Debbie Rowe

About

Deborah Jeanne Rowe, born December 6, 1958, in Spokane, Washington, is an American woman best known as the second wife of pop musician Michael Jackson, with whom she had two children. Her parents were Barbara Chilcutt and Gordon Rowe, who divorced a few weeks before her second birthday, and she was raised by her mother alongside several aunts and her maternal grandmother.

Rowe married Richard Edelman in 1982 and converted to Judaism at the time; the couple divorced six years later. She later met Michael Jackson while working as an assistant in dermatologist Arnold Klein’s office, where Jackson was being treated for vitiligo.

According to Rowe, after Jackson’s 1996 divorce from Lisa Marie Presley, he expressed distress at the possibility he might never become a father, prompting Rowe, a longtime fan of his, to offer to bear his children. In a Playboy interview, Lisa Marie Presley later said that during her marriage to Jackson, he was aware Rowe wanted to have his children and that Rowe had “a crush on him.”

Rowe experienced a miscarriage in 1996 that she described as devastating, and Jackson reportedly offered her comfort and support during that difficult period, a moment that became part of the broader account of their relationship leading up to the birth of their children.