----LaToya in 1985

     LaToya nude in Playboy?

     I was shocked when I heard the rumor. My daughter may have been different from her eight brothers and sisters in some ways -- she was the moodiest of my kids, for example -- but in terms of her dress and manners, she’d been so conservative that she’d once dropped a friend who had begun wearing low-cut tops and skirts with slits in them. “She looks disgusting like a hooker, "LaToya remarked at the time. “I don’t want any part of her.”

     But the longer I thought about the Playboy rumor, the more I feared that it was true. The LaToya I saw in early 1989 was not the LaToya I thought I knew.

     I couldn’t help but recall her 1988 engagement at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, when she danced for the first time ever in a sexy, suggestive way. Watching her from the audience, I was surprised and, I admit, a little taken aback.

     “Jack told me that I had to change my image if I want to make it in the business,” LaToya said when I questioned her about her new show.

     "Jack" was Jack Gordon, her smooth-talking manager. Her transformation had begun at the same time that he entered her life in 1987 with an offer for her to host a music video show that he had in the works. At the time LaToya was a confirmed homebody and mama’s girl

     “Toya, you stay under me too much,” I’d say. “You should get out of the house more.”

     “But I don’t like what’s out there, Mother,” she’d reply. “Besides, you’re my best friend.”

     Gordon’s music video show never materialized, but he remained on the scene, showering LaToya with flowers and gifts.

     REBBIE: When I was at the house, I’d hear my sister talk about Jack all of the time. Supposedly, he wanted to marry her, and she had refused, but he had obviously succeeded in getting her attention.

     Gordon begged my husband, Joe LaToya’s manager, to allow him to co-manage her; he claimed that he had ideas for how to revitalize her stalled recording career. He kept pestering Joe until Joe finally asked LaToya, "Is this what you want?” She said it was, so her father agreed to share management responsibilities with Gordon.

     The next thing I knew, Gordon had my homebody of a daughter travelling the world. No sooner would they return from business in Japan than she’d announced, “Oh, I have a photo shoot to do in Austria,” and she and Gordon would be on the next flight out of Los Angeles. While a part of me was happy that she was getting out into the world at long last meeting new people, the turnabout in her new way of life was so sudden and dramatic that it left me confused.

     It wasn’t until later, when I saw Jack Gordon for what he was -- an opportunist -- that I understood his strategy in booking LaToya in far-flung corners of the globe. He was attempting to distance my naive, trusting daughter from her family, literally and figuratively, so that he could become a dominant influence in her life.

     Jack Gordon changed overnight in his attitude toward Joe and me. His first act of defiance was in refusing to report to Joe’s business manager as Joe had requested. After he and Joe argued over this, Gordon made the outrageous claim to Frank Dileo, my son Michael’s manager at the time, that Joe had attempted to strangle him.

     Jack, I was in the room with you two, and you know that Joe never touched you!” I exclaimed.

     “He laid his hand on my shoulder! He laid his hand on my shoulder!” Gordon replied excitedly.

     The public learned just how successful Gordon had been in tearing LaToya away from the family when, in March 1988, People magazine reported that LaToya had moved to New York City with Gordon and cut her professional ties with Joe. “Jack’s a salesman,” LaToya was quoted as saying. “He throws a good pitch and he delivers. Anyway, he’s doing better than my father.”

     Adding a sensational touch was Jack Gordon’s own parting “pitch” to Joe: “I love Joe like poison.”

     Even though LaToya continued to talk to me almost daily on the telephone, our relationship deteriorated. It seemed like LaToya had been taking lessons in the Big Lie from Gordon.

     I had raised my children to tell the truth always, so I was disappointed in her for indignantly denying to me that she had decided to write a competing, “tell-all” book about the Jackson family, even after I heard that Gordon had taken her around from publisher to publisher in New York.

     “No Mother, I’m not doing a book. I don’t know how these rumors get started,” she said again a few weeks later, after I learned that she had signed a book deal for more money than my son Michael had relieved for his autobiography, Moonwalk.

     LaToya never did admit to me that she was writing a book. I had to read about it in a newspaper in early 1989. “Michael’s book is nice but very light,” she was quoted saying. “There will be a lot of things in my book that weren’t in his.”

     REBBIE: The ironic thing is, if anyone else in the family had even hinted at doing a book to compete with Mother’s, LaToya would have been the one running her mouth about how wrong that was.

     LaToya denied to me that she had disrobed for a Playboy photographer as emphatically as she had denied that she was writing a book. I’m sad to say that, once again, I learned the truth from the media.

     REBBIE: I can truly say that my sister’s book and her Playboy spread have hurt the family very badly at heart. Very badly. Everybody is hurt, including the grandchildren. I was personally so embarrassed that there were moments when I said to myself, I wish I was on another planet. I felt like crying when I went out in public, afraid that someone would recognise me and ask me about LaToya.

     In her interviews promoting her nude spread, LaToya defended her actions: “I have to live my life for LaToya and not for my family.” But she made a bad situation worse when she claimed that Michael -- of all people -- had approved of her decision to pose nude.

     Michael denied to the family that he’d done any such thing. He had given LaToya his new phone number because he was sensitive to the fact that she was “out there all alone.” But after she misquoted him he refused to take her calls. “I can’t talk to her when she continues to lie like that,” he said.

     Shortly after the Playboy issue with her face on the cover hit the newsstands, LaToya appeared on “Donahue.” “My parents laid down certain rules, and one of those rules, of course, was you were not to leave home unless you were married,” she claimed, as a way of rationalizing her rebellion. She didn’t mention the fact that our “rule” was never enforced, and that Michael, Marlon, and Janet had moved out before her as single people.

     After the broadcast, I received a call from someone who had witnessed the “Donahue” taping. “Get your daughter away from her manager,” she said. She told me how Jack Gordon had made a nuisance of himself before the show by insisting that Phil Donahue ask LaToya leading questions of a negative nature about the family.

     Needless to say, rescuing my daughter from Gordon had been the family’s aim ever since she had moved to New York with him, and even before it was reported in the national press that Gordon had run a brothel and served time in prison for trying to bribe the Nevada State Gaming Commission. But by then Jack Gordon has done a great job of brainwashing LaToya, because she refused to believe anything negative about his past or his motives, and nothing I nor her brothers and sisters could say would persuade her to return home to us.

     Mixed in with my rage at Jack Gordon was a feeling of guilt. Maybe I sheltered my children too much, I’ve thought many times since, and not educated them enough about sharks out there waiting to take advantage of them for their own financial gain.

     I’ll never forget the scene in LaToya’s dressing room in Atlantic City in 1988 immediately following one of her performances. There LaToya was, hot and sweaty, her hair in need of attention. And there was Gordon barking at her, “Hurry up! Go downstairs!” Vanna White was there, and he was insistent that LaToya pose for a picture with her immediately.

     My daughter Janet, who also witnessed Gordon’s outburst, broke into tears.

     “How dare you talk to my sister like that!” she exclaimed.

     “She’s going down those stairs!” Gordon repeated.

     After she left the room, Janet turned to LaToya. “Toya, how can you put up with that kind of treatment?” she asked.

     "When you're tired you don’t care what happens, "was all LaToya said.

     REBBIE: The LaToya situation in 1989 was like a mystery. What’s the next episode? I kept wondering.

     The public is probably asking that same question today about the Jackson family.

     Even as the media were covering LaToya’s rebellion, they were still feasting on rumors about Michael’s private life, reports of Jackson “sibling jealousy," and tales about how Joe and I are alienated from most of our kids.

     “What a sorry family these Jackson’s have become,” I imagine people are saying today. “They couldn’t handle their rags-to-riches success.” If I depend on the press for all my information on my family, I’d come to the same conclusion.

     But I’m able to see our story with a perspective that is lacking in an “Entertainment Tonight” sound bite, or an error-filled article in one of the tabloids.