackson married Nathaniel Brown late in 1968, her father refused to walk her down the aisle.
Think about how small that gesture is and how large.
No shouting, no locked door, just an empty place beside the bride at the one moment in a daughter’s life when everybody in the room turns around to look at her and her father together.
Now, here’s the part Rebbie couldn’t have known as she walked that aisle alone.
Within a year, her brothers were Motown recording artists and the family was on its way to California.
Soon after that, the boys had a number one record.
If Rebbie had waited a year, she’d have been the big sister of the most famous group in America with a ticket to Los Angeles and a father who suddenly had the means to make anybody a star.
She didn’t wait.
She was already Mrs. Nathaniel Brown.
And that, in the official version, is the end of the conflict.
Joe got his superstars.
Rebbie got her husband.
Everybody got what they wanted.
That’s the version the family told for twenty years.
It wasn’t the only version in the house.
While her brothers became the Jackson 5, Rebbie became a young wife and then a young mother.
Her daughter Stacee was born in the early ’70s and Rebbie lived the life she’d fought for, out of the spotlight, raising her own family while her siblings’ faces turned up on lunchboxes.
But Joe Jackson didn’t give up on anything easily, and he didn’t give up on her.
In 1974, the Jacksons opened a run of shows at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
And this time Joe built a family review.
The five boys were the draw.
But on that stage with them for the first time were the younger kids, Randy and Janet and La Toya.
And so was Rebbie.
Twenty-four years old, married, a mother, and finally standing where her father had always wanted her.
She’d later say that until then, singing had been something private for her, a hobby, not a career.
Two years later, CBS gave the family that variety series.
The Jacksons ran in 1976 and 1977, and Rebbie appeared alongside La Toya and Janet, three sisters dressed up for prime time.
On camera, it looked like Joe’s dream finally complete, every child in the act.
Here’s what the camera didn’t show.
That same year the Vegas shows began, 1974, a woman named Cheryl Terrell gave birth to a daughter.
Her name was Joh’Vonnie.
Her father was Joe Jackson.
Katherine would later write in her own 1990 memoir that Joe had been unfaithful and that she’d filed for divorce twice without ever going through with it.
Joh’Vonnie grew up as the family secret, watching her famous half-siblings on television instead of in person.
And just recently in an interview this fall, she said something that tells you a great deal about the eldest daughter.
Of all those brothers and sisters, Joh’Vonnie said Rebbie was the one she was allowed to know.
The girl who left the house became the bridge to the child the house pretended didn’t exist.
Rebbie’s second child, Yashi, arrived in 1977, the year the TV show ended.
For a while, there was talk of a girl group with La Toya and Janet under their father’s direction.
It went nowhere.
Janet went off to be a television actress and then a star of her own.
La Toya started a solo career.
Rebbie went home.
And for most of a decade, that’s where the story of the eldest Jackson daughter seemed to stop.
Married, faithful, content.
It didn’t stop.
It was just waiting for her little brother to finish the biggest album in history.
By 1984, Michael Jackson had made Thriller, and anything he touched turned to platinum.
That year, in his first outside production after Thriller, he did something for his oldest sister.
He wrote her a song.
He produced it.
He sang backing vocals on it himself.
It was called “Centipede.”
A slinky, creeping, slightly spooky dance record.
The kind of thing that sounds like it belongs on a Halloween playlist with Michael’s fingerprints all over the bridge.
The album of the same name came out in October 1984.
Rebbie Jackson was 34 years old, the age when most pop singers are already being asked about their farewell tours, and she was releasing her debut.
It worked.
“Centipede” climbed to number four on Billboard’s black singles chart and number 24 on the Hot 100, and the single went gold.
There were songs on the record from Smokey Robinson and from Prince.
Joe Jackson’s eldest daughter had finally become exactly what he’d wanted her to be in 1968.
She did it on her own schedule.
She’d waited, by her own account, until she felt her family life was secure and her children had had her through their early years.
There had even been discussions about whether she should record under the name Jackson at all.
In the end, she kept it.
Two more albums followed.
Reaction in 1986 and Are You Tough Enough in 1988.
In 1985, she had her third child, a son named Austin.
She never had another pop hit like “Centipede.”
She never seemed to need one.
Meanwhile, her sister was heading somewhere very different.
La Toya Jackson had spent the ’80s trying and mostly failing to get a hit of her own.
In 1987, she left her father’s management and signed with a man named Jack Gordon, a convicted felon nearly twenty years older than she was.
In 1989, she posed for Playboy.
That same year, she married Gordon.
Hold on to that name, Jack Gordon, because two years later, a book with La Toya’s name on the cover would go to number two on the New York Times bestseller list, and a lot of people would spend the next two decades asking whose words were really inside it.
The family saw it coming.
A full month before the book reached stores, Katherine Jackson told the Chicago Tribune that the whole thing was a lie and that Jack Gordon had brainwashed her daughter.
She hadn’t even read it yet.
She didn’t need to.
The book was La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family.
It came out in September 1991.
In it, La Toya accused Joe of beating his children, wrote that her father trained the boys with a whip in his hand, and reserved some of her harshest words for Katherine, the mother America thought of as a saint.
She also wrote about Rebbie.
According to the book, the eldest daughter often took the worst of their father’s anger, standing between him and the younger children.
That was hard enough for the family to swallow.
Then La Toya went on tour.
On the 5th of September, 1991, days before the book was even in stores, La Toya appeared on NBC’s Today Show.
And there, live on morning television, she said something that wasn’t in the book at all.
She said their father had sexually abused Rebbie.
Not herself.
Rebbie.
Later that same day on Phil Donahue’s program, an audience member asked whether she planned to press charges over her father’s sexual abuse.
La Toya answered in effect that she hadn’t said he abused her.
She’d been talking about her sister.
Within days, the story grew.
On the 10th of September, the Associated Press ran an interview in which La Toya said she had shared a bed with Rebbie as a girl and had been present for what she described.
She said that after Rebbie left home at 16, their father turned to her.
Two days later on Larry King Live, she put ages and years on it.
Joe Jackson told the AP flatly that he had never sexually abused her.
Janet went on television and said La Toya was simply trying to get the attention the public had never given her.
The family issued a statement calling her claims lies.
And the one person at the center of the newest, most explosive charge, the one La Toya had named on national television, said nothing.
Not yet.
Rebbie was 41 years old that autumn, a wife of nearly twenty-three years and a mother of three, living the quiet life she’d fought her father for.
And her sister had just told the country what had supposedly happened to her body.
That might have been the worst week in the Jackson family’s public life.
It wasn’t even close.
In February of 1993, Michael sat down with Oprah Winfrey on national television and for the first time he talked openly about his father, the fear, the vomiting, the rehearsals.
Joe’s response in an interview with the Baltimore Sun a few weeks later was that what people used to call a whipping was now being called child abuse.
Then came the summer of 1993 and an accusation against Michael himself from the family of a 13-year-old boy.
And on the 8th of December, La Toya, who was supposed to be on vacation, held a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, and said she believed the accusations against her brother.
The family closed ranks around Michael.
La Toya was now outside the circle completely, except she wasn’t free either.
That same year, Jack Gordon was arrested for hitting her with a chair.
She declined to press charges.
In 1996, she finally left him, and her divorce papers, as reported by the Las Vegas Sun, detailed years of alleged abuse.
She later said Gordon had forced her into the Playboy shoots and threatened her family’s lives if she didn’t follow his orders.
The divorce was final in 1997, and La Toya went home to the very family she’d accused.
In 2003, on Larry King Live, she said she and her father had accepted each other’s apologies.
And in 2011, she published a second memoir, Starting Over.
In it, she wrote that Jack Gordon had been behind every word of the first book.
She called the Tel Aviv press conference among the biggest regrets of her life.
NPR later summarized it plainly.
She had retracted her allegations against both Michael and her father, saying her husband had forced her to make them.
So that’s settled, right?
Not quite.
Because the most explosive charge, the one about Rebbie, was never in the first book.
It was made on television.
And when La Toya went back on the Today Show to promote Starting Over, Matt Lauer asked her directly twice whether she stood by what she’d said about molestation.
Both times she answered that her father was a wonderful man.
She never said yes.
She never said no.
By then, the money had done what money does to the Jacksons.
Michael died on the 25th of June, 2009.
His will, signed on the 7th of July, 2002, left his fortune to his mother, his three children, and children’s charities.
Not one dollar to his brothers or his sisters.
Not one dollar to his father.
In open court, the probate judge, Mitchell Beckloff, put it in six words.
“Joe Jackson takes none of this estate.”
Three years later, the siblings went to war with the executives.
In July of 2012, a letter signed by Jermaine, Tito, Randy, Janet, and Rebbie called on the estate’s executives to resign and called Michael’s will fake, flawed, and fraudulent.
The estate answered that California courts had already rejected challenges to the will.
That same month, Katherine Jackson was briefly reported missing.
She turned up in Arizona with her daughter Rebbie and other relatives.
The estate restricted which family members could visit the house where Katherine was raising Michael’s children.
Rebbie was one of the siblings kept out.
Six months later, on the 6th of January, 2013, Nathaniel Brown died of cancer.
The boy she’d married against her father’s wishes had been her husband for forty-four years.
So, which sister do you believe?
Before you answer, I owe you something.
I skipped a broadcast.
I told you that in 1991, Rebbie said nothing.
That’s true.
But she didn’t stay silent forever.
On the 11th of April, 1993, ABC News aired an episode of its magazine program Day One about the Jackson family.
By then, Michael’s Oprah interview had cracked the door open, and the brothers did something they had never done in public.
They admitted it.
Jackie said there were times he was afraid of his father when Joe got angry.
Jermaine said that if you did something wrong, you got a whipping.
The men of the family, in other words, finally confirmed part of what La Toya had said.
And then the producers turned to the eldest daughter and they asked her about the one claim that had always been hers alone to answer.
Rebbie Jackson said, “No, that’s not true. No, that never happened to me. It honestly didn’t.”
That’s the document that flips this story.
Not a court filing, not a will.
A 42-year-old woman sitting for a network camera with her brothers on the record admitting the beatings, saying that the worst thing her sister had told the world about her did not happen.
Look again at the details.
La Toya said Rebbie left home at 16.
The public record has her graduating from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary in 1968 and marrying Nathaniel Brown at 18.
La Toya’s first public version said she wasn’t the victim, only her sister.
Days later, she was.
The charge was never printed in the book that supposedly contained the family’s secrets.
And twenty years after that, the woman who made it said a manipulative husband was behind the book, then declined twice to say whether she stood by what she’d said on TV.
Here’s the honest part.
Nobody outside that house knows what happened in it.
Some people believe Rebbie because she was there and because she has no reason to lie about herself.
Others believe that families like this one protect their secrets for a lifetime and that a denial in 1993 can’t settle it.
The record can’t decide that for you.
What the record can do is tell you who was asked and what she said.
Rebbie Jackson was asked.
She said it never happened.
If your sister went on national television and described something about your own body that you say never took place, could you ever let her back into the family?
In 1997, after La Toya left Jack Gordon, the Jacksons did exactly that.
Joe Jackson died of cancer in Las Vegas on the 27th of June, 2018.
He was 89.
He’d been cut out of his famous son’s fortune entirely.
La Toya posted a loving tribute to the father she’d once accused.
Michael’s money stayed where Michael put it, with Katherine and his children, and none of it went to Rebbie.
By 2017, the daughter who’d once run from the house was standing beside the woman who’d raised it.
In court documents that year, Rebbie attested to what she said was a cousin’s mistreatment of their mother.
That cousin answered that Rebbie was the one manipulating her.
Katherine spent that season in London with Janet and with her eldest.
She never became a superstar.
She got one gold record, three children, and forty-four years with the man her father wouldn’t walk her toward.
She left that house at 18.
She spent the rest of her life being asked to describe it, and the one time it really mattered, she did.
