MICHAEL Jackson would lie to wife Lisa Marie Presley and give her "timed windows" to see him, his longtime personal assistant has revealed in an exclusive interview.

Speaking about Jacko for the first time, Scott Shaffer shared never-before-revealed details about the singer's two marriages, his relationships with kids and his drug addictions.

Scott, 66, revealed how he found Jacko collapsed and barely breathing in a near-drug overdose in a hotel room – and how he'd receive packages of pills delivered by Fedex.

Scott also recalled how Elizabeth Taylor once had to sneak him out of the country following a concert in Mexico – so he could go to rehab in private after his drug addictions got out of hand.

And he told how Lisa Marie Presley finally decided to ditch the Black and White singer after he only let her into the hospital to see for a specified amount of time, after she rushed to be at this side when he collapsed during a rehearsal.

Scott was one of the few people who got a glimpse into his marriage to Lisa Marie in 1994 and their divorce two years later.

“When he started dating her I was working at the ranch, I had an office there and he started bringing her up and introducing her,” he told Sun Online.

'HE LIED TO LISA MARIE'

“He was always kind of forcing us together. And we got on very well and I liked hanging out with her.

“And the reason he explained later why he did that was because he said ‘When we get married I don't want any kind of jealousy, about how close you and I are. But if you two become best friends then it's never going to become an issue.

“I was one of the few people in Michael’s entourage who were allowed to come to their house in Hidden Hills.

“I noticed things kind of going downhill between them because he wouldn’t tell her things – like where he was going for example.

“So one time he took me to Euro Disney for my birthday and he lied to her about where he was going and she found out by seeing it on the news – he was on TV on the balcony – I think with the Casio kids.

“Then she called me and said she was upset with me. She said: ‘I expect it from Michael but you promised you’d never lie to me.’

“I said, ‘I didn’t lie, I said I didn’t know, he’s my boss I have to do what he says’."

The former production assistant started working for Jackson after meeting him on the set of Black and White in 1991.

He soon began working as his personal assistant over a seven year period – and became part of Jackson's inner circle. Jackson even gave him the nickname "House" which has stuck to this day.

Scott says he was there when Lisa Marie finally decided to divorce Jacko and was even sent to move her things out of their shared house in Hidden Hills, California.

“I think the final straw for Lisa Marie was when he was in New York filming a HBO special in around 1995 and he collapsed on stage.

THE KIDS 'COULD TURN EVIL'

“So she rushed out to come and see him in the hospital and he told her she was only allowed to see him for a certain amount of time. He gave her an hour or even less that she could visit him and then she had to leave – so essentially he put a time limit on her.

“At that point she’d just had enough and that was literally when she called her lawyer to start divorce proceedings.

“That's when he sent me back to LA to go get all this stuff out of the Hidden Hills house.

“I don’t remember him being sad about the divorce but it was really hard to read him sometimes.

“I think another part of it was that some of the other people around him were saying things about Lisa Marie, like ‘She’s no good for you’. People were convincing him he shouldn’t be married to her.

“Especially the kids that were around. We all got along really well with them but they could turn evil – sometimes they thought it was funny to say things about people to get them in trouble. They ended up causing people to lose their jobs.

“Everybody was so possessive around Michael. I made it very quickly to Michael’s inner circle some people took years to get as close I did so there was a lot of jealousy.”

DRUG ADDICTION

Scott was also there throughout the singer’s well documented drug problems – even finding him passed out and barely breathing in a hotel room.

He also recalled how Michael’s good friend Elizabeth Taylor snuck him out of Mexico and brought him to England so he could receive treatment.

“Everyone knew he had a problem, he'd go on TV shows high, it was no secret.” he said.

“When we were in Mexico City, Elizabeth Taylor came and snuck him to London for rehab.

“She was already with us but she was the one who said, ‘l’m taking you out of here’.

“After the show instead of going back to LA – we snuck him out.

“We got one of the security guards who was about the same size as Michael to wear a robe with a hood and walk through the hotel so the fans and the media and everyone thought he was still in the hotel in Mexico City. Like a decoy.

“Then they took Michael out a different way to a plane and he went to a facility in London."

Scott, who lives in Hollywood and works in the movie business, hit out at the “irresponsible” doctors who he believes enabled Jacko’s drug problems.

And he firmly believes that if he was still working for the star in 2009 when he died from a Propofol overdose, he’d have been able to help him.

“I once asked him and he told me that all his drug problems started with the Pepsi commercial burn incident, he was filming a Pepsi commercial and his hair caught on fire in 1984.

“He had to have a lot of surgeries and was obviously in a lot of pain and so had to start taking pain medication.

"I do believe that a lot of the medical staff he employed were just ‘Yes men’ to him. They just didn’t say no.

'HE NEARLY DIED'

“We had one English doctor who would give him placebo drugs when he asked for them because he said he wasn’t going to feed his habit.

“But some of the doctors were just half a step above a quack – they would just give him stuff and it wasn’t helping. It was pretty terrible.

“I remember one doctor came and gave him a shot or something – I was out.

“And when I got back I found him passed out. We were staying in the Hilton in LA and I found him in his room barely breathing.

“We called another of his doctors who told us what to do and then came as soon as he could so we didn’t have to call an ambulance.

“Then I called the doctor who did it and I went off at them saying ‘You almost killed him! Why did you give him that and then just leave him?’

“And he said, ‘Well he called and asked for it’.

“That doctor had already being fired off the tour for being incompetent than Michael called him back. We went through a lot of doctors.

'FEDEX PACKAGES FULL OF PILLS'

‘I told him ‘This has to stop’ we were worried we’d find him dead. We used to worry that we’d end up being investigated about how he was getting all this stuff.

“He’d receive FedEx packages of pills when he was travelling. We wouldn’t open them – it was his mail – but we’d give them to him.

“So we would worry that if he died they’d be looking at us.”

But Scott remembers Jackson was also a hard task master and would think nothing of calling in him in the middle of the night.

"He really had no conception of what time it was," Scott recalled. "So you could easily be getting calls like two o’clock in the morning.

“One funny time was when we were in Australia and he called me at 3AM and told me he was engaged to Debbie Rowe and how I should go open up a jewelry store and get an engagement ring for him to give to her.

“He didn’t like it when I said no. Telling him no was hard he didn’t like hearing no.

“We had this saying between the two of us ‘We can do anything and no one can tell us no’.

“Because he would set me these assignments and I’d give 300 percent to get it done so if I said no it was a big deal.

“I told him I didn’t know anything about jewelry so one of his secretaries who knew Debbie and would know better than I what kind of ring she would like went the next day and I went along with her.

“Debbie was very nice she always looked out for me. I remember there was this one time when I hadn’t slept for two days because Michael had me running around and she saw me and she said ‘what’s wrong with you? You look terrible!’

“And she gave me a shot to get me to sleep, put a ‘do not disturb’ on my door and told everyone to leave me alone for 24 hours. She said to Michael ‘He’s not going to be much use to you dead’.

“Michael was tough but he was also fair.”

And while he worked him hard, Scott remembers how Jackson had a very “giving” side – and paid thousands for him to fix his teeth.

“He kept asking me why my teeth were a little off," he said. "And I said that's cosmetic so it’s not covered by insurance.

“When we got back from the Christmas break he had a driver come pick me up. I just thought we were going to go see him and he dropped me off in Beverly Hills where they gave me implants, surgery, braces. It was a lot of dental work – around $50 or $60,000. And he just did that as a gift.

“When his accountant and other people found out about it they went ballistic – that he was spending money on something like that.

“He was very generous, he’d donate money to hospitals.

“There was one time we were in Japan and he had heard about this kid that was terminal, and his dying wish,  his 'make-a-wish' was to be Michael before he died, so we were going to go visit them after the concert.

“Unfortunately we got the news that the child had died just before he was about to go on stage. We decided not to tell him because we knew he’d cancel the show.

MIXED FEELINGS

“When he did find out, he was in tears. It was like he had lost his best friend. He was very emotional about that stuff.”

Scott eventually left his job in around 1998 after becoming a little bored and wanting a new challenge but he stayed in touch with Michael over the years and he attended his funeral in 2009.

But he admitted to being heartbroken after watching documentary Leaving Neverland in which Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck accused Jackson of sexually abuse them for years as children.

Scott says he believed their accounts and fully supports them – claiming that "a lot of things finally made sense" to him after watching it.

“I have mixed feelings about speaking out after all these years. Michael did a lot of positive things and he was an incredible talent and I don’t want to attack him but there was also a negative side which he kept hidden and which ruined people’s lives.

“While I believe the victims I still think there has been a lot said by maids and other employees that isn’t true.

“When we were on tour I had to go and clean his room and I never found underwear floating in the bathtub, I never found tubs of Vaseline or anything slightly suspicious and I had to clean his room out completely.

“So these people coming forward and saying they saw this, they saw that – I think some people are just trying to make a buck.

"I was closer to Michael than almost anybody and it's hard to reconcile my memories of him with what Wade and Jimmy said but hearing them describes situations and places on the documentary I believe them – I was there and it all makes sense to me now. I had no idea at the time, Michael never talked to me about it. He kept all that separate."

Source: Read Full Article