- LOS ANGELES (Reuters) --
Pop star Michael Jackson, facing a trial on child molestation charges,
is about to become a father to four more children -- quadruplets -- by
way of a surrogate mother, Us Weekly magazine reported on Tuesday.
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- Citing unnamed sources close to the self-proclaimed "King
of Pop," the magazine said Jackson recently spent time with the pregnant
mother-to-be in Florida, where he stayed in a $4,000-a-night luxury hotel
suite in Miami Beach.
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- The magazine said Jackson's spokeswoman Raymone Bain
declined to confirm or deny the story, saying, "We do not respond
to these kinds of stories."
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- Bain could not be immediately reached for comment by
Reuters.
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- Jackson, 45, already has three children -- Prince Michael
I and daughter Paris Michael by his former wife, Debbie Rowe, and Prince
Michael II, the child he notoriously dangled from the balcony of a Berlin
hotel in November 2002.
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- Jackson later revealed in a television documentary that
Prince Michael II had been born to a woman who was essentially a stranger
to him. "I used a surrogate mother and my own sperm cells," he
told British interviewer Martin Bashir. "She doesn't know me."
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- It was in that same interview that Jackson ignited a
public furor by saying he saw nothing wrong with having other children
spend the night with him in the bedroom of his Neverland ranch home in
California.
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- One youth who appeared in that documentary is now at
the center of the child molestation case pending against the performer.
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- Jackson is charged in a 10-count indictment with committing
lewd acts on a boy under the age of 14, as well as child abduction, extortion
and false imprisonment. He has pleaded innocent, and a trial is set for
Sept. 13.
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