New Michael Jackson Book Reveals a Secret Romance: ‘He Loved the Ladies’

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Shana Mangatal idolized Michael Jackson as a teenager. But as an adult, she says she had something only fans of MJ could only dream of: a romance and, even more so, a friendship with him.

Mangatal, now 46, has written a book, Michael and Me: The Untold Story of Michael Jackson’s Secret Romance, about her time with the late artist. Thanks to the detailed diaries she began keeping years before she met him, Mangatal recalls her experiences with Jackson over two decades, from the first time she attended one of his concerts in 1988 to the years when she worked as part of his management team. During that time, Jackson would regularly breeze through the door of her office, and she worked alongside him as an extra on two of his short films. Mangatal recalls that the two shared phone calls, her first kiss (at 26!) and several steamy nights in the summer of 1996.

The author says that when she read through her old diaries over the last couple of years, she was glad her younger self had kept them.

“After he passed away, it was really difficult for me to look at his pictures, watch his music videos or even listen to his music, so I definitely couldn’t read those diaries, until about, I’d say, a year or two ago, when I finally got the strength to do it,” Mangatal says about the years following Jackson’s untimely death at the age of 50 from “acute propofol intoxication”in 2009. “As I was reading the diaries, I was, like, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much good stuff in here.’ [I thought] if the public knew these things, maybe they would think a little bit differently about Michael and have a different perspective on him.”

Read on for some nuggets from the book.

His vibe was the opposite of asexual

“Anyone that I talk to, most of them believe that he was asexual, and I tell them no,” Mangatal says. “All you have to do is spend five minutes with him, and you know instantly that he was not asexual. He was quite the opposite, because he was extremely flirtatious — he was always flirting with me, at least. He could flip any conversation into something flirty. From the very first day that I met him [as a fan] at the afterparty for his concert in New York, he was flirting with me — from the very moment I met him. That told me a lot. And from then on, I knew that there was more to him than meets the eye, because it was clear that he loved the ladies. And he couldn’t hide it. Even if he tried to be child-like and innocent, he had that manly, macho thing in him that made him the flirtatious, sexy guy in real life.”

However, she notes, he showed a very different side when he was around children. Because of the sweet behavior she witnessed, she never questioned her friend’s innocence after allegations of child molestation were brought against him.

“When you were with Michael, and you saw him with kids, you saw the relationship, and it was just so pure and innocent,” she says. “It was really a wonderful thing to see, because… he became like a kid when he was with them. He was like a peer to them. So it was never like he was this adult preying on the children. He was literally one of them. He loved playing what they loved to do, which was play video games, watch cartoons, talk about girls even.”

He carefully chose his nickname, the King of Pop

As an artist, Jackson was skilled at branding himself. For example, he was the one who came up with his nickname, the King of Pop, and insisted that others refer to him that way at awards shows or on MTV for a very specific reason.