Janet Jackson claims she was ‘blocked’ from seeing brother Michael during Scream video shoot

JANET Jackson has claimed that she was “blocked” from seeing brother Michael during the Scream video shoot.

The Rhythm Nation singer, 55, collaborated with The King of Pop in 1995 for their only duet together, where they attacked the coverage of the allegations against him.

However, Janet said that Michael’s record company kept them apart when they filmed the music video for their smash hit – believing that they “didn’t want her on set”.

She makes the revelation in a shocking self-titled four-parter due to air on Sky Documen­taries and Now TV today.

She said that being separated during the production was “tough” with Michael’s team making it hard for her to even see him.

Filming of the music video overran and costs spiralled to $7million. Of the shoot, she said: “It was his song and I was there to support him.

“Michael shot nights. I shot days. His record company would block off his set so that I couldn’t see what was going on,” Janet said.

She continued: “They didn’t want me on set.

“I felt like they were trying to make it very competitive between the two of us.” 

She recalled how her relationship with the late star was strained after he reached international stardom and explained that the incident only pushed them further apart.

“That really hurt me because I felt I was there fighting the fight with him, not to battle him,” Janet added.

“I wanted it to feel like old times between he and I, and it didn’t. Old times had long passed.”

In the same documentary, Janet said that her superstar brother Michael fat-shamed her as a youngster, leaving her with painful body image issues.

She said: “There were times when Mike used to tease me and call me names . . . ‘Pig, horse, slaughter hog, cow’.

“He would laugh about it and I’d laugh too, but then there was some­where down inside that it would hurt.

“When you have somebody say you’re too heavy, it affects you.”

The docu­mentary series, which she has spent five years making, reveals how she has struggled with her weight since the age of ten, when she won the role of abandoned girl Penny on the US sitcom Good Times.

Janet explained: “I’m an emotional eater, so when I get stressed or something is really bothering me, it comforts me.

“I did Good Times and that’s the beginning of having weight issues and the way I looked at myself.

“I was developing at a very young age and I started getting a chest and they would bind it so I would look more flat-chested.”

Asked if it would be different if she wasn’t in the public eye, she adds: “I probably would have wound up not having a problem.”

Despite the seven-year age gap between her and older brother Michael and his comments about her, the pair had been very close as children.

But she admits she and Michael, who died in 2009 aged 50, drifted apart as they grew older.

A few years later her family tried to stage an intervention in his life at his Las Vegas home — but he refused to listen.

Recalling the conversation with him, alongside his brothers from The Jackson 5, she says: “I said, ‘We wanted to talk about you guys going on tour again and if you guys would do that as brothers. I would be honoured to open for you’.

“He didn’t have much to say, he was standoffish. I was really upset.

“My family chartered a private jet and they came for an intervention. It was a way of us getting close again and he wasn’t having it.”

But she admits they had started to grow apart years earlier, when Michael released his groundbreaking best-selling album, Thriller, in 1982.

Janet, who was then beginning her own lucrative music career, explains: “It was Thriller, that’s when it all started to change.

“I remember really loving the Thriller album but for the first time in my life I felt it was different between us, a shift was happening.

“That’s the time Mike and I started going our separate ways. He just wasn’t as fun as he used to be.”

She went on to have a string of hugely successful albums and 17 Top Ten singles in the UK alone, including All For You and What Have You Done For Me Lately.

Janet Jackson airs tonight in the UK at 9pm on Sky Documentaries, or available to stream on NOW