Jacko’s ex father-in-law keeps mum in Cyprus

MICHAEL Jackson’s former father in law was keeping a low profile at his home in Cyprus this week in the wake of child molestation charges faced by the self-proclaimed king of pop.

Retired pilot Gordon Rowe, father of Jackson’s ex-wife Debbie, has been living on the island for the past 25 years.

“No comment,” was his response to a phone call to his home in Limassol regarding the case and media reports suggesting Debbie Rowe could turn prosecution witness against Jackson.

Rowe and Jackson married in 1996 and separated in 1999. Two children from the marriage, Paris and Prince Michael, remained with Jackson.

Details of the child custody arrangements were never made public but reports emerged last year that Rowe was seeking custody of both children.

Jackson is charged with molesting a young boy at his Neverland Valley Ranch and conspiring to commit extortion, child abduction and false imprisonment. He has pleaded innocent to the charges and has vowed to be acquitted and vindicated at the trial.

Gordon Rowe, a former freight pilot now in his mid-seventies, has been dodging the media with relative success for a number of years, although he once let it slip that Willie
Nelson was more to his preference.

Catapulted into the spotlight after relative obscurity for years, one resident of the hamlet of Ayios Tychonas said Rowe and his wife packed up and left because of being hassled by the press.

“He never let them in. They would just stand outside and shout questions over the fence and never get an answer,” one resident of the village said.

Rowe sold his two-storey country house two years ago and moved into a modest apartment building in a working class neighbourhood of Limassol. A small sticker displayed his name at the entrance of the seven-storey building whose doors are kept
shut.

Debbie had visited her father at Ayios Tychonas, whose streets are too narrow to manoeuvre a car, let alone a fleet of luxury limousines.

“We heard Jackson was going to visit once, but he never came,” a former Rowe neighbour said.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.