Dad Joe Jackson: 'We Have Sole Authority'

“She would have to be accessed if she would be a fit mother. We would have to determine if she has a proper place for them to live. If she doesn’t show she would be a fit parent, all access to the children would be terminated.”
 
If Rowe gains custody of her children with Jackson, she would be entitled to child support from the singer’s estate. This could be worth millions of dollars annually because she would be entitled to raise these kids an environment commensurate with the financial state of their father. This would mean that the children might be able to live in an estate with their mother paid for by the assets of their dead father.

And despite his money woes, Jackson could be worth more than $1 billion, thanks to his one-half share of the Sony/ATV catalog and other holdings like Mijack, the singer’s catalog of his own songs, whose sales have exploded since the singer’s death.

However, the cash-strapped Jackson also borrowed against that catalog for years, and his finances are considered to be a hopeless tangle.

At present, the children are residing with Jackson’s mother, Katherine, in her Encino home, owned by her late son.

Jackson has at least two wills, maybe more, but even if he left orders about whom he wanted to care for his children, the DCFS expert said, that meant nothing to child welfare officials.
 
“They would do what is in the best interests of the children and not what he wanted,” he said.
 
Jackson fathered two children, Paris, 11, and Prince Michael I, 12, with Debbie Rowe, who at one point in their lives, turned over sole custody to Jackson but retained visitation rights. She later changed her mind and pressed the matter in a legal dispute.

The outcome of this was that the judge in the matter restored maternal custody to her, even thought it was believed that Jackson paid her to remove herself from their lives. Now that Jackson is dead, there appears to be a clear path to Rowe becoming their rightful guardian as their mother. That is, the child welfare expert said, if she is fit to be a mother who has custody of her children.
 
The Jackson family source said there is no issue about whether Jackson used a sperm donor to impregnate Rowe and the kids could be vulnerable to a father who claimed parenting rights to his off spring. Jackson told the family friend that he was the father.

However, Big Hollywood reported Debbie Rowe made claims just before Jackson’s passing that he was not the father of her children and that she has made similar claims in the past. Jackson attorney Brian Oxman dismissed her claims as unreliable.

But if true, Rowe would be violating a confidentiality agreement she signed, Oxman told the site “The contract says she would hold the birth of the children, the lineage, their parenting and how they were taken care of would be held in confidence and not be disclosed in public to anyone.

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