Janet Jackson reveals she’s related to Samuel L. Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Tracy Chapman
Janet Jackson has other famous relatives that the world didn’t know about — until now.
The “Together Again” singer, 58, revealed that she’s related to Samuel L. Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Tracy Chapman during an interview with Scott Mills on the BBC “Radio 2 Breakfast Show.”
In a clip from the interview shared on X Tuesday, Mills, 51, asked Janet, “Now someone told me this earlier, are you related to Stevie?”
“He’s our cousin,” Janet nonchalantly replied.
“Not a lot of people know that,” she added. “He’s our cousin on my mother’s side. So is Tracy Chapman.”
A shocked Mills asked Janet if they could “go through” her family tree, prompting the Grammy Award winner to reveal that Samuel, 75, is also her cousin.
“So Stevie is what to you?” Mills asked.
Janet reiterated that Wonder, 74, and Chapman, 60, are her cousins.
When asked again about her relation to Samuel, Janet said, “He would be my cousin too, I mean he’s not my brother.”
Janet is the youngest sibling of the famous Jackson family.
She’s the sister of Rebbie Jackson, 74, Jackie Jackson, 73, Tito Jackson, 70, Jermaine Jackson, 69, La Toya Jackson, 68, Marlon Jackson, 67, Michael Jackson (who died in 2009) and Randy Jackson, 62. She had another brother, Brandon Jackson, who died after birth in 1957.
Janet talked about her family dynamic, including her parents Joe and Katherine Jackson’s parenting techniques, in her 2022 Lifetime documentary.
“My parents disciplined all of us and that’s how, we as a people, raised our kids,” said Janet, who shares 7-year-old son Eissa Al Mana with her ex-husband, Wissam Al Mana.
“But you turn around and you give them love to show them, ‘I love you. I’m here for you,’ ” she continued. “Discipline without love is tyranny. And tyrants they were not. They just loved us and wanted us to be the best that we could be. Obviously, it worked.”
She also talked about her decision to break away from her father, who was also her manager, after her 1982 debut studio album flopped.
“I knew that I had to take control of my life. I wanted my own identity. I wanted to go on my own,” she explained in the doc.
“At that time, my father was in charge of my life, my career and he was my manager. There were things I wanted to do, a direction that I wanted to go in, that I — like I said, it’s hard to say no to my father,” the “Control” singer added. “So in order to do things the way I wanted to do, … I guess he would have to be out of the picture.”
The Jackson family patriarch was previously accused of beating his children and molesting daughters La Toya and Rebbie in La Toya’s 1991 memoir.
“When your father gets out of bed with your mother and gets into bed with his daughter and you hear the mother saying, ‘No, Joe, not tonight. Let her rest. Leave her alone, she’s tired,’ that makes you crazy,” La Toya wrote.
Joe died in June 2018 at age 89. He was suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer.
