HOLLYWOOD - In what has to be the worst timing ever, singer Michael Jackson, who is facing a trial on child molestation charges, is about to become a father to quadruplets by way of a surrogate mother, according to reports circulating Tuesday--reports his people flatly deny. Us Weekly magazine reported Tuesday that Jackson recently stayed at a $4,000-a-night luxury hotel suite in Miami Beach, Fla., and spent time with the pregnant mother-to-be.
Raymone Bain, spokeswoman for Jackson, told Reuters when asked about the report, "This is not true, and we are not going to further comment on stories of this nature. We do not respond to these kinds of stories."
The 45-year-old performer already has three children--Prince Michael I and daughter Paris Michael by his former wife, Debbie Rowe, and Prince Michael II (aka "blanket"), the child he dangled from the balcony of a Berlin hotel in November 2002.
In February 2003, Jackson revealed in a TV documentary that Prince Michael II had been born to a woman who was basically a stranger to him. "I used a surrogate mother and my own sperm cells," he told British interviewer Martin Bashir in the documentary Living With Michael Jackson. "She doesn't know me."
One of the youths who appeared in the infamous documentary is now at the center of the child molestation case pending against Jackson. The boy is about the same age as the child Jackson is believed to have given $25 million some years ago to resolve a civil lawsuit that made similar claims.
In both cases, the parents of the boys were fighting with each other at the time the children were brought into Jackson 's Neverland Ranch. Jackson reportedly referred to the boys as "Bubba," according to Vanity Fair.
The latest child, who has cancer, reportedly has given authorities drawings of Jackson's genitalia. Both boys reportedly also were given antihistamines with wine, both of which induce drowsiness, and the latest child's sister was given sleeping pills.
Jackson pleaded innocent in December to seven counts of performing lewd or lascivious acts on a child under 14 and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent. If found guilty, the self-proclaimed "King of Pop" could face up to 24 years in jail.