be like, "You not f to talk about Michael? " Yes, I am. Michael Jackson never mentioned a single doctor to me who was treating him with opioids, propall or any of those substances.
Michael Jackson was a drug addict. Security comes to get me and says, "You have a you have a guest here who wasn't on the list. " And I'm like, "Who?
" He's like, "Michael Jackson. " I'm thinking they joking around. I'm thinking like, you know, oh, you know, they they trying to maybe punk me.
This is like like like I think I think Punk was out during this time. I'm not knowing what's going on. So then I go towards the back back by like where the catering [music] was and it's Michael.
There is something Cat Williams said that a lot of people heard, but not enough people actually sat with. He stood in front of a mic and told the world that he should never have made those jokes about Michael Jackson. Not because the jokes weren't funny, but because, in his words, one of the main reasons the system lets you rise is your willingness to tear down your own kind.
Think about that for a second. A man who built his entire career on saying the things nobody else would say. Looking back and admitting he was used as a tool against the very icon he was mocking, that is not a small thing to confess.
Once you understand what Cat was really saying, it opens up a much bigger conversation about Michael Jackson himself, about the industry that built him, even at the height of his global power. Michael Jackson could not protect himself from the forces that had decided his time was up. Back in 2006, Cat Williams released a stand-up special [music] called The Pimp Chronicles Part One.
And in it, he went at Michael Jackson. The jokes landed and people laughed. Cat was on fire in that era, and it felt like nothing was off limits.
That was kind of his whole brand. And the fact of the matter is we watched get murdered right in front of our own mother and knew it was going to happen. He told us and we didn't know his last tour.
This is it. And they gave us the most bull story we ever heard our entire life. First they told us this nug addict.
Then we find out this drug was sleep. Yeah, that's no drug addict. Something's a foul here.
This story don't go together. Fast forward to late 2024. Cat appears at the Vulture Festival for a sitdown with journalist Jesse David Fox.
Somewhere [music] in that conversation, the topic of Michael Jackson comes up and Cat does something that genuinely surprised a lot of people. He said he regrets those [music] jokes. He called them the jokes of a man that was hurt by an icon.
I shouldn't have honestly like um some of these things are the reason that the enemy decides to go ahead and let you be famous is um your ability [music] to tear down your own kind. no matter how high they are. Um, on the other hand, my job is to be funny first and to um voice the opinion of a group that doesn't get to have their opinion out there.
Right? So, as a black man, [cough] if you don't love yourself, you don't love me. So, um, those were the jokes of a guy that was hurt, um, you know, by an icon.
[music] And so, I was telling those jokes. The fact that years later, Janet Jackson says she still loved me despite the jokes that I told about her brother is probably one of the most magnificent things, you know, just because I say a lot of hilarious, it it costs me every time, you know, like [music] I'm never I'm never unscathed in these situations. ations.
Now, think about that phrase, hurt by an icon. What does that even mean? It suggests that Cat, like so many other black entertainers of his generation, grew up looking at Michael Jackson as the ceiling of what was possible.
The proof that you could come from nothing and become everything. And when the media started dismantling that image, a lot of people processed [music] that grief through humor. Cat included.
The deeper point he was making was more uncomfortable than just personal regret. He was saying that mockery of the powerful is sometimes manufactured that the entertainment world has a way of recruiting your voice, your platform, and your credibility to do its dirty work for it. And by the time you realize what happened, the damage is already done.
If you watched Cat's explosive Club Shay Shay interview with Shannon Sharp back in January 2024, you already know that [music] Cat has been building this world view for a long time. That interview went on for nearly 3 hours and racked up over 83 million views on YouTube. People could not stop watching because Cat was saying things out loud that the industry expects everyone to quietly agree to keep private.
All of these know why they take it the [music] wrong way. One of his central arguments throughout that interview was simple. You do not reach the highest levels of this industry without making compromises that cost you something essential.
And those compromises are not always financial. Sometimes they are moral, relational, and willing to destroy on the way up or on the way back down. When you apply that framework to Michael Jackson, things start to look different.
Here is a man who at a certain point became too big, independent, and vocal about the business side of the music industry to be comfortable for [music] the people in power. He had publicly called out Sony Music and taken ownership of his masters. He was in control of his catalog in a way that threatened the people who believed they owned him.
What happened then? The narrative around him shifted. [music] The media coverage changed its tone and the same industry that had celebrated him for decades began a slow and methodical process of reframing who he was and what he represented.
Jack, I wanted to ask you about um Michael Jackson. What about him? Was he touching little kids?
What I will say is is this. They spent a lot of money and a lot of time trying to convince people that he did. And yet every witness that they had recanted or was found to be a liar.
You know, the simple fact that he was a child victim of essay in the industry, the things that happened to him in Mottown, the way he was, the way he was taken advantage of by the late Quincy Jones, may he rot in hell, the way he was lined up by his own people when all he ever did was try to warn people how to protect yourself from the industry. the way he gave good counsel to Aaron Carter and let him know that he would be targeted by Sony and look at what happened and now we have Liam Payne. You know, it's just it's interesting [music] where people's minds go.
Uh yeah. No. Uh it does seem like a campaign [music] to uh attack the melanated.
Uh but would you say some How do you pick and choose what's true? Like when you hear Michael Jackson versus Diddy, uh Bill Cosby versus R. Kelly, Jay-Z versus whoever else.
R. Kelly had his own set of Diddy tapes. That's what got him.
Bill Cosby admitted it in a deposition that he thought nobody was ever going to see. Diddy was broadcasted on CNN violently attacking and abusing at what they've been trying to disprove was an FO. I'm just saying.
I hear you. You can't argue with reality. Ry near Salowe, Wanda's son.
She had it when she was 16. It takes 40 weeks to cook a baby. That means she was 15 when she got pregnant.
Age of consent in Pennsylvania is 17, was then is now. And she was taken across state lines from Pennsylvania to an apartment in New York. Oops.
Oh. Oh man. The details.
That's how Ramen Manatee made it into this world. Take the test. That's fine.
We'll give you You don't know Betty. Take the test. You making Lega Gold look halfway rational.
You've been ducking this boy's DNA for all his life. Take the test. Do that.
Would you like to see him on the couch? About lack of integrity and valid and integrity and you've been dead beating it your whole life. Meanwhile, your daughter's looking more like somebody you used to be with than somebody you married to.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. Cat Williams, in more than one setting, has pointed to the title of Michael Jackson's [music] final concert series as something people missed entirely. This is it.
50 Concerts London, the biggest comeback in pop history. On the surface, it looked like a triumphant return. The King of [music] Pop was back, but Cat's read on it was different.
He suggested that Michael may have known on some level that this tour represented a kind of last stand. That the pressure surrounding it was not just the pressure of performance, but [music] of something far heavier. The financial arrangements, the ownership disputes, the control that promoters and business partners had over the tour structure.
All of it pointed to a man who was in many ways not fully in control of what was happening around him. How often did you talk to Michael? We we spoke to him not that much during rehearsal, [music] but we we last saw him May 14th.
Do you know how long he'd been given probable? Well, see with this is it there was a lot of footage that was taken out that no one saw and because that was the edit before the edit and um it's just so much went on. So much went on.
And is that footage damaging? I mean, do you see a guy, you know, in a bit of a days, bit of a zombie? I mean, what is the stuff we didn't see?
Well, things that we've noticed, and this is why the the defense is going to try to paint my brother out to be a drug addict, and he was very [music] dependent on drugs, and it's not true because how can someone be dependent on drugs and just 2008, he was dancing 4 hours a day, and he had a 5-year plan of starting a new life. And well, let me let me throw something to you about this. [music] I know somebody who's a very famous TV star, very famous, one of the biggest stars in the world, [music] who's a friend of mine who takes sleeping pills every night to sleep because he finds the adrenaline just too much going [music] on.
Been doing it for years. That is a form of addiction. You know, I was on ambient after breaking some ribs [music] for 3 and 1/2 weeks once.
When I tried to stop, it was like having a form of cold turkey for 2 or 3 weeks. It was these are strong [music] drugs. propol is is significantly stronger than anything that this friend of mine takes or that I was taking that time.
So if Michael was getting this stuff [music] over a regular period of time, he could still be performing perfectly well. But as you say, underneath it, the damage would be pretty intensive, I would say. But that's the question.
Michael has always had an anesthesiologist around him when he was taking things. Someone who knew whether I knew whether someone who knew about the process of knocking somebody out for the purposes of sleep. Yeah.
Plus, he's he's lived all this time doing dimmer and sleeping pills and also pain pills, but the symptoms from propall, it's like no one knew that he was, you know, the public, [music] you know, he was complaining about his body, one side being an ice cube, another side being very warm. Do you know how long he'd been taking? Is there any evidence that you've seen?
I really don't know. But what is the family's belief? What is the theory that you you think about that?
Our our belief is that we [music] knew he was doing um um prescription drugs to sleep in pain and um we didn't [music] know about propall. I just found out about this drug which I can't even pronounce hardly. uh the symptoms.
The reason why I want to talk about the symptoms because if you look at the past tours, [music] we've never heard of these symptoms of Michael Jackson not knowing whether to go right or left when he comes on stage. Who was he who was he telling [music] about the symptoms? No, this is No, these are people that were around him.
him not being able to lift to lift himself out out of what five 5 lb prop or or something repeating himself [music] and him losing just unbelievable weight and and these are signs of toxic in your body. Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009, less than 3 weeks before that tour was supposed to begin. Every single one of those 50 concerts had been sold out and the official conclusion was that his personal physician, Dr Conrad Murray, had administered a fatal dose of propifall in the bedroom of a rented Los Angeles mansion.
Murray was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served less than 2 years. Cat's point was never that the legal outcome was wrong. His point was broader.
It was about the conditions that put Michael in that room. the isolation, dependency, and people who had every incentive to keep him compliant and every reason to be nervous about what he might say or do once he had a global stage again. One thing that comes up again and again when you trace Michael Jackson's final years is the theme of isolation.
After the 2005 trial in which he was acquitted on all counts, Michael did not return to his life in any straightforward way. He left Neverland and spent years moving between Bahrain, Ireland, and other locations far from the industry that had defined his existence. He was by most accounts deeply rattled.
You know, they credit your testimony in part for Michael's acquitt. You know, you were called really a star witness. You you withtood a blistering [music] cross-examination and he was acquitted.
On some level, do you feel guilty about that now? Do you think about that? Yeah, I do think about that.
I [music] have. than I do. I wish that I was ready.
I wish that I could [music] have helped Gavin Arzo receive some justice and some validation [music] for what happened to him. That was just like what happened to me and just like what happened to James. [music] And I wish that I could have played a role in at that point stopping Michael from abusing however [music] many other kids he did after that.
Do you think that there are others out there? I do think there are others out there. Um, but but I also don't expect [music] them to just come out now that we're coming out.
It's such a difficult thing to do to come out. You you have to do it when [music] you're ready. We can't change what happened to us.
It happened. It's done. But what can we do with it now?
[music] How can we provide comfort for other survivors? That's what this is about. And Michael just happens to be the guy, the abuse in this child.
[music] Well, CBS This Morning co-host Gail King joins us now on the set. Gail, their [music] story is heartbreaking. Um, it's heartbreaking and disturbing.
I watched both parts back to back o over a month ago [music] actually, then watched it again right before the interview cuz I started taking notes and I woke up really just haunted and very disturbed by what I had seen. [music] But I think it's important to emphasize that the Jackson family believes these two are admitted liars, that they're opportunists, that they're trying to exploit Michael [music] Jackson in death and exploit the legacy. But what they have to the story they [music] tell is very very chilling.
Um you know we in your piece you point out that they had been given an opportunity to talk about this before and they denied that there was any why are they talking about it now? Well I mean I think that they said [music] you have to come to it in your own time and they weren't ready to talk about it then. And also Anmarie for a long time they didn't even think of it as because Michael they say had [music] trained them so well to think we love each other this is how people show love and it's [music] always we will get in trouble we will this is our special thing.
So when you're a little kid you feel that you're complicit in that. So [music] for many years they didn't know that it was a be when they became adults actually and really started having their own children. And the biggest reason why they didn't tell is because they wanted to [music] protect him.
This is somebody that you're in love with who you care about. And so they lied to their parents. They lied on the stand and said [music] for them they thought if we didn't lie, it's going to hurt him and ultimately hurt us.
So when you listen to the story the way that they tell it, you can see why with a little child's brain, even though they're [music] grown. Wade was 22. Um he was 11 the first time and 22 the second time, you're now a grown-up.
By the time he was back in Los Angeles in late 2008 and rehearsing for This Is It, he was living in a rented mansion in Homie Hills. The people around him were a combination of paid professionals, handlers, and associates with varying levels of genuine loyalty to him. His closest friends from earlier periods of his life.
People like Chris Tucker, who Cat has spoken about warmly as someone with real integrity, were not a consistent part of that inner circle by then. um an authentic relationship with someone who was very guarded um who was Michael Jackson. Yeah.
And I found that your friendship with him was very genuine. Yeah. And it just worked.
Like how did you and Michael Jackson actually become friends? It was crazy man cuz I think I think he knew I was a big fan of his cuz in every movie you could check out all the movies Fridays from Rush Hours. I have something in it about Michael Jackson cuz I guess [music] it was I got influenced by growing up with you know Michael like everybody else.
Uh, but uh, I met everybody, all his family members before I met him. I met Jermaine. I met the Joe Jackson even called me one time in my comedy club.
I All of them were big fans. All of them. Well, I don't know.
I wanted to meet Michael and uh, but they always just calling me. I was like, "Where's Michael? " [laughter] Yeah.
Call me with Michael on the other line. They want to hear from you. Yeah.
Him probably hearing about and we got on the phone with each other one time. Yeah. And he told me he was performing.
He was doing his album in New York and I was doing Rush Hour 2 in Vegas and he said when you through just come to New York and we can meet and you know it's great I'm a big fan and I'm like I'm a big fan Michael you don't understand he's like what whenever you're done let's get together but I spent a lot of money uh to see [music] Michael really I yeah cuz I took a private plane to New York I took a private plane to New York cuz Michael told me you know when you finish rush hour I'll come see it so I knew he was there I called him before I went cuz I was going there for something else Yeah. And I kept leaving a message, Michael, I'm in New York. If you're around, I'd love to see you.
And I didn't hear anything. So, I [music] got on that same private plane, flew back to Los Angeles. You know, I was done.
Soon as I landed, I got a message from Michael Jackson's office like, "Michael, I want to meet you tomorrow in New York City. " I was like, "What? " And I went right up to the captain's seat and I said, "Take me back to New York.
" They said, "Well, is this going to cost? " I said, "I don't care. You got my credit card.
Just take me back. " [laughter] Man, I took I I bought I was in a expensive plane, too. I don't know what it was.
G4 or whatever. [music] I asked, "Take me back. I'm about I didn't tell him.
" It was worth it, man. Every dollar. And that's how we became friends.
It was like I don't know how much it was, but it was crazy. They flew me all the way back. The guy said, "Cool.
" The pilots went right back up in the air. They had enough time they could fly uh some more. So, that's how that's how I met Mike.
Was he really as giving as everybody says he was? Oh, yeah. He was he was he was cuz he would like anytime that I wanted to go to Neverland, like, you know, I would just call him Mike.
I want to go I want to come up to Neverland. He's like, "Of course you come up. I'm not there.
there. I'm in Russia, but going up the chefs are still there and everybody's there. Go, go.
So, he was nice. I mean, he was he was a joke. He liked to joke around and so he was he was fun.
A lot of fun to be around. Cad has made it clear that he sees this pattern of isolation as a feature, not a bug, of how the industry deals with artists who start to become inconvenient. You do not take someone down all at once or remove the people who genuinely care about them.
You surround them with people whose interests are aligned with managing them rather than protecting them. You create dependence and when something goes wrong, there is plausible distance between the powerful people at the top and the outcome at the bottom. Here is the part that most of the conversations about Cat Williams and Michael Jackson tend to skip over.
When Cat talks about the industry's relationship with its biggest stars, he's not just talking about music. He's talking about a culture of compliance that runs through entertainment at every level. In his Club Shay interview, he was direct about the fact that he had been approached multiple times with offers that would have required him to compromise his integrity.
He turned them down and left money on the table by his own account, specifically to avoid becoming the kind of person [music] the industry could control. That choice cost him mainstream support for long stretches of his career, but it also meant he was never fully owned. Club Shay Shay.
Yeah, [music] I um I I was [music] trying to do something there that hadn't been done. I was trying to I thought that I had figured out the [music] algorithm uh mathematically and I thought that I could show that and um when I wrote [music] it out, I wrote it out to [clears throat] kill the careers of the people I was talking about, right? But it was so vicious that I erased all of the knockout blows [music] and just left the jabs so that the comic I'm talking about [music] knows that I know your real story.
I'mma tell this, but you know what else I know. So uh [music] uh yeah, I was Michael Jackson for all his extraordinary power and global reach had [music] spent decades in a system that had its hands in everything he did from the time he was a child. He entered the Jackson 5 at around 10 years old and never truly left the machinery of professional entertainment.
The people who shaped his career had a generational head start on knowing exactly what levers to pull when they needed him to cooperate and exactly what to do when they decided cooperation was no longer necessary. What Cat was really calling out in his own unfiltered way was the idea that superstardom at that level is not freedom. It is the most elaborate and expensive cage ever [music] constructed.
Let's come back to that moment of regret because it deserves more attention than [music] it got. When Cat Williams stood at the Vulture Festival and said he should never have made those jokes, he was not doing a PR move. He was not walking something back because his publicist told him to.
This is a man who [music] in 2024 alone voluntarily burned some of the most powerful bridges in Hollywood on live podcast audio. He does not do calculated softness. What he was expressing was something much more honest.
He was saying that he like many others in the entertainment space was once a participant in the dismantling of Michael Jackson's image. Not a major or conscious one, but a participant nonetheless. And once you understand how that process actually works, once you see how the machine recruits voices and platforms to do its bidding, the humor stops being funny.
Well, I was going to ask you. It just seems like, you know, when you were when at least when I saw you in the studio, you were listening to a lot of Michael Jackson, a lot of thriller and a lot of Michael Jackson last night. I was ill.
Really? It was crazy ill. You came in like a shadow like ill.
Then he [music] just like there's Mike. I don't know where he came from. Yo, where Mike came?
I don't It's my word. I don't know where he came [laughter] from. Yeah, he was in there working on a song that um they had asked me to work on and uh song was incredible and you know he just came in the room I was like what's up like what's up so it was cool [music] and that was in the studio.
Yeah, last night. Wow. So did you guys actually meet me meet and wow crazy?
But I know it was just that the thriller album to me was like the best album ever made. You know what I mean? I even spoke to Quincy about the formula how they how they [music] put that together and he showed me a little chart and everything.
So I followed the guidelines not to make Thriller. I don't want people to think that like I'm trying I'm making Thriller music like I'm making beat it or something like that or I might even sample and beat it. You know what I mean?
It's it's nothing like that. It's the structure the way they made the album. Excuse me.
[music] Let me just get that for me. You know what I'm saying? Right.
So, but I mean, you were saying that like you wanted this album to to either top it or have that feel of like having, you know, nine really hot songs or whatever. That's what That's what it's about. You know what I'm saying?
So, I'm not trying to make Thriller. [music] I'm not trying to make beaten. I'm not trying to moonwalk.
I might get a bubble, but that's that's about it. No monkeys. No.
Yeah. No, no monkeys, nothing. I'm just I just [music] like to you know as far as the songs was nine songs nine hot songs you know what I'm saying nine singles [music] you know not that I'm trying to make a single every time e I'm just trying to make a album with all the hottest music on it I mean if you look at [music] the history in every album that I made you know you you can never say that it was one or two songs you know what I'm saying and I and I take I take great pride in that you know Even volume one, which people was my most criticized album, had five of the five [music] of five bomb songs on it.
You know what I'm saying? So that that's what I try to work at, just just making a whole album full of high songs instead of one [music] or two singles and his album's over. He also said something quietly devastating at that moment.
He said that the reason the system lets certain people become famous is their ability to tear down their own kind. Think about how that applies to the entire ecosystem around [music] Michael Jackson's fall from grace in the 1990s and 2000s. The sheer volume of voices from within the black entertainment community and from outside it piled on during his most vulnerable moments.
How many of those voices were genuinely independent? How many were in some way incentivized? That's an uncomfortable question, but it is the right one.
We are at a moment in time where a lot of things that were considered fringe thinking about the entertainment industry have turned out to be basically accurate. The you know what files are being discussed openly. The Diddy situation unfolded exactly the way Cat predicted [music] it would back in January 2024.
Almost to the point where people started calling him a prophet. Major institutions and powerful individuals who were untouchable 5 years ago are now facing serious scrutiny. Against that backdrop, Cat Williams revisiting Michael Jackson is not nostalgia.
It is a data point in a much larger pattern that people are only now beginning to properly map out. Michael Jackson was by every measure the most famous human being on Earth at the peak of his powers. He had the resources, [music] the global fan base, the legal team, the money, and the platform to fight back against anything.
And yet, the system still won. It found the pressure points, vulnerabilities, and manufactured a narrative around him that stuck to him for the rest of his life. And in the eyes of some people, beyond it, if that can happen to him, that is a sobering statement about what the industry is actually capable of when it decides someone has become a problem.
Cat Williams has spent the last several years making sure people understand that. Not just as it relates to Michael Jackson, but as a warning about how power actually operates in spaces where everyone is too dazzled by the lights to look at the machinery behind them. I [music] worked to save Michael's life.
Candace Owens never met Michael Jackson. I was his rabbi for two years. I love him.
I missed him. I tried to get him off of drugs. She said that I killed him.
And talk about the contempt for people struggling with addiction that she would say the Jews killed Michael Jackson. [music] And with all due respect, Pierce, you have not said that one of those things that I'm a murderer, a man who doesn't have a speeding ticket, who doesn't have a parking ticket, is a murderer, and the police have to come and the FBI to protect me. Are you going to say, "Here's what I'm going to say to you, Rabbi.
Once again, you've just singularly failed to answer my question. So, what is the takeaway from all of this? Cat Williams is not a historian or a journalist.
He is a comedian who has spent 30 years inside the entertainment system. Watching it up close and refusing to pretend that what he saw was normal. His regret about Michael Jackson is in a strange way a form of testimony.
It tells us that the same cultural apparatus that destroyed [music] Michael Jackson's image did so with the help of people who had no idea they were being used. that the damage was distributed across thousands of small moments, jokes, headlines, and off-hand comments until the accumulation of them became the accepted version of who Michael Jackson was. When we talk about why Michael Jackson could not be saved, maybe the answer is not Conrad Murray or any single event or any single person.
Maybe the answer is that by the time Michael Jackson needed [music] saving, the world had already been prepared not to try. Cat Williams understood [music] that and his willingness to say it out loud even at cost to himself is exactly the kind of honesty that the industry has always been allergic to. So here's a question worth [music] sitting with.
If this is what happened to the most famous artist in the history of popular music, who else has been lost in a way that we have not yet had the language to describe? Let us know what you think in the comments below. If you like this video, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss out on any new videos.
And until then, fam, keep it real.
