The Daily Beast has learned that Grace Rwaramba, the trusted nanny to Michael Jackson’s children who began working for the superstar in 1991, will be giving a deposition to Los Angeles investigators today in their probe into Jackson’s death. Few people have a better overview of Jackson’s pill habits across the past two decades, including enabling doctors. According to a source familiar with what she intends to tell authorities, she is ready to “reveal all” she knows about his myriad physicians. That should make some of them very nervous.
Few people have a better overview of Jackson’s pill habits across the past two decades, including enabling doctors.
Not only does Rwaramba know where the bones are buried when it comes to doctors who enabled Jackson’s prescription-pill addiction, but The Daily Beast has also learned that Michael Amir, a top aide to Jackson known to many by his Nation of Islam shorthand, Brother Michael, fired Rwaramba in 2008 precisely because she was fighting with the pop star over the extent of his drug use and because she had reached out to other friends to help with an intervention.
Rwaramba has long been the subject of false tabloid rumors ranging from The National Enquirer’s 2007 report that she had secretly wed Jackson in a Las Vegas ceremony to British tabloid reports that she was the mother of Prince Michael II. She always endured the stories silently, never talking to the press or even issuing denials. And even when Jackson let her go over her drug intervention, she was loyal and maintained her silence.
But now she must endure another round of slanderous comments, passed around to reporters by some of the Nation of Islam workers who had surrounded Jackson during the past several years. One rumor: Rwaramba has a secret offshore bank account worth $100 million and that she used her trusted position with Jackson to enrich herself. Sources involved with the executors unraveling Jackson’s complicated estate and finances say the hidden-wealth rumors about Rwaramba appear utterly baseless and that all they can find is that Jackson sometimes passed money to his mother Katherine, through Rwaramba.
Rwaramba has told friends she has “absolutely nothing to hide.” Critically, the Jackson family believes her. They have embraced her once again and she is spending all her time with the children at the family’s request.
Instead, forensic accountants being brought in by the executors appear to be initially far more interested in a few top aides of the past couple of years, including some members of the Nation of Islam, about potentially millions missing from the Jackson accounts, and reports of shakedowns done by Jackson aides when outside businessmen approached the pop star with deals. Multiple efforts to reach Michael Amir or Grace Rwaramba were unsuccessful.
Xtra Insight: The Daily Beast's Gerald Posner: Jackson and the 'Pill Mills'
Xtra Insight: The Daily Beast's Gerald Posner: Jackson's Shady Inner Circle
Gerald Posner is the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism ( www.posner.com). Posner lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.