On May 10, 2009, Conrad Murray took his iPhone and secretly recorded Michael Jackson while he was under the effects of the anesthesia that the doctor administered to him every night so that he could sleep. In that recording, Jackson is 50 years old, his voice is slurred, he speaks incoherently, and yet he speaks.
He talks about his children, he talks about the world’s largest hospital that he wants to build with the money from his tour. He speaks of the pain he carried throughout his life and says, “With the voice of someone who is no longer fully awake, that God put him on earth to do one thing.” That recording was found on Murray’s phone.
It was presented as evidence in the involuntary manslaughter trial and for almost 2 years nobody in the world heard it. When it was finally played in the Los Angeles courtroom in October 2011, Jackson’s brothers, who were sitting in the stands, covered their mouths with their hands, because what they heard was not the voice of the King of Pop.
It was the voice of a man who was being silently destroyed, yet still dreaming. But what exactly did he say? And why did nobody do anything when there was still time to save him? To understand what that video and recording reveal, one must first understand what stage of life Michael Jackson was at in the months leading up to his death. It was the year 209.
Jackson had not done a full world tour for 12 years. His last major concert series had been the High Story World Tour, which ended in 1997. In between, there had been two sexual abuse lawsuits, a trial that lasted almost 5 months, the destruction of his reputation in the media around the world, the loss of his Neverland home and a debt that, according to financial records of the time, exceeded 500 million dollars.
He was a man who had spent a whole decade in the eye of the most brutal storm a famous human being can face and who had survived it all with three children to raise and with the conviction that his return to the stage was going to prove something to the world, something no court sentence could prove, that he was the greatest artist who had ever lived and that he still had something to say.
On March 5, 2009, Jackson appeared at a press conference at the O2 Arena in London. 7000 fans and 350 journalists were waiting for him. When he entered the building, something about him had changed. This was not the Michael Jackson the world remembered with the sequined suit and wide-brimmed hat. He was a thin, almost frail man.
with ivory-colored skin and the eyes of someone who has n’t slept well in too long. But when he spoke, he spoke with a clarity that no one expected. I just want to say that these will be my last performances in London. When I say that’s it, I really mean that’s it. He then added that it was his final performance.
The words were interpreted in many ways. No one knew then that he was being literal in a way none of them could have imagined. The trials began in April 2009 at the Center Staging studios in Burbank, California. Six days a week. The production was monumental. Randy Philips, the CEO of AEG Life, the concert promoter, had announced that 13 million pounds would be spent on the production of the shows, 18 songs, 22 different stages, three-dimensional segments filmed especially for the tour, including a new thriller version
set in a haunted house with the voice of Vincent Price. Aerial routines in the style of Sir du Soley. Jackson had hired former bodybuilder Luigno to train him physically. He had hired Kai Chase as his personal chef to prepare healthy meals that would keep him in shape for the shows. The machinery of what could have been the biggest comeback in the history of popular music was in motion.
And at the center of that machinery, Michael Jackson slept every night with an IV in his arm, administering Propofol, a surgical anesthetic, because it was the only way he could lose consciousness. This is where the story changes in nature because what happened between March 5, 1929, when Jackson announced the tour, and June 25, 1929, when he was found dead in his home on Carol Wood Drive in the Holby Hills neighborhood.
It wasn’t simply the tragedy of a man who died too young. It was the slow collapse of a human being whom everyone around him saw deteriorating, and no one stopped it. On May 10, 2009, exactly 46 days before his death, Conrad Murray recorded Jackson speaking in that state of deep sedation. The recording, which lasted several minutes, was analyzed by forensic experts during the trial.
The analysis confirmed that it had been done on Murrey’s iPhone. This is what you hear in it. Jackson says with the voice of someone struggling to articulate each syllable. When people leave my show, I want them to say, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life. B, I’ve never seen anything like this.
It’s amazing. He’s the greatest artist in the world.” Then there’s a pause, and he continues. ” I’m going to take that money. A million children. A children’s hospital. The biggest in the world. Michael Jackson’s Children’s Hospital. It’s going to have a movie theater, a playroom. The children are depressed.
In those hospitals, there’s no playroom, no movie theater. They’re sick because they’re depressed. Their minds depress them. I want to give them that. I care about those angels. God wants me to do it. I’m going to do it with Rad.” Murri responds with two words. “I know.” And Jackson says, “There isn’t enough hope left.
” No more hope. That’s the next generation that’s going to save our planet. Then he says something that prosecutors cited in their opening statements as one of the most revealing lines in the entire case. Jackson says, “He the world, we are the world. Will you be there?” The lost children? Those are the songs I wrote because I suffered. They know I suffered.
And after a long pause, he adds, I had no childhood. I had no childhood. I feel your pain, I feel your suffering, I can handle it. The recording ends with Jackson murmuring, “I’m asleep.” Those were his exact words, secretly recorded without his knowledge, and played out before the world two years after his death in a Los Angeles courtroom.
Prosecutor David Walgren presented this recording to establish one thing only: that Conrad Murray knew exactly what physical and mental state his patient was in 40 and 6 days before his death. I knew that Jackson was dependent on propofol. I knew that without him I couldn’t sleep. And instead of admitting Jackson to a hospital or referring him to an addiction specialist, Murrey ordered more, much more.
According to records from the medical supply company Sea Coast Medical Supply, between April 6, 2009, and the day of Jackson’s death on June 25, Murray ordered enough propofol to administer 1937 mg daily. The first shipment was 15,000 mg, the second was 45,000 mg. Murrey tried to have the supplies delivered to a residential address.
The company refused because that raised red flags. Murray then had them sent to his girlfriend’s apartment in Santa Monica. But the May 10 recording was not the only time the system failed Michael Jackson in those final months. On June 19, six days before his death, Jackson arrived at the rehearsal at the Forum in Inglewood, in a state that witnesses described at the trial as alarming.
Kenny Ortega, the tour director, stated that Jackson was trembling, had chills, and rambled. Jackson was sent home without rehearsing. That same night, Ortega wrote an email to Randy Philips, the CEO of AEG, describing Jackson’s condition and expressing his concern. Philips responded by arranging a meeting the next day at Jackson’s house .
At that meeting, according to testimonies, Murrey convinced everyone that Jackson was fine, that he simply needed rest, and that the tour could continue. Nobody called an outside doctor, nobody asked for a second opinion. The show literally had to go on. On June 21, according to court records, one of Jackson’s bodyguards called one of his doctors, Dr.
Cherilyn Lee, to tell her that Jackson wanted to see her. Lee could hear Jackson in the background giving instructions to the bodyguard. I was telling her to explain what she felt, that half of her body was hot and the other half was cold. Lee, who was in Florida, told the bodyguard that Jackson had to go to the hospital.
Jackson refused, telling Murrey that he couldn’t sleep and that if he didn’t sleep he would have to cancel the rehearsal. Murrey administered the propofol to him. That night Jackson slept. That night, too, no one saw him more than he needed to. On June 23, two days before his death, Michael Jackson stepped onto the stage of the Staples Center in Los Angeles for the last time.
He arrived around 5 pm, but didn’t start rehearsing until 9 pm. Before going on stage, he spoke with Ed Alonzo, the magician who had been hired for the opening segment of the show. Alonzo later stated that Jackson looked good and had great energy. Jackson joked that he had laryngitis, then went on stage and rehearsed for 90 minutes.
Vocal director Dorian Holly, who had worked with Jackson since 1987, said something in an interview that was forever etched in memory. You would have thought that the world had hit him hard and that you could understand why he was afraid. But I didn’t have any of that. It was shining. You could see that I was finally seeing everything fall into place.
That night Jackson sang They don’t care about us with eight backup dancers with a precision that no one who saw it could forget. That was his last performance recorded on video. That was the last time the king of pop graced a stage. The next day, June 24, Jackson arrived at the Staple Center for the last time.
He did n’t go to rehearse, he went to a meeting with the production team to finalize the visual elements of the show. There was also a meeting with television producer Ken Erlich. and Randy Philips of CBS to plan a Halloween special scheduled for October 31, 2019, which was to focus on the 1997 music video Ghosts with Jackson as host and performer.
After the meetings, he returned to his home on Carolwood Drive. Kai Chase, their chef, who had arrived as usual to prepare breakfast, later described what he saw upon arriving that day: Dr. Murray coming down the stairs from Jackson’s room, carrying oxygen tanks. That was normal. That was what happened every morning.
Oxygen and propofol were part of the routine. On June 25, 2009, Kai Chase arrived home as usual. He waited for Dr. Murrey to come downstairs. Murrey did not come down . At 1:30 p.m., security guards told Chase and the rest of the staff to leave the property because Mr. Jackson was being taken to the hospital. Chase stated in an interview with The Guardian. I thought maybe Mr.
Jackson was sleeping in. At 2:26 p.m. Pacific Time, Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLI’s Ronald Rean Medical Center. He was 50 years old and weighed 62 kg. The coroner’s report revealed that despite everything, his heart was strong. His main organs were normal. There was no significant atherosclerosis.
He was physically a man who could have lived decades longer. What killed him was neither time nor disease. What killed him was a surgical anesthetic administered by a doctor who had no training in anesthesiology. In a room without monitoring equipment, without a resuscitation cart nearby, and with no one who could intervene when Jackson stopped breathing.
Murray was found guilty of manslaughter on November 7, 2011. He was sentenced to 4 years in prison. He turned less than two. He was released in 2013 for good behavior. Today he has a medical clinic in Trinidad and Tobago. In 2016 he published a memoir titled This is It, in which he describes his experiences with Jackson and refers to himself as a victim of the system.
The Daily Telegraph’s review described the book as text, sunk in thousands of words of self-indulgent, poorly punctuated, and repetitive writing. But the question that cannot be answered with a guilty verdict is more difficult than the one that was resolved in that court. The question is this. How did Michael Jackson reach the point where he needed a surgical anesthetic to sleep? The answer is not in any doctor, it is in the accumulation of 30 years of a life that was never designed for a human being.
Years of trials that began when I was 5 years old. years of tours that lasted for months without a break. A trial that lasted 50 months and that, although it ended in acquittal, left him with his reputation in pieces and his self- confidence shattered. An industry that turned it into a revenue-generating machine, and when the machine started to fail, it sought to repair it instead of stopping it.
AEG Life knew that Murrey was treating Jackson. Murray told the tour’s insurers that Jackson was in perfect condition. Manager Frank Di Leo left a voicemail on Murrey’s phone on June 20 telling him that Jackson had had an episode and needed to have blood tests done urgently. Murray never called him back. The video of the June 23 rehearsals, which was filmed without the intention of being seen by anyone outside the production team and which later became the documentary This Is, distributed by Sony Pictures, shows Michael Jackson
on the Staple Center stage, giving everything he had left. It shows a 50-year-old man who, after 12 years of silence, could still move his body in ways that no 30-year-old dancer could replicate, who could still fill a stadium with his mere presence, who still had the voice, the grace, the magnetism he had built up over four decades of work.
The documentary grossed over $260 million worldwide. The cinema ticket cost the same as any normal movie, and the man who appeared on the screen had been dead for 4 months. The secret recording from May 10 and the videos of the June 2009 rehearsals are together. The most complete portrait that exists of what Michael Jackson was like in his last weeks of life.
Not the Michael Jackson of the tabloids. Not the Michael Jackson of accusations or passionate defenses from his fans. The real Michael Jackson, a man who dreamed of building a children’s hospital, who spoke of his lost childhood with the slurred voice of someone who could no longer stay awake, and who at the same time went on stage two nights later.
And he executed every step, every note, every gesture with the perfection that only decades of total dedication can provide. That contradiction, that brutal distance between what he was capable of doing on stage and what they were doing to him while he slept. It is perhaps the most difficult thing to look at in this whole story, because it means that in his last weeks of life, Michael Jackson was two people at the same time, the greatest artist of his generation and a patient that nobody was really protecting.
And the question that remains suspended in the air after all the verdicts and all the documentaries and all the books is just one . How many people saw what happened on June 25th coming and decided that the show was more important than the man? M.
Michael Jackson grabó un video 28 días antes de su muerte, y recién ahora está siendo revelado
On May 10, 2009, Conrad Murray took his iPhone and secretly recorded Michael Jackson while he was under the effects of the anesthesia that the doctor administered to him every night so that he could sleep. In that recording, Jackson is 50 years old, his voice is slurred, he speaks incoherently, and yet he speaks.
He talks about his children, he talks about the world’s largest hospital that he wants to build with the money from his tour. He speaks of the pain he carried throughout his life and says, “With the voice of someone who is no longer fully awake, that God put him on earth to do one thing.” That recording was found on Murray’s phone.
It was presented as evidence in the involuntary manslaughter trial and for almost 2 years nobody in the world heard it. When it was finally played in the Los Angeles courtroom in October 2011, Jackson’s brothers, who were sitting in the stands, covered their mouths with their hands, because what they heard was not the voice of the King of Pop.
It was the voice of a man who was being silently destroyed, yet still dreaming. But what exactly did he say? And why did nobody do anything when there was still time to save him? To understand what that video and recording reveal, one must first understand what stage of life Michael Jackson was at in the months leading up to his death. It was the year 209.
Jackson had not done a full world tour for 12 years. His last major concert series had been the High Story World Tour, which ended in 1997. In between, there had been two sexual abuse lawsuits, a trial that lasted almost 5 months, the destruction of his reputation in the media around the world, the loss of his Neverland home and a debt that, according to financial records of the time, exceeded 500 million dollars.
He was a man who had spent a whole decade in the eye of the most brutal storm a famous human being can face and who had survived it all with three children to raise and with the conviction that his return to the stage was going to prove something to the world, something no court sentence could prove, that he was the greatest artist who had ever lived and that he still had something to say.
On March 5, 2009, Jackson appeared at a press conference at the O2 Arena in London. 7000 fans and 350 journalists were waiting for him. When he entered the building, something about him had changed. This was not the Michael Jackson the world remembered with the sequined suit and wide-brimmed hat. He was a thin, almost frail man.
with ivory-colored skin and the eyes of someone who has n’t slept well in too long. But when he spoke, he spoke with a clarity that no one expected. I just want to say that these will be my last performances in London. When I say that’s it, I really mean that’s it. He then added that it was his final performance.
The words were interpreted in many ways. No one knew then that he was being literal in a way none of them could have imagined. The trials began in April 2009 at the Center Staging studios in Burbank, California. Six days a week. The production was monumental. Randy Philips, the CEO of AEG Life, the concert promoter, had announced that 13 million pounds would be spent on the production of the shows, 18 songs, 22 different stages, three-dimensional segments filmed especially for the tour, including a new thriller version
set in a haunted house with the voice of Vincent Price. Aerial routines in the style of Sir du Soley. Jackson had hired former bodybuilder Luigno to train him physically. He had hired Kai Chase as his personal chef to prepare healthy meals that would keep him in shape for the shows. The machinery of what could have been the biggest comeback in the history of popular music was in motion.
And at the center of that machinery, Michael Jackson slept every night with an IV in his arm, administering Propofol, a surgical anesthetic, because it was the only way he could lose consciousness. This is where the story changes in nature because what happened between March 5, 1929, when Jackson announced the tour, and June 25, 1929, when he was found dead in his home on Carol Wood Drive in the Holby Hills neighborhood.
It wasn’t simply the tragedy of a man who died too young. It was the slow collapse of a human being whom everyone around him saw deteriorating, and no one stopped it. On May 10, 2009, exactly 46 days before his death, Conrad Murray recorded Jackson speaking in that state of deep sedation. The recording, which lasted several minutes, was analyzed by forensic experts during the trial.
The analysis confirmed that it had been done on Murrey’s iPhone. This is what you hear in it. Jackson says with the voice of someone struggling to articulate each syllable. When people leave my show, I want them to say, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life. B, I’ve never seen anything like this.
It’s amazing. He’s the greatest artist in the world.” Then there’s a pause, and he continues. ” I’m going to take that money. A million children. A children’s hospital. The biggest in the world. Michael Jackson’s Children’s Hospital. It’s going to have a movie theater, a playroom. The children are depressed.
In those hospitals, there’s no playroom, no movie theater. They’re sick because they’re depressed. Their minds depress them. I want to give them that. I care about those angels. God wants me to do it. I’m going to do it with Rad.” Murri responds with two words. “I know.” And Jackson says, “There isn’t enough hope left.
” No more hope. That’s the next generation that’s going to save our planet. Then he says something that prosecutors cited in their opening statements as one of the most revealing lines in the entire case. Jackson says, “He the world, we are the world. Will you be there?” The lost children? Those are the songs I wrote because I suffered. They know I suffered.
And after a long pause, he adds, I had no childhood. I had no childhood. I feel your pain, I feel your suffering, I can handle it. The recording ends with Jackson murmuring, “I’m asleep.” Those were his exact words, secretly recorded without his knowledge, and played out before the world two years after his death in a Los Angeles courtroom.
Prosecutor David Walgren presented this recording to establish one thing only: that Conrad Murray knew exactly what physical and mental state his patient was in 40 and 6 days before his death. I knew that Jackson was dependent on propofol. I knew that without him I couldn’t sleep. And instead of admitting Jackson to a hospital or referring him to an addiction specialist, Murrey ordered more, much more.
According to records from the medical supply company Sea Coast Medical Supply, between April 6, 2009, and the day of Jackson’s death on June 25, Murray ordered enough propofol to administer 1937 mg daily. The first shipment was 15,000 mg, the second was 45,000 mg. Murrey tried to have the supplies delivered to a residential address.
The company refused because that raised red flags. Murray then had them sent to his girlfriend’s apartment in Santa Monica. But the May 10 recording was not the only time the system failed Michael Jackson in those final months. On June 19, six days before his death, Jackson arrived at the rehearsal at the Forum in Inglewood, in a state that witnesses described at the trial as alarming.
Kenny Ortega, the tour director, stated that Jackson was trembling, had chills, and rambled. Jackson was sent home without rehearsing. That same night, Ortega wrote an email to Randy Philips, the CEO of AEG, describing Jackson’s condition and expressing his concern. Philips responded by arranging a meeting the next day at Jackson’s house .
At that meeting, according to testimonies, Murrey convinced everyone that Jackson was fine, that he simply needed rest, and that the tour could continue. Nobody called an outside doctor, nobody asked for a second opinion. The show literally had to go on. On June 21, according to court records, one of Jackson’s bodyguards called one of his doctors, Dr.
Cherilyn Lee, to tell her that Jackson wanted to see her. Lee could hear Jackson in the background giving instructions to the bodyguard. I was telling her to explain what she felt, that half of her body was hot and the other half was cold. Lee, who was in Florida, told the bodyguard that Jackson had to go to the hospital.
Jackson refused, telling Murrey that he couldn’t sleep and that if he didn’t sleep he would have to cancel the rehearsal. Murrey administered the propofol to him. That night Jackson slept. That night, too, no one saw him more than he needed to. On June 23, two days before his death, Michael Jackson stepped onto the stage of the Staples Center in Los Angeles for the last time.
He arrived around 5 pm, but didn’t start rehearsing until 9 pm. Before going on stage, he spoke with Ed Alonzo, the magician who had been hired for the opening segment of the show. Alonzo later stated that Jackson looked good and had great energy. Jackson joked that he had laryngitis, then went on stage and rehearsed for 90 minutes.
Vocal director Dorian Holly, who had worked with Jackson since 1987, said something in an interview that was forever etched in memory. You would have thought that the world had hit him hard and that you could understand why he was afraid. But I didn’t have any of that. It was shining. You could see that I was finally seeing everything fall into place.
That night Jackson sang They don’t care about us with eight backup dancers with a precision that no one who saw it could forget. That was his last performance recorded on video. That was the last time the king of pop graced a stage. The next day, June 24, Jackson arrived at the Staple Center for the last time.
He did n’t go to rehearse, he went to a meeting with the production team to finalize the visual elements of the show. There was also a meeting with television producer Ken Erlich. and Randy Philips of CBS to plan a Halloween special scheduled for October 31, 2019, which was to focus on the 1997 music video Ghosts with Jackson as host and performer.
After the meetings, he returned to his home on Carolwood Drive. Kai Chase, their chef, who had arrived as usual to prepare breakfast, later described what he saw upon arriving that day: Dr. Murray coming down the stairs from Jackson’s room, carrying oxygen tanks. That was normal. That was what happened every morning.
Oxygen and propofol were part of the routine. On June 25, 2009, Kai Chase arrived home as usual. He waited for Dr. Murrey to come downstairs. Murrey did not come down . At 1:30 p.m., security guards told Chase and the rest of the staff to leave the property because Mr. Jackson was being taken to the hospital. Chase stated in an interview with The Guardian. I thought maybe Mr.
Jackson was sleeping in. At 2:26 p.m. Pacific Time, Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLI’s Ronald Rean Medical Center. He was 50 years old and weighed 62 kg. The coroner’s report revealed that despite everything, his heart was strong. His main organs were normal. There was no significant atherosclerosis.
He was physically a man who could have lived decades longer. What killed him was neither time nor disease. What killed him was a surgical anesthetic administered by a doctor who had no training in anesthesiology. In a room without monitoring equipment, without a resuscitation cart nearby, and with no one who could intervene when Jackson stopped breathing.
Murray was found guilty of manslaughter on November 7, 2011. He was sentenced to 4 years in prison. He turned less than two. He was released in 2013 for good behavior. Today he has a medical clinic in Trinidad and Tobago. In 2016 he published a memoir titled This is It, in which he describes his experiences with Jackson and refers to himself as a victim of the system.
The Daily Telegraph’s review described the book as text, sunk in thousands of words of self-indulgent, poorly punctuated, and repetitive writing. But the question that cannot be answered with a guilty verdict is more difficult than the one that was resolved in that court. The question is this. How did Michael Jackson reach the point where he needed a surgical anesthetic to sleep? The answer is not in any doctor, it is in the accumulation of 30 years of a life that was never designed for a human being.
Years of trials that began when I was 5 years old. years of tours that lasted for months without a break. A trial that lasted 50 months and that, although it ended in acquittal, left him with his reputation in pieces and his self- confidence shattered. An industry that turned it into a revenue-generating machine, and when the machine started to fail, it sought to repair it instead of stopping it.
AEG Life knew that Murrey was treating Jackson. Murray told the tour’s insurers that Jackson was in perfect condition. Manager Frank Di Leo left a voicemail on Murrey’s phone on June 20 telling him that Jackson had had an episode and needed to have blood tests done urgently. Murray never called him back. The video of the June 23 rehearsals, which was filmed without the intention of being seen by anyone outside the production team and which later became the documentary This Is, distributed by Sony Pictures, shows Michael Jackson
on the Staple Center stage, giving everything he had left. It shows a 50-year-old man who, after 12 years of silence, could still move his body in ways that no 30-year-old dancer could replicate, who could still fill a stadium with his mere presence, who still had the voice, the grace, the magnetism he had built up over four decades of work.
The documentary grossed over $260 million worldwide. The cinema ticket cost the same as any normal movie, and the man who appeared on the screen had been dead for 4 months. The secret recording from May 10 and the videos of the June 2009 rehearsals are together. The most complete portrait that exists of what Michael Jackson was like in his last weeks of life.
Not the Michael Jackson of the tabloids. Not the Michael Jackson of accusations or passionate defenses from his fans. The real Michael Jackson, a man who dreamed of building a children’s hospital, who spoke of his lost childhood with the slurred voice of someone who could no longer stay awake, and who at the same time went on stage two nights later.
And he executed every step, every note, every gesture with the perfection that only decades of total dedication can provide. That contradiction, that brutal distance between what he was capable of doing on stage and what they were doing to him while he slept. It is perhaps the most difficult thing to look at in this whole story, because it means that in his last weeks of life, Michael Jackson was two people at the same time, the greatest artist of his generation and a patient that nobody was really protecting.
And the question that remains suspended in the air after all the verdicts and all the documentaries and all the books is just one . How many people saw what happened on June 25th coming and decided that the show was more important than the man? M.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
