Impressions of ARNOLD KLEIN’s interview with Harvey Levin of TMZ, Nov. 5, 2009

I am finally posting the transcript of Arnold Klein’s conversation with Harvey Levin on TMZ Live on November 5, 2009. The huge job of transcribing was done by reader BG whom I am very thankful to – without the transcript I would have been totally unable to understand what Arnold Klein is speaking about.

And I was curious to know it. Though Dr. Klein is considered a pariah in Michael Jackson’s community my perception of him is somewhat different and for some strange reason I feel it a duty to write about him.

Why Klein and why the need to talk about him at all?

Because he was one of the closest people to Michael and was with him in the last crucial days of his life. Also because Klein regarded Michael as his friend and tried to be helpful to him in the way he thought it best. And because the reason why Klein repeatedly gets involved in everything concerning Michael is his lack of indifference to the man and his fate.

Why else?

Because Klein’s emotions and talkativeness are both the worst and best Klein’s features. Because the things he often does are outrageous but the motivation for his actions is mostly good. And because Michael probably shared with him his thoughts and feelings, and if we manage to separate them from the torrent of Klein’s ramblings his memories of  Michael may be priceless.

There are also a couple of things I respect Dr. Klein for. One of them is that he never shifted the blame for Demerol onto Michael’s shoulders and always said it was solely the drug of his (Klein’s) choice.

The second thing I thank him for is his disclosure of the extremely painful procedures Michael had to go through as a result of the “balloon skin stretching” of his scalp. This made me realize the extent of physical pain Michael was going through for weeks or months after the burn and showed how the Demerol nightmare started.  Since this was also the time when the immense physical pain was coupled with the unjust and horrible 1993 accusations this helped me to imagine the hell Michael was going through and why he had to go to a rehab as a result.

Dr. Klein often exasperates me, but despite all that I feel a certain attachment to him. He is sincere, trusting and emotional. His main problem is that he does not often understand what he is saying and doing. He likes talking, speculating, fantasizing, sharing information, recalling, reflecting on this and that – and in the process does not unfortunately see that the conversation he is so thoroughly enjoying is taken advantage of by the very people whose company he is enjoying so much. He gets carried away and does not realize that he is being used.

In short I sympathize with him though he annoys me very much indeed. His own lifestyle and sexual preferences, impulsiveness and trusting the wrong people often misguide him and make him an easy target for fraudsters, beguiling media and the critical public. He often means well, but his good intentions take him to so many extremes that you often find yourself wishing he had better kept silent instead.

And his interview with Harvey Levin is a good illustration of all that.

Harvey Levin speaks to ARNOLD KLEIN

TMZ Live – November 5, 2009

Levin         Okay, so, welcome to TMZ Live, and we talked about this a couple of days ago and we said that Dr Arnold Klein had agreed to come to TMZ Live and talk to us about all things Michael Jackson, and at the very last minute we got word that Dr Klein was not going to show. He called me yesterday and said, “I am going to do this” and, sure enough, he was a man of his word and he came here agreeing to talk about a lot of things involving Michael Jackson.

We’re going to be talking about Michael Jackson and his drug history, we’re going to be talking about the doctors who treated him, including Dr Klein, we’re going to be talking about propofol, Michael Jackson’s family, how he got along with the family, the 1993 molestation case in particular, something that we published the other day that got a lot of…captured a lot of interest, we’re going to be talking about the police investigation, a lot of things involving Michael Jackson.

Dr Klein, first of all, thank you.

Klein          Well, thank you, and I just want to say I’m sorry I didn’t show up but a lot of people got in my way. You know, I do have lawyers who do think that I’m certainly crazy to do this but I think it’s important to get out to the public the truth. I mean, I think you can fight everything by being honorable.

I mean, you were very interesting to me, you compared everything to “Rashomon” and “Rashomon”, to people who don’t know it, is a Japanese movie by Kurosawa, which is about people all seeing the same event from a different perspective, whether the tree chopper or.. and it’s starring Toshiro Mifune. It’s a very great movie. I think that’s not what this is. This is really about the difference between good and bad because I think what we have here is a lot of bad medicine. We have some good medicine but I think we have a whole bunch of bad medicine. I think we have some good behaviours and I think we have some disastrously horrible behaviour, and I think that the running thing that we’re going to talk about today is there’s a lot of greedy people out there, a lot of people who didn’t care whether Michael lived or died as long as they made money off of him, and I think that was the biggest thing that this whole story’s about, that we’ve seen the loss of integrity in many fields, and I see that in entertainment, especially in this area. I’m very worried how greedy the people were because I think that’s what ran this whole situation.

Levin         Okay. Let’s start with the patient. Was Michael Jackson a drug addict?

Klein          I think yes, Michael Jackson, at periods in his life, was addicted to drugs. Now once someone’s addicted, according to Bill Wilson, who founded AA, who I knew, because remember, I wrote the book on heroin addiction in England, that you’re a drug addict but you’re not always addicted to drugs.

Now let’s say, for example, you’re a drug addict and you’re going to have your appendix out, okay? Do you think you should go and they should give you a silver bullet and you have your appendix removed? No, I think you need anesthesia at times when you’re having procedures done, but I think you have to be very cautious about what medication you give and I don’t think you give people recreational medication or over-medicate people. So I think that there are such people who become drug dependent. I don’t think there’s any question that Michael was a drug addict. I made two personal interventions on him, remember that. I got him off the drugs twice in my lifetime, so there was an ongoing problem with him in the use of drugs. Now, when you’re rich and you’re famous inAmerica, you can get anything you want, and they’re selling drugs on the street corner here. You can buy Oxycontin. If we go down to east LA, you go to the playgrounds you can buy Oxycontin. So, I mean, I think there’s a whole host of drug addicts but I think that he was, yes, a drug addict. There’s no question.

Levin         There are…you know, you were his doctor for decades…

Klein          Yes, twenty, over twenty years. I think we met in 1984.

Levin         …and you saw that he was a drug addict during periods of his life yet you prescribed Demerol numerous times…

Klein          I never prescribed Demerol.

Levin         You administered.

Klein          I administered Demerol because you have to understand that the procedures I do are painful injections and I would give him…I would say I would take an hour-and-a-half to inject him and I would do somewhere around… oh, well over a hundred facial injections on him and unless I sedated him… He was very, believe it or not, needle-phobic when you got to needles on his face, and I mean, did you ever have injections in your face?

Levin         Not really.

Klein          Okay. It’s really a painful procedure, so, I mean, you had to stop him from squirming. You had to go to his eyes. The scalp injections were very, very painful, which I had to do because also I had to reduce a great deal of scarring on him. So what I used drugs for, it was not to give him drugs. I mean, I used drugs to relieve the pain when I did a procedure. So we have to make a big difference. If you’re having a surgical procedure, and these are really minor surgical procedures, with my length of time it takes for me to do it, it’s not minor, you have to use some amount of drug but when you look at how much I used, it’s not anything compared to the amount that some other doctors give. I didn’t give him bags of it to take home as some doctors do.

Levin

Dr. Klein’s records for Michael Jackson on April 27, 2009 (two injections of Demerol were made – 100 and 200mg)

But repeated dosage of Demerol over a period of time.

Klein          Yeah, but you have to take the total dose of Demerol that I used over the period of time I used it on him and it was not an immense dose because we went down finally…when I got him back from Las Vegas he was on a little higher dose and I twiddled him down to getting a very small, hardly therapeutic dose of Demerol over the period of time that I saw him because he’d developed some tolerance and I told him he couldn’t have it. Now I had no idea…

Levin         Why’d you tell him he couldn’t have it?

Klein          Because I think that what people do is build tolerance to drugs, you understand? That’s why heroin addicts require larger and larger amounts of heroin as time goes by and that’s how we lost people like Janis Joplin from speedballs, being large amounts of drug. So what I thought, what I kept telling him I wanted to do was reduce the amount of medication he required because he had developed tolerance because I knew…

Levin         Tolerance or an addiction?

Klein          Well, tolerance and addiction are two different things. Tolerance is from using massive amounts of drugs when he was there. Now when you take a heroin addict off of heroin or you take a patient off Oxycontin, you reduce the drug dosage. I don’t know if he was addicted because I never saw withdrawal symptoms whatsoever from narcotics, ever, and narcotics have set withdrawal symptoms. So if I would have saw addiction to narcotics, which is what I was using, he wasn’t addicted to narcotics.

Levin         My understanding of Demerol, correct me if I’m wrong here, is that it almost operates like a poison in the body, that over time it literally takes over the…

Klein          Okay, I reviewed forty-eight articles on this. If you give me that statement and I reviewed it, I would say, contrary to what you say it’s non-toxic because what it has in the body are active intermediates and these active intermediates are non-toxic to the body if they’re done in a sterile fashion. What they do is they stimulate the body and that’s the good thing about Demerol, is Demerol becomes a stimulant once you give it to them, so they don’t have the narcotizing effect. It’s not like Morphine or Dilaudid or those drugs, and that’s what I like about Demerol. And also it’s active in the body over forty-eight hours, it’s about forty-eight hours it remains in the body so it takes a long time for the body to metabolise it but in all forty-eight articles on Demerol addiction, which I read very specifically, there was not any article about toxicity. Now I’ve treated heroin addicts for a long period time in England, where they get sterile heroin to use. They’ve used sterile heroin for decades, they’ve never gotten sick from it. So if someone can show me a toxicity or toxication that’s present during the metabolism… It’s metabolized by the liver. Now you have cytocromes in your liver, which are little enzyme things that work overtime metabolizing things and those cytochromes are not toxified by the Demerol. It wasn’t in any of the forty-eight articles I read.

Levin         Okay. Did you ever administer propofol to Michael Jackson?

Klein          Never.

Levin         Did he ever ask you for propofol?

Klein          Yes. He called me one weekend and he asked me if I would administer propofol and I told him he was absolutely out of his mind.

Levin         Why did he say he wanted it?

Klein          Because he wanted to have propofol, he said he couldn’t sleep.

Levin         When was this?

Klein          This was about, I would say about four years ago. [2005]

Levin         Four years ago?

Klein          Yeah. Now I’ll tell you our biggest problem we had. I knew Michael had a problem with propofol.  But let’s go way back, okay? He was under the hands of a plastic surgeon. Can we talk about which plastic surgeon? Will you say his name?

Levin         This is no holds barred so you…

Klein          You say his name.

Levin         Well, there were…honestly?

Klein          Yeah. Who was the main one who gave him nose procedures in…

Levin         There were several doctors who gave him propofol, and tell me if I’m wrong here, Michael Jackson doctor-shopped for propofol.

Klein          Yeah, but which was the one who started doing all the nose jobs, all the plastic surgery. Can’t you use his name?

Levin         Your stage.

Klein          I’m asking you. You didn’t mention his name yesterday?

Levin         It’s your stage. You can say what you want.

Klein          Okay. According to Associated Press, Steve Hoefflin, when he operated on Michael Jackson, did close to…it doesn’t say there but he did close to twenty nose procedures. He put him under anaesthesia and according to the article in Associated Press, he would put the time of the clocks forward and wake him up and say he did a nose job. You understand? He was also accused of playing with the genitalia of patients and also he used so much anesthesia…

Levin         Well…

Klein          Let’s just go ahead with this.

Levin         But, I mean, look, here’s the thing about that..

Klein          No, we’re not done yet.

Levin         Well, but that’s, that’s nothing provable that’s been…

Klein          No, but I’m just saying…okay?

Levin         I know but I would rather not get into…

Klein          We’re not going to get into…

Levin         …blind accusations.

Klein          No, this is not an accusation. I’m just quoting an article, okay? In the article the doctors were frightened about the amount of anesthesia he used. That’s in the article.

Levin         And that’s the issue. Were you frightened about the propofol when he came to you four years ago and said, “I need propofol to sleep”?

Klein          I wouldn’t want to give him propofol because I knew that this very doctor had gone on tours with him.

Levin         But there…you had to know that there were other doctors who were giving him propofol.

Klein          At that point in time… Propofol is a very short-acting drug…

Levin         Right.

Klein          …and you can be on propofol and you would never know it. Now you remember the Frankie Lymon story – when he got off of heroin and he was with his final wife, who was a teacher, he suddenly died one day and she had no idea that he was doing heroin. Well, heroin’s not quite like propofol but propofol is very short-acting. I mean, if you got off propofol in the morning and you went to see a doctor three or four hours later, you’re not going to have any lingering effects of propofol.

Levin         But that’s my point – that if Michael Jackson said to you, “I need propofol to sleep”, that means he’d have to take a large amount of propofol in order to get a long period of sleep because it is such a short-acting drug. So when he said to you, “I need…”

Klein          It’s not a large amount. He had to be maintained on it over a long period of time.

Levin         Right. Well, that’s 50mg every 15 minutes, so….

Klein          Right. It’s according to body weight and also there’s a certain amount of enzymes again you induce in the body, which you need more of it. So I told him…he said, I had one bag of it and I should start. [2005] And I said I don’t know how to give propofol, I would not give it to him…

Levin         But wasn’t that an alarm that this guy is calling you up…?

Klein          Oh, absolutely. I told him that he was absolutely insane but what I’m telling you is, you cannot go and stay at house arrest with every single patient.

Levin         Right.

Klein          What I eventually did is got rid of the plastic surgeon who began. You don’t want to talk about all the propofol because he had a cease and desist against this plastic surgeon in 2003 because this plastic surgeon did a television show about Michael Jackson, and I bring up this plastic surgeon for many good reasons and I’ll explain to you, that he would not want anything to do with him. He issued a cease and desist order against Hoefflin because Hoefflin’s the one who’s gone down to the police…just remember that with me, and he’s told the police and the medical examiner that I taught Murray how to give propofol, which I never have given.

Levin         Did you know Murray?

Klein          No, I never met him. I didn’t know he existed.

Levin         Ever talk to him on the phone?

Klein          No. I only knew he existed from Michael telling me he’d met him in Las Vegas.

Levin         Met him through..

Klein          Through his father.

Levin         …Joe Jackson?

Klein          Yes. We both know that. Through his father.

Levin         And am I correct? That this was probably in October of 2008?

Klein          Somewhere around then. Yes.

Levin         And he was treating his kids?

Klein          Yeah, he primarily told me…he wanted to know, very strangely…he called me up and he said what I thought of Afro-American black doctors and I said I don’t really judge doctors by color, and he said, “What do you think? Are they good doctors”? I said anyone could be a good doctor. The great doctors are black doctors. I mean, orange doctors, yellow doctors, white doctors. I mean, it doesn’t matter the colour, it matters the quality of the doctor. Is he a good doctor? And he said, “He’s a cardiologist” he tells me. He was a heart doctor. I said, “Are you sure that he’s a good doctor?” He said, “Well, I think he’s a great doctor.” I said, “Fine, then he’s a good doctor” and that’s the last we ever discussed Dr Murray until I read his name in the newspaper when everyone knew about him.

Levin         So, you didn’t know that Murray was at his house nightly?

December 24, 2008

Klein          No, and the strange thing was we were over there Christmas Eve, because we went over there Christmas Eve and we celebrated Christmas Eve with Michael, and we saw no presence whatsoever of Murray. I mean, the people I used to see in the house, there were all these waiters, people who worked there. There was Grace, the nanny, who I saw at the house and I mean, I never saw his family. I  mean, in all the years I’ve known Michael I’ve never…I met Janet once and I’ve never seen a member of his family at the house and I’ve only ever heard him call a member of his family in my presence once, and don’t forget he’s lived at my house.

Levin         But you were such good friends with him, he lived at your house, he asked you four years ago for propofol – the subject of propofol never came up again in four years?

Klein          The only thing he knows from me is I told him the dangers of propofol because it was more than that because, you know, when I knew that he was having… There was one time when he was on tour and getting propofol, that I went on tour specifically myself. I stood guard over his room with my nurse and with two of my assistants, two bodyguards I brought with me, to make sure the doctor who was giving him propofol on that point of the tour, wouldn’t give it to him. Now I had heard that, and see this is where you got a little thing screwed up, but he was getting propofol in Germany. That’s the most recent tour. And that was being arranged…I’m not going to mention the doctor…by another doctor in Los Angeles, and I told the doctor, I mean I just thought this is totally insane, this doctor’s arranging a German doctor to give Michael propofol. I mean, this is like giving someone the drug they want.

See, every drug addict has a drug of choice. Do you know what I’m saying?

Levin         And he was, indeed, asking you for certain drugs?

Klein          Yeah.

Levin         Did he ever ask you for Demerol?

Klein          No.

Levin         He never said, “I want Demerol”?

Klein          No, because I wouldn’t give him what he wanted. You don’t give a person what they want.

Levin         There was a lot of talk that Michael…it was almost the cart before the horse…that Michael would come to you for procedures, not because he necessarily wanted the procedures but he wanted the drugs that would put him under.

Klein          No, because I did the procedures frequently with no anesthesia, I mean, no prior anesthesia, and if you wanted an amount…I mean, he could take all the Demerol I gave him at one time, it wouldn’t do that much because I just am so wary of anyone who’s a drug addict because you know, when you’re dealing with very high profile people…a large portion of my…Keith Ledger is not one person who’s isolated. How many people in this city are addicted to drugs?

Levin         A lot.

Klein          What number are addicted to drugs? So, I mean…yesterday a patient wanted Oxycontin from me. It was a patient with HIV positive, who I’d really rebuilt the whole area under his eyes and his cheeks, this is an actor, and he said he wanted Oxycontin. I said I don’t give Oxycontin, and he said he wanted something else, and I said I don’t give any of those drugs, I don’t carry triplicates, because you have to be very defensive around you. Now there are certainly doctors who give all these drugs. I don’t happen to be a drug doctor, only because I’ve seen the dangers, I’ve lived with heroin addicts and it’s not a pretty picture, and also, I don’t want this to happen to people. When Keith Ledger died, he had everything, including the kitchen sink in it and when the family members say they found black tar heroin at the house…this is what’s strange, who the heck, other than someone who used drugs, understands what black tar heroin is. It’s not something we casually talk about.

Levin         By the way it was not black tar heroin.

Klein          It was marijuana that was in a bag. But I don’t think, I mean, Michael was not a person like that. I mean, Michael was a person who usually…you know what, was really dependent, more or less, on prescription drugs. But I think he was much more than just a drug addict. I think if we just sit here and we talk about the drugs, it’s a terrible thing. I think the horror of this whole thing is that AEG hired Murray, and we will agree with that, will we not?

Levin         Well, what do you know about that? I mean…

Klein          It was…I read the article in People magazine that AEG hired Murray and I think that if I would hire a doctor for a very famous person I would make sure that the doctor was qualified to be the physician to this patient.

Levin         So you had told me something earlier about Dr Murray and Michael Jackson, that at a point Michael Jackson said, “I need an anesthesiologist.”

Klein          Okay, this is not what I said. You heard it from someone else but I’ll tell you what my feeling is on this, because I didn’t tell you that because I didn’t know that until a long time after…

Levin         An associate of his.

Klein          Somebody told me that, that Michael called two weeks before he passed away saying he needed an anesthesiologist, which makes no sense when he has Murray there who’s giving him this anesthesia. What you have to understand, when you read the records of the last part of his life, he was giving propofol IM, okay? Propofol was never meant to be given intramuscularly, it’s meant only to be given intravenously, okay? It evens burns when you give it in that manner. So the other thing is you begin to worry about this doctor administering in this manner. Now I…

Levin         But he was administering it IV.

Klein          We don’t know that for sure.

Levin         Well, he was found with… he had an IV the day he died.

Klein          Okay, but we also know…

Levin         And, if I may, he also…

Klein          Was giving an IM. We knew that from his statement. He stated that he gave it to him intramuscularly, which is absolutely incorrect.

Levin         But he was sleeping for eight hours sometimes, and to sleep eight hours you have to give about 800mg of…

Klein          I absolutely understand that.

Levin         …of propofol and you can’t do that intramuscularly, you have to do that intravenously.

Klein          But here’s a problem with it. The problem with the whole picture on the last day was he administered the drug intramuscularly. You can’t get a constant level. Let’s just talk about a few things. He didn’t have a pulse oximeter and an EKG going. You can’t administer drugs like this unless you can properly monitor the patient. That’s another problem. And the other thing is that when you take propofol, who else could get some of the propofol breathed out by the patient? The doctor. So the doctor can be sedated at the same time the patient is and that’s really a big problem because a lot of doctors…

Levin         So you’re saying that even if someone gets an IV of propofol, when the patient is breathing, what he exhales…

Klein          Is propofol.

Levin         …is propofol and the doctor around him can suffer the impact of propofol?

Klein          Absolutely, and they’ve shown that doctors have gotten addicted from patients exhaling it. So I mean a doctor…

Levin         Could that sedate you?

Klein          Absolutely. So that’s the question you wonder – was the doctor giving the propofol sedated at the time and put to sleep by the exhaling of the propofol by Michael? We don’t know that. Or did Murray fall asleep there because Michael was…because if he was sitting in a room with someone exhaling propofol for eight hours, that’s how the doctors supposedly got addicted to those drugs.

Levin         How is it, if Murray was…we know that Murray said he was administering propofol nightly for six weeks. We have reason, at TMZ, to believe it was a lot longer than six weeks, but take the six-week period. If Jackson is getting this night after night after night, why suddenly would he talk to somebody in your office and say, “I need an anesthesiologist?”

Klein          Because I believe that he had nurse anesthetists who started the IVs. I don’t think that Murray was starting IVs on him and I think he was looking for someone else to use an intravenous line in him.

Levin         Why?

Klein          Because I don’t think that Murray was capable of starting his IVs because doctors themselves, who are not, you’re not surgeons, remember this man was not a surgeon. He was supposedly just a general doctor. He’d had problems in San Diego, had he not?

Levin         He had problems in San Diego, problems in Houston.

Klein          Everywhere he went he had problems and I don’t think that he was the most gifted person with his hands and if you’re going to start IVs… Have you ever had a person who couldn’t start an IV try to start an IV on you? And some nurses who are trained to do it will put in a line. Now if this doctor was really good and was going to give him a drug nightly, he would put in a cath, a hep cath, you know, something, a line to put this drug in on a nightly basis, which Michael didn’t have. And Michael showed up, and we didn’t see him there for two months, with all these marks all over his body. I tell you, I think there were nurses along with Dr Murray, administering this drug to Michael because we saw his body, ah, let’s say before May and he didn’t have these marks all over his body, and then suddenly he shows up with all these marks all over his body.

Levin         And I have to stop you there because one person of people we talked to and I’m 100% on this, that he was riddled with injection sites.

Klein          I knew that.

Levin         Riddled. And I’m talking his neck…to this extent, so much so that when the paramedics came to try and revive him and gave him…is it benzo…um, oh gosh, I wrote this down…is it benzo…?

Person in studio Benzodiazepine?

Levin         No.

Klein          It’s not benzodiazepine.

Levin         It’s sodi…

Klein          They use anti…he used anti-narcotic, I think, like narcan. They can give them.

Levin         No. You know what I actually wrote this…

Klein          Benzodiazepines are other sedatives. Those are like valium.

Person in studio You don’t know what they used to revive him with or attempt to?

Levin         It was a sodium bicarbonate…

Klein          Okay.

Levin         …that they gave him, that they actually had to inject it in the back of his knee because they said his veins had so collapsed from the repeated IV injections that they literally couldn’t find a vein in his body, and they said that the marks were literally all over, I mean, all over his body. Some fresh…

Klein          Did anyone here see the movie? Anyone here see the movie?

Levin         Several people saw the movie.

Klein          Who’s seen the movie?

Person in studio Yeah, I saw it.

Klein          Did you see his neck in the movie? Do you see his neck in the movie? You do.

Person in studio Yeah, you do see it, you do see it.

Klein          You don’t see any marks on his neck in the movie. You don’t.

Person in studio No.

Klein          No, you don’t see any body marks at all. Did they show any…because I haven’t seen the movie, did they show any shirt…

Person in studio No.

Klein          Does he do any of this (indicates opening of shirt)?

Person in studio No, never seen that.

Klein          You see his neck and you don’t see any…one single mark on his neck.

Levin         How can you explain this.

Klein          Because I’m telling…you want me to tell you how I explain it?

Levin         Yeah.

Klein          Because I’m telling you he had someone administering this intravenously I believe and he wasn’t doing it so he took up the skin popping because I’ve dealt with skin poppers. Those are people who give muscle…intra-skin injections intramuscularly, and I think that he really was destroying every vein because you see this in people who don’t know how to start IVs because I’ve seen people start IVs where they don’t leave any mark.

Levin         But wouldn’t that happen…I mean, if it’s that severe, wouldn’t that have happened over a period of time so that you would know? I mean, you’ve seen Michael without a shirt on…

Klein          We didn’t see him in May, we didn’t him in June. Remember that. We had a two-months period where we didn’t see him. So, I’m telling you, before that there were no marks.

Levin         But Murray was administering this before then.

Klein          With a nurse though. I believe there was someone else there. I don’t think this is the whole story. I think the story is that, if you look into this more deeply than you have, you’ll find that there was some type of nurse anesthetist involved in this, or a nurse who knew how to start an IV because you have to be well with an IV. If you’re going to be good with an IV, because I’ve dealt with heroin addicts, remember this, my whole life. When I lived in England, you know, for a year I lived, you know, with heroin addicts, who were giving themselves heroin. If they knew how to administer the stuff properly they didn’t have any collapsed veins anywhere. You know, I’ve seen people give drugs all the time, you know, when they put in these lines, for, kidney, you know, dialysis. You don’t get those veins collapse. You only will collapse a vein when you infiltrate usually and you use a product very badly, and you usually don’t see this unless a person is very bad at starting an IV.

Levin         But you’re saying that you think this happened in the last six weeks of his life…

Klein          It had to because I saw him with…

Levin         …that he was clean before the six weeks?

Klein          He wasn’t clean. He was on propofol.

Levin         Well, clean in…well, but if he was on propofol it had to come in some way and there’d be marks.

Klein          We didn’t see it because he was with one of the members of my office, who you’re very well aware of, totally without a shirt and my nurse, Alan, saw him without a shirt and without…with pants, and we didn’t see any marks. If we saw marks, I mean, that would be the first question I would ask. You have to understand that if he had a flaw in any part of his body he didn’t…it didn’t matter whether it was his face or his leg, because he had an infection in his leg, he had a staph infection on the right leg, so I had to deal with that staph infection in the right leg when he couldn’t go to court in England.

So we had to look at all his body to make sure that he didn’t have any other infections because of the fear of MRSA, Methicillin-Resistant Staph. So it wasn’t a simple thing. But I think he’s much more than just a drug addict. I think what we have here though is a situation where this Dr Murray existed and I feel this man is responsible for his death. I think though, that the family really honestly, wants to just shift the blame and they got a hold of this Dr Hoefflin, who decided that they were going to shift the blame to me.

Levin         Why do you suppose?

Klein          Well, I…for several reasons, I’ll give you several reasons – because they needed a scapegoat to take…

Levin         Why wouldn’t they have Murray?

Klein          Why wouldn’t they have Murray as a scapegoat? Because he’s not enough a scapegoat and the other thing is they wanted to have someone to share the blame with because AEG hired Murray. Now, I’ll just tell you what I think. I’ll give you a great example of it. You came to my office, okay, the day Winters was there. All I see is helicopters, and you all arrived before Winters got there, okay? Now that means that Winters told you he was coming to my office, right?

Levin         It doesn’t necessarily mean that.

Klein          It means it, you know it means it. You can tell me what you want to but I know from your facial expressions.

Levin         My facial expressions?

Klein          I know what you’re saying. You know that Winters told you.

Levin         No, no, I mean, what…

Klein          You’re going to tell me he didn’t say that to you?

Levin         I’m going to tell you…

Klein          How do you…

Levin         I’m going to tell you I’m not going to tell you how we find out anything.

Klein          So you’re telling me the answer there, that you knew…

Levin         No.

Klein          You got there before he did, so you knew. Now, he was sitting in the third row of the memorial. Do you know that?

Levin         I did not know that.

Klein          Okay. He was in the third row of the memorial. So he had a special relationship with someone, which may be a special relationship with the family, because I didn’t get an invitation to the memorial and I was his closest friend. Let’s just go through some of these stories.

So I’ve turned my records all over to the police, okay? And they go through my records and they don’t find anything, and Murray…you know, Dr Winter, Mr Winter, excuse me, he’s not a doctor, if he wanted to be a real human being he would park under my building, walk the elevator, come to my office, if he wanted to be like a human being.

He wanted to turn this into a spectacle, but you know what? I’ve seen enough spectacles, I’ve seen Ben Hur, and we know the truth is he told you, he told every news source.

The authorities are focused solely on Klein and no one asks what Murray has done to HIS records? Strange, to say the very least!

I’ve had helicopters there, I had everyone in front of my office, that he’s going to come to my office doing nothing, because he had the records.

And this was the problem I had, because I have a patient down at the Medical Examiner’s office, who died from Botox and Artofill, Botox being one agent you’re using and Artofill being a filler, due to an infection after having them, that I would like them to report to the FDA but they have more time doing this. We have kids dying, getting Oxycontin on the street and he’s doing a spectacle in front of my office.

So what I’m saying to you is I wish the Coroner would stick to doing important things rather than feeding their own narcissism. And that’s what this whole thing bothers me because you get a famous person who dies and everyone wants to be in front of the spotlight and it becomes really abhorrent to me. I mean, you have everyone doing this.

You have, you know, you have to know that Steve Hoefflin also spoke for the family. He said he was a representative, witness now, and with the family, together with the police.

But did the police ever speak to me? Ask me that. Have the police ever spoken to me?

Levin         My understanding is that the police are not investigating you, that the…that there are two investigations going on. One is Dr Murray with the LAPD, the second is with the DEA. The police have nothing to do with that and the DEA is looking at the various prescribing practises and you’re one of the doctors they’re looking at.

KleinYeah, but I’m telling you that if you go to my prescribing practises, you go to Mickey Fine Pharmacy. Now Mickey Fine Pharmacy is a fabulous pharmacy. They decided to put every drug that was ever prescribed to me, by any doctor, under my name as if I prescribed it to myself. You understand that?

Levin         They said that there were 27 self-prescriptions by you.

Klein          They never made a self-prescription by me. They did it to every doctor in my building.

It is totally amazing that within a span of 12 days they visit Klein’s office twice, but will go to Murray for the first time only at the end of July. Someone definitely considered Klein the root of all evil. I recall that in their “riot act” to Michael AEG Live promoters demanded that he stopped seeing Klein

And you know, who runs Mickey Fine pharmacies? A pharmacist? No. Jeffrey is an accountant, so he’s very thrifty in the amount of pharmacists. I’ve never self-prescribed any of those medicines to myself.

We now have a letter from my physician, my treating physician, that none of that was ever self-prescribed. And if I ordered Demerol for office  use, they would put it under my name. So I never ordered an office use prescription because they were sloppy. Now see that’s the problem. It was the greediness of that pharmacy and their sloppy behaviour that got them into trouble. I’m in no trouble. And you know what happens? They came up to my office and tried to get the name of my doctors. You want to know why? Because they wanted to know who was prescribing the medicine because they were saying I was self-prescribing. You know what I did? I refused to give them the name. Let them live with the mistakes they made.

But you want me to guarantee you something on the grave of my mother? Which is a big deal for me because my father was an orthodox rabbi, is I never gave that medicine. So they wanted me to look bad, so everyone thinks that I should look bad. But you know what? I’m good, I’m not a bad guy. And I’ll tell you something, I tried to help Michael to the best of my ability but some people are beyond your help. Ask me a strange question. Would I do it again? Yes, because you know what? I can’t refuse anyone…

Levin         Well, I think we have to go back to that because what I really did ask you when I met you Sunday was that you were friends with him and you were best friends with him and you were also his doctor, and I asked you if there’s a danger of blurring the line, and if you could go back twenty years, would you elect to treat Michael Jackson as a patient?

Klein          I don’t have many friends. You know that. My friends are my patients. I mean, we know someone, a mutual friend of ours, okay? My patients are my patients 24 hours-a-day. You know, they call me at three o’clock in the morning, they call me four o’clock in the morning. You know, I’ve flown as far as Tokyo to see a patient, I’ve flown to the Middle East to see a patient where Jewish wouldn’t go. So I’m telling you, when you say what I do is medicine, the practise of medicine, I mean I’m not a shrink, I’m not, you know, Freud, but I think that you do blur the lines because you’re available 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week.

Levin         But that does raise the issue that you’re not a shrink, you’re a dermatologist, yet you, at times, prescribed things like Xanax and other medications…

Klein          But that was once and let me just tell you about the Xanax prescriptions. You have to understand that there’s another person in the mix, okay? First of all I’m not a dermatologist, just a dermatologist. I happen to be a Professor of Medicine also. Are you aware of that? So I’m also an internist and I’m also a dermatologist, so I’m more than just a little dermatologist.

Levin         I didn’t mean it that way by the way.

Klein          No, well I’m just telling you this. Now let’s…

Levin         You’re a famous dermatologist. Well, you are.

Klein          I’m the best dermatologist…

Levin         Fair enough.

Klein          …because I don’t see anyone who can do it better than I can. I mean they may think they can but I’ll do it better than they can because we’re horribly competitive, even with myself – that’s the worst thing, that’s the person I compete with.

So I think what we have to look at is, look at right now. Now Debbie Korman was in today, in my office. You know Debbie Korman? Harvey Korman’s widow. They had to change his name at UCLA. You want to know why? Because they couldn’t use the name Harvey Korman because the information got out and people started harassing him, so he had to use a pseudonym.

You can’t start using these real names of these patients, the medicine’s going to end up...those prescriptions sold. [evidently to the media]. And we didn’t even have HIPAA laws back there. I knew back there, and even in those periods of time, there were problems. Now if you want to look at my prescriptions and my charts, you have to understand if you viewed both my charts with the first medical…you know, with the first city attorney from Los Angeles, Gil Garcetti, remember it? When he came into my office with no search warrant and I had the…

Levin         District Attorney.

Klein          District Attorney. And where were the records? Not in the trunk of my Rolls Royce. I didn’t have a Rolls Royce then, I had a Mercedes convertible.

Levin         Well, this…no, no. But in ’93 you did put the medical records…

Klein          In the back of my car.

Levin         …of Michael Jackson in the back of your Bentley.

Klein          No, I didn’t have a Bentley, I had a Mercedes.

Levin         Well, I got the car wrong but you put it in the back, in the trunk.

Klein          You want to know why?

Levin         Yeah.

Klein          Because I felt that was the only safe place because I didn’t trust the records then.

Levin         Did you do it this time?

Klein          This time the records…for this time, no, the records existed in the office.

Levin         Did you ever move those records outside of the office after Michael died?

Klein          I don’t know where the records are right now because I’ve given the records away to so many people, that right now if someone has the records, it’s one of the city authorities and they’ve not returned them to me.

Levin         But did you…

Klein          I never hid them. I never hid these records.

Levin         You never took any of the medical records…

Klein          No.

Levin         …outside of your office?

Klein          No, because all of the records I gave the City Attorney of Los Angeles and Sneddon up in Santa Barbara, they’re long gone. But I have to tell you something. When the sisters moved all the stuff out of the house this time, they said they found lots of bottles with my name on them. They found one bottle of muscle relaxants with my name on it.

Now the other thing is, Michael used to hoard a lot of money in his house. We know this, right? I would like to know where all that money went. Did the sisters take that money? There’s rumours that they got some of the money out of the house, because he used to keep valuable jewellery in the house, he showed me jewellery that was amazing, he used to keep a lot of cash in the house.

Levin         He had five million dollars, yeah.

Klein          Up to five million dollars. And I don’t think that…you think that Tohme Tohme took all the money…

Levin         No I…

Klein          I still think that there was more cash there…

Levin         I don’t know who took the money.

Klein          …but we know one thing, that for two days after Michael died we know La Toya stayed in the house. Don’t we know that?

Levin         I know she was there, I didn’t know she…

Klein          She stayed overnight in the house.

Levin         I did not know she lived there.

Klein          She stayed overnight in the house. So I’m saying this, we have a crime scene here. But why do the police contaminate the crime scene? Is this how they usually work, they’re allowing contamination? Or do they allow it because it’s famous people? Are famous people allowed certain behaviour patterns during situations like this, than non-famous, because I’m sure that… Why did the police talk to the Jacksons? Now what…let’s talk about 2008, let’s go back a ways.

Levin         Before we do, I want to go into something that you had mentioned, that you talked about Mrs Korman, about that he used an alias, which I get.

Klein          …Forrest used an alias.

Levin         You used the name Omar Arnold. By the way, is Arnold you?

Klein          Yes.

Levin         The Arnold was for your name?

Klein          Yeah, I mean, it’s not for Benedict Arnold, it was for me.

Levin         Right, okay. But there were other names – Josephine Baker. Did you ever use that?

Klein          Let me tell you about these names. Debbie Rowe sent me an email about these names and she said that she blamed Cindy, who worked for Randy Rosen, for creating these names, and Cindy didn’t know half these names, okay?

Levin         There were nineteen of them.

Klein          Yeah, I mean… I will tell you one thing, that, you know, I can’t…we know that Debbie treated Michael at Neverland, correct?

Levin         Right.

Klein          Debbie Rowe treated Michael at Neverland.

Levin         Well, she treated… Debbie Rowe treated Michael Jackson in your office in 1993 and gave him repeated injections of Demerol.

Klein          I don’t know if I was even there. You have to understand this is according to records of Steve Hoefflin’s trying to say…

Levin         No, no, no, no, no, I can tell you that that’s not true. This is according to records from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department investigation where Debbie Rowe is quoted by one of the officers, because I’ve seen the report, and the report talks about Debbie Rowe repeatedly injecting Michael Jackson in the buttocks, in your office…

Klein          Okay, I have to tell you one thing…

Levin         …for acne treatments.

Klein          No, we don’t give…I don’t give Demerol for acne, ever. She could have done it. You want to know why? Because she treated Michael at different times. Don’t forget she posed for…

Levin         She said acne by the way.

Klein          Listen to me. She posed for nude pictures in my office. Do you think I allowed that to happen? Do you think I really ran a Playboy thing?

Levin         Probably not.

Klein          Okay. So what I’m telling you is you have to consider your source and when…I’m telling you, when you consider the source, this person who really doesn’t like me whatsoever and, you know, who’s with this Marc Schaffel right now, who I don’t think is a most wonderful person either at this point in time.

You have to consider your source, that she wrote me this email saying she was not the mysterious woman who gave these names, that it was this Cindy character. Well, excuse me, this Cindy character didn’t know these names. She worked for Randy Rosen. The only one who knew of these, so that essentially tells me Debbie Rowe gave these names. And when we used to be missing things that Debbie would leave from the other nurses, took and gave them to Michael Jackson. So anything she might have done in my office I cannot be held responsible for because I didn’t do it.

Levin         I will not belabor this but I do have one other thing on that.

Klein          Sure, ask me anything you want to.

Levin         The LAPD has some of the records…

Klein          Yes.

Levin         …that the Coroner took from the office. At least one of the records involves…it talks about you filling acne scars and putting him under with Demerol.

Klein          Yeah. You know how many acne scars he had?

You know how terrible his acne was, that he wouldn’t go to school? You know, he used go to this clinic out in the Valley, near Grenada Hills. He used to have cortisone injections in his face and he used to tell me how he used to love to go.

And he would scrub his face with brillo because he thought it would get rid of his acne. And he had some really severe acne scarring when I met him.

He had really severe acne scarring and he had lost all the volume from his cheeks, so he had these very big shadows on his cheek, and sure I filled lots of acne scars but I also filled lupus scars. I also filled the scars around his nose. I also filled the scars around his scalp from having discoid lupus. So am I going to start talking about discoid lupus scars in a record like this that it’s going to liable…end up in someone else’s hands? No. So I called all scars, acne scars because they’re scars.

Levin         Okay. And you know what, it kind of allows me, just for a breathing moment, just to say, you know, when…I’m looking at this, obviously differently from the way you are because I don’t have the history you have and that’s why, when we talked before, to me it was like “Rashomon” because, at least from my point of view when I look at this, what I see, if I may, I mean what I see is…I see a patient who is deeply addicted to drugs and propofol.

Klein          No, he was deeply addicted to propofol. Let’s put it in perspective. You can’t…not all drugs..

Levin         He’s deeply addicted to anesthesia.

Klein          No. Not all drugs are created equal.

Levin         Right.

Klein          You have to understand people have drugs of choice. Do you think if I took an alcoholic from Ireland and gave him propofol he’d be happy?

Levin         No.

Klein          No. So we’ve…let’s talk about…

Levin         Do you think it was only propofol that Jackson had a problem with?

Klein          No, I think he had problems with different drugs or addiction.

Levin         Demerol?

Klein          I don’t think he had a terrible problem with Demerol because you didn’t find tons of narcotics. Now I went over his house once and in his house I found all this Dilaudid that he got from his favourite plastic surgeon and I flushed it all in the toilet, you know? But you can’t flush his whole life in the toilet because there’s just too many bathrooms. But I’m telling you, if’s there a bottle of drugs they find in his house and it’s not used, right? There’s these bottles that were not used. It means he didn’t use that drug because it was not important to him. If it was important to him he would have used it.

Levin         Yet you had enough alarm that you flushed it down the toilet.

Klein          Dilaudid is milligram for milligram ten times stronger than Morphine.

Levin         But it seems like the spectre surrounding this guy was he had a drug problem. He had a propofol problem.

Klein          Yeah but you can’t…

Levin         If I may. So I’m just saying, you know, just, one of the reasons you wanted to come on and I want you to address this.

Klein          But I don’t think you understand addiction. I think you should study addiction because I think you don’t understand that if you had your appendix out and you had a history of addiction with propofol, you don’t think they should give you some anesthesia?

Should they just give you a silver bullet and take out your appendix? That when you’re giving a person injections in their face straight for an hour-and-a-half, you have to sedate that person because I’m going right near the eyes.

Levin         Or you say, “I’m not going to fix the problem in your face because of the bi-product that it has on your drug problem.”

Klein          No. The small amount of medicine that you’re going to use is not what he’s having a problem with. Do you understand? And you know if you can sedate him with this much, you have to know that he’s not addicted.

Levin         Do you think Dr Murray should be prosecuted?

Klein          Of course he should be prosecuted I feel, but I think also…

I think the people responsible for hiring him are culpable also because I think they didn’t do a background check to know enough.

But I really have to clear your idea on addiction because I think you should really understand that his main drug of addiction was propofol, that Michael was put to a point where he couldn’t sleep without it and that’s only from continuous use. You understand? You only get to that point of propofol addiction once you start getting continuous use.

You develop severe insomnia as a result of being taken off from it. So the culprit in the beginning is the person who uses this anesthetic continuously on the patient. And I think if you want to widespread every drug he got, you can say, you know, any drug is possibly addicting. I mean, what…is methamphetamine physically addicting?

Levin         I would think so, although I don’t know.

Klein          No, it isn’t. Speeds aren’t addicting. However, if I gave him meth, if I gave him crystal meth, it was the wrong thing to do?

Levin         Yes.

Klein          Okay, you would say yes, but he’s not a meth addict, remember that. So I’m trying to tell you, drugs… Anyone here ever been a crystal addict or ever used crystal?

Person in studio Yeah.

Levin         Everyone’s raising their…no.

Klein          Or anyone ever met a meth addict? You ever met a meth addict? What? Have you ever met a meth addict?

Person in studio Yes.

Klein          And they’re the worst addicts in the world. They’ll sell their mother to get drugs. Right?

Person in studio Rob, cheat and steal, yep.

Klein          But they’re not interested in getting other drugs than meth. That’s their drug of choice. You know that. So, I mean, you have to begin to understand, because I lived with addicts so long in my life, remember, I spent a whole year of my life with addicts, that they have drugs of choice.

Michael was absolutely a person who wanted propofol, but to widen the range, that he wanted every single drug in the world is not correct.

Levin         You knew him for decades. Is the only time he ever asked you for a specific drug four years ago, when he asked you for propofol?

Klein          No. If you want me to say drug by name, yes. If you want me to say that he wanted some sedation when he had procedures, yes. Did I do…

Levin         Did he name the drug?

Klein          A drug that he wanted? No, he just wanted a drug. He didn’t care if I gave him five Percocet, you know, that he could have sedating him, or three Percocet which sometimes I would sedate him with when I gave him injections, but I didn’t inject him that much.

But when he came to me when he came back from Las Vegas, do you know what he looked like? He looked like he came from Auschwitz. He had no body fat in his face. You understand? He looked terrible. He looked haggard, if you see the pictures beforehand, and I rebuilt his face. Now you may…hear you say, “Don’t you think he looked good.” You saw the concert, right?

Person in studio Right.

Klein          What did you think he looked like in the concert? Be honest with me.

Person in studio At different times. Sometimes he looked pretty good but there were times you could tell his face was…

Klein          I mean, his face was not perfect…

Person in studio …reconstructed.

Klein          You know why? Because we blew it up because you know what? He had done so much surgery on it that I rebuilt his nose. His nose looked normal, did it not? It didn’t look perfectly normal…

Person in studio For Michael Jackson.

Klein          …for Michael Jackson it looked like a nose. At least he had a nose. You know, when I started rebuilding his nose, it was totally recollapsed and so I reconstructed his nose. You know, it’s not like rebuilding the Babylon but you have to do a lot of work to do this. I did it very seriously because you know what? I knew they’d be wanting to try to rebuild his career.

Levin         The guy used nineteen aliases with the help of some doctors and some of those you used, and I understand that sometimes you do it for privacy but there nineteen aliases.

Klein          Well, I didn’t use nineteen out of them.

Levin         No, no, not you but..I can list them but there are nineteen aliases.

Klein          He may have used nineteen aliases but I didn’t use all these aliases for one reason. I had one real important reason I used an alias for him, because I didn’t want anyone stealing his records. Much like Harvey Korman did. I didn’t use it to prescribe drugs to him. That was not my idea of using it.

Levin         But the thing that’s hard to believe is that…I mean, I knew when Michael Jackson was alive that he was a drug addict from the people I knew in town and it just seems like everybody knew he was doctor-shopping, who was involved in his life and I was, at the time a reporter and I knew this from people I was talking to.

Klein          But I would say that he was not the addict that he became with the use of propofol, that the drug that he was in search of mainly was propofol, of all drugs, which people didn’t know.

Levin         Did he repeatedly come to you and ask for drugs?

Klein          No, not at all. Because when he stayed at my house he didn’t ask me for drugs, when he brought his kids to my house he didn’t ask me for drugs. I mean, he didn’t…he was not…

Levin         But yet he was using drugs every single night with Dr Murray for months.

Klein          But you know, you have to understand one thing, that he was over my house some of those nights, he was not on propofol unless he got propofol after he returned home, and he used to stay at my house overnight remember, not during that period of time but before, so I did not know anything about this propofol insanity with Murray. There’s no way I could have known because it was gone out of his body.

And so, you know, and we saw his body, so he didn’t act strange. I mean, there was lots of people at my house at that time , one very famous actor, so we didn’t see him strange, but I think if we spend this whole time just discussing…

Levin         I think you’re right.

Klein          ...his addiction, we’re just going to go nowhere. But I’ll just tell you one thing…

Levin         What about…can I…I do want to switch gears for just a second.

Klein          We have to go away, only from addiction only for one reason.

Levin         Okay.

Klein          I think the key thing in him is the drug propofol. I think you can go anywhere you want with any other drug but the key thing was propofol. I think propofol is a drug that someone must know how to administer. Now we know this doctor was incompetent in the manner in which he administered. Where was the EKG? Was there an EKG there? No.

Levin         No.

Klein          And we know that he could have fallen asleep during the exhalation of propofol from Michael. So if anyone really wants to run into a problem here, it’s that.

Levin         Is that criminal?

Klein          I think it’s...there’s no question it’s criminal to me.

Levin         Do you think it’s manslaughter?

Klein          I think it’s manslaughter. See, I don’t know enough. Remember when I discussed with you whether it’s homicide versus manslaughter, I’d put it more as manslaughter. But I really feel I would hit him over the head if he was here.

I’m very angry. I mean, I really loved this guy because I mean, he was the ... he defied gravity. He was the best performer of our age that I know of, and we’ve lost so many great performers because of drugs. Look at how many we’ve lost. Jim Morrison we lost because of drugs. Janis Joplin we lost because of drugs.

Levin         Heath Ledger.

Klein          And all these people…Elvis Presley we lost because of drugs. And you see all these incredible performers and you see all these child actors die with drugs. There are some who live longer who still take drugs, you know?

Levin         But the common thread is there were a lot of doctors who enabled all of the people you just mentioned.

Klein          Remember Dr Feelgood in New York who gave everyone amphetamine, including John F Kennedy?

Levin         Yeah.

Klein          So I’m telling you, there’s always…when there’s a need, there’s always going to be someone to fill that need. But I would tell you that the vast majority of my patients, I never use anything on because I don’t have to really sedate them, but you have to know that he was needlephobic. I mean, there’s a number of people – Michael Jackson is needlephobic. You couldn’t go anywhere near his eyes, where I had to go near his scalp, and the scalp hurts like hell with shots, unless you would sedate him a little bit. But if we just stick on this…

Levin         Was he obsessed with his face and…

Klein          Oh, there’s no question. There’s something called the body dysmorphic disorder. Has anyone here ever heard of that? Anyone here? Are there any women right here? Women? Any women here?

Levin         Yeah, we have women here.

Klein          I’m going to have to find one woman who can stand up and talk to me.

Levin         They’re all hiding.

Klein          Don’t hide. I have a question. How many hours does… Where? Back there?

Levin         They’re hiding.

Klein          I want women. Okay. Women can spend up to two hours-a-night on their eyebrows. Are you aware of that? And that…

Person in studio Sure.

Klein          You’re aware of that? Do you spend any time on your own eyebrows? Do you?

Levin         Clearly not.

Klein          You don’t? I have a question.  Is there any man here who trims his own eyebrows? Okay. Is there any man here who trims his eyebrows? Do you know what…?

Person in studio Jacks(?)

Jacks        You guys are jerks. I don’t trim my eyebrows.

Klein          No, you can trim…it’s not a problem. Do you?

Jacks        No, I don’t.

Klein          Why are you so frightened with my question.

Jacks        Because I don’t trim my eyebrows.

Klein          What two body parts are men worried about…

Levin         You gotta help me out here. Don’t go there.

Klein          But I want to tell you one thing. There’s people who are obsessed with the way they look. Now what areas are men obsessed with? Do you have any idea?

Levin         Their hair?

Klein          No. Two areas. They don’t want their chest feminine-type and their penis should not be small. This is true. This comes from a book called “The Adonis Complex”. And women are obsessed, often times, with their eyebrows. But people can take this obsession to abnormal consequences, meaning they develop what’s called the body dysmorphic disorder. Now you can go to any restaurant and you’ll see the breasts and lips enter before the woman does. So you know these people when they walk down the street, they’re obsessed with the way they look, to the point where they distort themselves, and these are people who go after doctors, end up having facelifts after facelifts, they look tighter and tighter ‘til they don’t look human anymore. And these are the people you really have to deal with, these body dysmorphic people. And what percentage of the patients I treat does it represent? Eighteen percent of people are dysmorphic.

Levin         Is it like on a scale where he was an extreme?

Klein          Extremely. But he really viewed his face as a work of art. You have to understand. It’s hard to take…understand this, but he really viewed his face as a work of art, an ongoing work of art. Now there’s a very famous French artist who does surgeries on their face as an artistic form. There’s another French artist who implants objects under their skin. And there are Americans here who, you know, like tattoo art is a big art. Do we all know about tattoo art is all very big? We know a very famous actress who has tons of tattoos now, do we not?

Levin         Right.

Klein          Who is it?

Levin         Angelina.

Klein          Angelina Jolie, and she proceeded to buy another one. So she has tons of tattoos. Do you think that’s attractive on a woman?

Person in studio Personally?

Klein          Yeah.

Person in studio No.

Klein          Neither do I. I mean, I’m Jewish, we don’t have any tattoos, you know, because they tried to tattoo numbers. So I’m saying when you want to get into aesthetics, it’s a whole different world we have…

Levin         So was his about aging or was it about…?

Klein          It was about pure beauty and he wanted people to see him and pee in their pants. That’s what he told me. He wanted to appear on stage and take people’s breath away. Even in the movie you saw, and you saw the movie over there?

Person in studio Yeah.

Klein          Didn’t some of his performances take your breath away? The way he performed? The way he danced? He had the greatest dancers in the world with him but he still was the better than all of them. And I haven’t seen the movie, that’s what I understand.

And Fred Astaire told me that he was the greatest dancer of our time. I’m just telling you that. That’s what he told me. So I mean, here we have a great artist and we have a great artist of the realm of a great artist, whether you want to call him equivalent to an artist like Stella or Lichtenstein…you saw I liked Lichtenstein..?

Levin         Yes.

Klein          …or that. But he was an artist and we had an artist and he was a drug addict. And they usually go hand in hand, artists and drug addicts, but he also was a performer. But he also could manipulate himself to get anyone to give him anything practically, because he once called me up…

Levin         Which is one of the signs of a drug addict.

Klein          Absolutely. He called me once from New York where this doctor had given him the inappropriate drug, remember? He was running down the street and he had swallowed his tongue because the doctor had given him a phenothiazine. I had to reverse it with benadryl. So I’m telling you, he was a bit high-maintenance, but I’m telling you that he was extraordinarily talented. But I blame a lot of this in that I wasn’t watch…or looking at him. But the family didn’t have a lot of contact with him. We have to go into that too.

Levin         I want to get into that. The family actually…it’s interesting. I do want you to get into the relationship because they gave the LAPD a list of doctors that they felt were mis-prescribing and you were on the list. What about the family? His relationship with the family?

Klein          He had no family relationship. I mean, you have to understand that in 2008, you saw the article that none of his brothers were really that employed whatsoever, none of them, that the father we know has multiple children we know that were not his, correct? We know his father has multiple children that are not his. His father, he told me, was a thug. He used to beat him. And we know that everyone thinks his mother is good and we know that La Toyahas said some very strange things.

But for some reason Katherine Jackson gave a letter to Steve Hoefflin, who is not quite with us, I mean, remember he’s been in two mental institutions and was found shooting people from a tree, that he could speak about me when he doesn’t know anything about me except a letter he wrote me where he thought I was the best dermatologist in the world.

Levin         What did Michael think of Katherine?

Klein          Michael loved Katherine but the strange part of it was he never talked to her on the phone when I was around but, I mean, he told me he loved his mother and I think..his mother, he said, he only really blamed his mother because during the beatings his mother would say she couldn’t stop the father from beating. So I’m telling you that while everyone thinks this woman is so perfectly pure, when there…you know, it’s like good cop, bad cop, but a mother like that, I would take the kids and leave.

You understand? I would leave. But I mean, you know, I would think that there’s a problem when a man beats his children. Now they made fun of Michael’s nose, terribly. You know that? They used to call him tomato nose and they made fun of his nose all the time, including his father, and he got beaten quite often, with a leather belt. I mean, he told us in the Oprah interview, if you remember this correctly.

Levin         Right.

Klein          And so I really think that they really had a lot to blame but they’re trying to appear flawless now. You suddenly hear all these people are flawless. Now the one who Michael did absolutely not get along with was Jermaine and Jermaine is singing Smile at that whole memorial. I mean, the memorial seemed too planned to me to be…and I wasn’t there. It really bugged me.

And then when AEG has every satellite truck around the place, rented, every satellite space rented and then wants to charge us, the City of Los Angeles, it’s totally ridiculous. Then AEG films the funeral and they feed it to CNN, don’t you begin to think about how much AEG was involved in this? I’ll probably get shot on the way out but, I mean, how much is their money involved in this whole thing. And then they own the movie, which they released through John Branca.

Levin         You’re not suggesting there was foul play here?

Klein          No, I don’t think there’s foul play but I think they’re making a lot of money there and I don’t think they should have the City of Los Angeles pay for the funeral. That’s what I’m saying. Why should we pay nickels and dollars for the funeral when AEG’s making money off of this whole thing and rented out the satellite spaces all around the Staples Centre when they filmed this. So I don’t think there’s anything here but I think they’re culpable in this because they should have known the background of Dr Murray when they hired him.

Levin         Would you settle something once and for all? Are you the father of any of Michael Jackson’s kids?

Klein          To the best of my knowledge, absolutely not.

Levin         Yet you donated sperm.

Klein          I once donated sperm but I don’t think absolutely I’m the father. I don’t think so. What’s wrong with giving sperm?

Levin         Nothing, but you would think at a point your best friend would say, “Oh by the way, that’s your kid.”

Klein          They didn’t want to do a DNA test. I’ll do a DNA test. I don’t care. But let me tell you one little thing about this. I promised Michael Jackson one little thing. I said once, he was at my house and all the kids were at my house and the kids really like me and they gave me two little…a bunch of toys, he said, “If I ever go I want you to be responsible.” My greatest fear with these kids, and I don’t about the father, the schmather, that’s not important, I’m worried about whether their money is going to be taken, so what I made sure of is that they had their own legal representation. I went to court over that.

Levin         That’s right.

Klein          I don’t want children. I mean, I understand why guppies eat their young. You know, that’s the school I come from. I’m serious, I do. I’m really not… You want children?

Levin         I don’t feel the way you do, let me tell ya.

Klein          Children are alright for about one day.

Those kids though, I’ll tell you one little thing, those kids are great kids, they’re brilliant kids. He’s raised really good kids, which is an indication of how much he loved the kids and how much the kids really loved him. I mean, there was an immense love affair.

I mean, they would never pass their father without saying, “I love you Daddy.”

And they were very happy to wear the masks and that’s the one thing I can never forget. Martin Bashir wants to interview me, right? He thinks I’m going to be an idiot and allow him to do that when he destroyed Michael with that one interview that Uri Geller sold Martin Bashir…sold that interview to Martin Bashir for like, $50,000. Remember the guy who would bend spoons with his mind, and for him to do that interview was horrific because what basically he did was destroy Michael Jackson in that one interview, because the kids never wore those strange masks, they wore Hallowe’en masks. And why did they wear masks? Because he did not want his children recognized and kidnapped.

Levin         Yet they’re now showing their faces full on.

Klein          I think what they did at the funeral was absolutely horrific because Michael would not want those children on the stage. Michael would not want his children recognizable. That’s one thing he didn’t want them to be.

Remember once he was over my house. It was Hallowe’en last year, and he came over to my house, he brought the kids with him and Blanket got out from in back and they snapped some pictures, and he said, “Get your face out of it Blanket. I want to get you. I don’t want you to have any pictures.” Because he really wanted to protect his children.

He was an incredibly loving father. So yeah, he had bad qualities, a drug addict, right? [OMG, please choose your words, Dr. Klein!] But he had some really wonderful qualities. He was gifted as a musician and he was an incredible father, a much better father than I would ever have been. And I think as a person…my house loves him…listen, my housekeepers want me to get the kids but you know, I’m not going to get the kids, I don’t want the kids, but the welfare of the kids I was worried about. I was worried that the family would steal all the money because I think that’s what they’re there for.

Levin         Yet Katherine was the one who was really kind of the gatekeeper, so why would you be that concerned if it was Katherine and Michael loved Katherine and she loved him?

Klein          Because, I would tell you one thing. She keeps going asking for more money, doesn’t she?

Levin         Yeah.

Klein          She does. So would you…

Levin         Do you think ultimately Katherine’s greedy?

Klein          I think…if she’s asking for more money, what do you think?

Levin         I’m asking you.

Klein          I’m asking you.

Levin         No, I’m asking you.

Klein          You get to answer this one first.

Levin         You know her, I’ve never met her.

Klein          You know. You don’t want to say that she’s greedy.

Levin         No, I don’t know. I’m telling you what I…

Klein          Let me tell you…

Levin         No, no, no…

Klein          Here’s the person. Katherine, this is Katherine (holds up walking stick) and this is a person that keeps coming back asking the Will for more money. That person, forget what her name is.

Levin         But you just said that they’re broke, so if they’re broke she needs to keep the ship afloat.

Klein          Does she have to keep the ship…the whole group, every one of them? Doesn’t Janet have a few shekels?

Person in studio They’re Michael’s kids.

Klein          Yeah, and Michael’s kids have their own income now. They have their own amount of money.

Person in studio She’s got to take care of them.

Klein          What?

Person in studio But she’s got to take care of them, right? That’s why she needs the money.

Klein          Yeah, but they have enough money to take care of themselves.

Levin         I guess, you know, you’re kind of dancing around it.

Klein          I’m not dancing around. But you know, I think the whole thing is about greed because I think they’re only interested right now, the brothers and the father, in money. And it’s all about money. The father announced his new record label with thumbs up on the day his son died. Is that what you would do if your son died?

You know what, let me tell you something. I was close to him and I had to go through all this crap I went through, in mourning. And I had to read all the crap you wrote on TMZ about me – that I was this monstrous person. I had to hide behind a Botox pillow and, you know, I said I would never do this. God knows, it’s so strange to know I’d be a friend of yours because I really respect you, you know that and I must be an idiot to respect you but I do, because I think you’re a really good reporter, you’re a really honourable reporter. And I don’t want to talk about his urination anymore because that’ll probably end up on Howard Stern.

Levin         No, that’s our next subject.

Klein          Oh, we’re going to talk about urine now?

Levin         You had said that…you had actually given me a segue. You said that Michael wanted to be so beautiful that the audience would look at him and pee in his pants, which raises then the issue…

Klein          Of the urine.

Levin         …of 1993, that the accuser in the 1993 molestation case, we know, was able to identify, in great detail, discolorations and markings on Michael Jackson’s genitals because he had vitiligo.

Klein          Do you think he studied his penis, the kid would study the penis? Like we would study the map of…maps?

Levin         Well, he gave such…

Klein          I know he gave a description but it was not…

Levin         Dr Klein, Dr Klein, so descriptive…

Klein          You can call me Arnie by now by the way, Arnie.

Levin         Oh, fair enough. But so descriptive that some think it was what triggered the nearly $20 million settlement.

Klein          Let me tell you what triggered the $20million settlement. Let me say something. I rode up with Howard Weitzman on my left and Johnnie Cochran on my right, in a helicopter, noticing Johnnie Cochran had a facelift, as I would only notice because I saw his facelift scars. Okay? So you should all know that. So we went up there to the thing…

Levin         If you say that, I must say then, one of the great lawyers of all time.

Klein          Johnnie Cochran?

Levin         Yes.

Klein          He was very good at getting money out of people.

Levin         Great lawyer.

Klein          Yes. Was he a great lawyer or was he a greedy lawyer?

Levin         Great lawyer.

Klein          Okay, but we know he was greedy too a little bit because he got money out of UCLA.

He would threaten people. He signed the settlement and Howard Weitzman never did, for Michael Jackson. Howard never signed the settlement for Michael Jackson in that case and Johnnie Cochran did to get the $20million, and if Michael had not settled the case, which he would have won in court, he would have never have had all these problems with being accused of being a pedophile.

Levin         So what was it that allowed this child to identify in such great explicit detail…

Klein          Michael pees in what’s ever available. He always has. I’ve known him all this time. You know, he pees in a cup. I mean, he has a way of…I guess he was raised in a situation where they used to pee in a cup. I mean, I know a very famous country singer who used to pee in the bed because that’s the only way she could keep herself warm at night in the country. I’m telling you the truth. And I mean, he used to pee in a cup, and so my nurse could describe his penis well. So I think the description of penis is not a room for conviction. I really don’t think so. So I think you have to really look past all these things…

Levin         Can I just get back to peeing in the cup part?

Klein          I mean I don’t pee in cups.

Levin         Why?

Klein          Why? Because he didn’t want, he didn’t have time…he didn’t really want to have to run off to the bathroom because he didn’t like to walk in hallways and be recognized.

Levin         Did he know he was shocking people who happened to be there?

Klein          I think he could’ve known he was shocking people but I don’t think he really cared. It got to a point in his life where he really didn’t care but I think if there was a woman standing right there…but there was my nurse there, he was peeing in a cup in front of her and she asked me, “Does he always do that?” And I said he’s been known to pee in a cup. So it didn’t really bother me, you know, because I just figured he was peeing in a cup. I don’t think it’s worth…

Levin         Does it seem a little inappropriate to do in front of children?

Klein          To pee in a cup?

Levin         Well, to expose your genitals in front of children and pee?

Klein          I don’t think Michael viewed himself as an adult. I think Michael viewed himself partially as a child. There was a part of Michael that you would play with because he had rooms full of video games. You know, he loved to play video games, he loved toys. God knows how many toys he’s given me. I mean, he’s given me tons and tons of toys, you know, to play with. I mean, you know, Hart gives me lots of jewellery and this is better than that, you know, when I get jewellery and stuff, canes, seats. But I mean, Michael liked toys and he would give me more toys.

So I would have more toys, more cameras, more things that I would never know how to operate because I can never…I would get bored by reading the manuals. So he used to have this video game room full of all these video toys, and he loved to have a carnival and you know what he would do, when he took me on the ride of a carnival, this big ship that rode back and forth? He’d throw gumballs at me, he’d throw M&Ms at me.

So I mean, it felt like I was in high school again or even elementary school. So he really liked, he liked the child inside of you. He loved Disneyland and one of the greatest thrills he ever had was when I introduced him to Mrs Disney because Mrs Disney was my patient and he only wanted to meet Mrs Disney, because she still lived in the house of Walt Disney with the remnants of the train. So I introduced him to Lillian Disney and so when I brought him up there, the guy said, it’s so nice of Michael to visit this poor little old lady. Excuse me, he was dying to see her and to see all the, you know, awards, Academy Awards that Walt Disney had gotten. So I mean, he was religiously a fan of Disney. And so it’s really interesting, I mean, the things…

And we saw the premiere of Black and White, the video, at their house. You have to understand that we saw it on a little television that was about18 inches. This was a color television because that’s what the Disneys had at their house. But she was a wonderful woman, because, I mean, eventually she built Disney Hall and, you know, with Frank Gehry’s building. But I think it’s really interesting to know him because he was very much a child there too.

There was a big child there who played with the children. He was desperately frightened of dogs, okay? And I had Newfoundlands. You saw one of my Newfoundlands and I have a boxer, but I have big dogs and he would run away from my dogs because when he was a Jehovah’s Witness, you know the dogs would always bite him, or he’d think they’d bite him.

Levin         When he went…

Klein          When he went from door to door.

Levin         Door to door?

Klein          Yeah.

Levin         I did not know that.

Klein          There’s so many great stories. In fact, the story of Bad…I’ll give you a great story of Bad. Bad – you know who was supposed to sing on Bad with him?

Levin         Who?

Klein          Prince.

Levin         I did not know that.

Klein          Yeah, no one knows this. And so Prince wanted to go up and see Michael Jackson. So Prince went up to Havenhurst to see Michael Jackson and he comes up there with a box of chocs and some lacy thing that he gave Michael, and Michael starts talking to him, “This is what we’re going to do, this is what we’re going to do, this is what we’re going to do…” And Prince stood there in the corner and didn’t say a thing. You understand that? Wouldn’t say a thing. Michael went on and on and on. After a while he left and they never did it but it was supposed to be a duet between Prince and Michael Jackson, which would have blown everyone’s socks off…

Levin         That would have been amazing.

Klein          …the two of them performing together.

Levin         That would have been amazing.

Klein          But there’s so many things about him that I know that eventually I’ll write. But I mean, the truth be known, I think it was an honor to have known him and I mean, a lot of things I still do, I still want to do eventually what he wants me to do and he wants me to get involved in this thing charitably, about the inner cities, you know? And I really still want to do that because I think AIDS is a really epidemic thing in the inner city. You know it’s 80 times more frequent, 80 times among black women than as white people. He really got me interested…you know, like this big thing with me and the FDA, they think I’m nuts but if you take an agent like Botox, for example, a vial of Botox, and people…it’s a single-use vial, you have to know that, but the FDA is allowing doctors to use it on more than one patient which means the chance of it causing infection is really severe. So you know, they should really package it in single-use vials or why should they let just anyone use this one vial on multiple patients.

And so he really, you know, he really got…he’s a very righteous person. I have to tell you, strangely, in that manner. And he was very religious in certain matters too but yet he was this child and he really got me into thinking in different ways in different situations. It could have even been myself, gotten into thinking in these different ways.

Levin         I want to ask you something. You had told me a story of Sunday that was almost chilling, almost premonition-like, about the last time he visited your office.

Klein          Yeah. He said goodbye to everyone and I really felt very weird about that.

Levin         When was this?

Klein          This was the last time I saw him. I don’t even remember what the date was, because I mean, he was…

Levin         Roughly.

Klein          When did he die?

Levin         The 25^th of June.

Klein          It was about five before that, the last time he came to the office. He went around to everyone in my office and said goodbye.

Levin         Was that unusual?

Klein          Yeah, he never does that. He went round, even to the file clerk and, you know, the file clerk, Luis, who’s from Jamaica, almost fainted because he never talked to Michael before. Michael went around to every single person you know. And I have a brother who’s learning-disabled, who’s schizophrenic, you probably don’t know that, and I take care of him and Michael always would come to my house and ask me how my brother was and want to see my brother.

And, you know, Michael was that way and Michael carried around a lot of money because he didn’t have credit cards, and he would give people on the street, who were living on the street, hundred-dollar bills. I mean, it was strange what he would do but he was so generous. And he always felt bad about children who had any predicament whatsoever because I couldn’t tell him about it because he’d give them money, you know? So, I mean, he had a great heart. I mean, there are so many qualities about him that were good and I know there’s bad things but I guess people what, in the end, what this is about and what this is about is a very good person who had a very bad habit, and a person who I love very deeply, so as you said, “Do I really want to have him as a patient?” Can I tell you something, I have to tell you, with Michael the good really outweighed the bad. I mean, he was really amazing but I think…

Levin         Yet you had said to me on Sunday, at a point you said, “I probably would have done that part differently.”

Klein          You know what, I would try to make…if we had a retrospective–scope of my life, I would have tried to have changed a lot of things. But you know what, I try to be the best possible doctor I can be. I can’t be anything else other than that.

Levin         Is it a good idea for doctors generally to be friends with their patients?

Klein          I can’t help it because you know what? They become part of my life because they’re all part of me, every single one of them. I love them.

Levin         Yet when you occasionally get the drug addict, who specializes in manipulating people, it must become tough.

Klein          It becomes tough but there’s one very famous one who I’ve never given drugs to, and for the most part, I never give anything to. But if I have to do a procedure on some patients… I have some patients who can only have procedures done under general anaesthesia. You know, I have to even put them out to do it.

Levin         Because they’re so tolerant?

Klein          No, no, because they cannot tolerate any injections whatsoever because they’re so phobic of needles. It’s very rare, but I have other patients like Michael. So I wasn’t giving Michael drugs because he was a drug addict, I was giving Michael drugs because the procedures to rebuild his face were very arduous. And I have to tell you something, you want to get calls at eight o’clock in the morning? It wasn’t just one wrinkle but he had scars all over his face, his cheeks had fallen in, he looked like a man out of Auschwitz.

Levin         Okay. Just a couple more questions and we’ll call it.

Klein          Sure. We don’t have to call it, we can go on for weeks.

Levin         Listen, you’re invited back any time.

Klein          Okay.

Levin         What…do you think he had a premonition that he was going to die?

Klein          I think in some weird way he did and I don’t know what it was but I mean, the day that he said goodbye to us all, I felt very strange about the whole situation. I felt very, very terrible about the whole thing because I said he was really…I mean, I had a feeling that he was saying goodbye to us and I got very sad.

But when he died I couldn’t move for eight hours. I mean, I was a wreck and I mean, if it wasn’t for people like Elizabeth, you know, Taylor and Carrie Fisher, my dear friends, I couldn’t have made it through this whole event now, that I’ve gone through. But they’ve been very supportive of me, and I have a friend right now, Penny Marshall, who’s out doing…who’s had a little illness but she’s doing much better and I feel really good and I send my love to you.

I want to say that there’s been a lot of people who’ve been highly supportive of me and I want to thank you for that, and I’ve had millions of calls, lots of flowers and stuff, and I’m just trying to tell the world that I’m not quite the person they think I am, that I feel just like everyone else does and, you know, the thing about this is that, you know, I never asked him for money because money is not my object in life. My object is to be the best doctor.

I mean, I’ve got to be honest, I never asked him for a nickel and I you say my bill was a lot and I just want to tell you about my bill. You know I used to spend three days with him, you know, I used to fly back and forth on helicopters when he called me. So, I mean, when you put all that money together, flying around in helicopters all the time to see him and spending three days with him at a time, your days, over three days, is worth a lot of money.

Levin         It is but that does raise an issue and that is you filed a creditor’s claim against the…

Klein          Because I didn’t get paid a nickel.

Levin         I got it. But here’s the thing about that and, you know, and I’m not trying to put myself in your shoes here, but it strikes me and it struck other people that by submitting a bill, by saying that you repeatedly did these IM injections, which is presumably Demerol…

Klein          I didn’t repeatedly give anyone…

Levin         Well, there were 51 IMs in three months.

Klein          Okay. Let me explain to you one little thing. You say an IM but you don’t say how much was in the intramuscular injection because it depends what the dose was. It’s not how many shots you…

Levin         But if he could tolerate this it would have to be something significant enough so you could do the procedure.

Klein          Yeah, but it wasn’t that much in the way of a dosing…go ahead, because the last dose I gave him was 100mg – that’s not a lot. Let’s go ahead…and that was the last two doses. But go ahead, continue your story why I’m asking for the money.

Levin         I’m not trying to be presumptuous here but you are an extremely successful, presumably wealthy man and you submitted a bill for just under $50,000 that put this in the spotlight with 179 procedures in three months and 51 IM injections. Why?

Klein          Because…

Levin         I  mean, and I’m not saying you should give up your…

Klein          …my lawyers were silly, they should have hid the bill and secondly, I’ll donate the money to charity. But you know what, he’s made $100million worth of records. Michael’s not here anymore and I think I have a right to that money and I’ll donate to a charity in his name. But I have a right to the money for the work I did because I would take my whole weekends off. Do you know how many weekends I spent with him doing this, and just working on his face, trying to rebuild a face? It’s not easy. And, you know, I had to rent helicopters because he decided that he wanted to do it that day and I was 200,300 milesaway. I can’t make it by car, I have to come by helicopter. And that’s what he wanted. I said, “Michael this is insane”. He said, “That’s what I want”. So when push comes to shove, at the end of it, at the end of it, should I give everything away for nothing because he passed away.  I mean, it seems to me…

Levin         But did you know you would take some heat for the bill, for submitting the creditor’s claim?

Klein          I did not even know the creditor’s…can I be honest with you?

Levin         You didn’t know it was being filed?

Klein          I did not know it was being filed. It was done behind my back and I think it was stupid to file it in the manner in which they filed it because it wasn’t filed with my knowledge.

Levin         So you had no…you found out on TMZ?

Klein          I had no knowledge at all. I found out on TMZ that I had a creditor’s claim because you have to understand, do you think I run my business?

Levin         What was your reaction when you saw this?

Klein          My reaction was this. First of all, my attorneys had to be very stupid to submit this in this manner because usually you submit something closed like this if they owe me something. Why are you submitting this open like this, and I didn’t know he didn’t pay any of his bills as he’s going along.

Levin         But, you know, it opens up what could be a Pandora’s box where The Estate could have jacked and say, “Justify these medical procedures and…”

Klein          Can I tell you something? They’ve hurt my business so much with the crap they’ve done now. You understand? I could open a creditor’s claim against them because they’ve taken me away from my patients with these…with your good friend Ed Winter, who invites everyone to appear at my office, along with you and a helicopter patrol.

Levin         That’s slightly presumptuous of you.

Klein          It’s honest to me.

Levin         No, it’s…

Klein          It’s not, it’s honest to me. How’d you get there? Do you have crystal balls?

Levin         We have good sources, don’t we?

Klein          Yeah, it’s called a telephone call. You know, I’m not stupid. What? Do you think I was born yesterday?

Levin         Okay. Can I just…?

Klein          You can ask me another question.

Levin         Well, I just want to kind of go through my notes.

Klein          I want to know just one thing…

Levin         As you speak… What?

Klein          I don’t want you to write nasty things about me. I’m a good guy, okay? I’ve given away a lot of money to charity, over $300million so I’m not some person who’s trying to steal money from people. I have also a breast cancer center that I set up. That pays for breast cancer treatment. So I any time you’re asking me, I can’t give money away any more.

Levin         Okay.

Klein          Ask me some more.

Levin         Okay, Debbie Rowe. What’s your opinion about her?

Klein          I have no opinion of her because I don’t…I feel that she’s hostile to me.

Levin         Why?

Klein          Because she’s hostile to me because… You know why she’s hostile to me? Because I was still friends with Michael and she wasn’t. That she really is actively hostile. You’ve seen how she acts in public?

Levin         When we’ve covered her.

Klein          …that she sits in the corner of the coffee shop of my office, downstairs, you know, Mickey Fine’s, and eats there and drags all the paparazzi and all the people possible there. She comes into my office, she doesn’t see me as a doctor, she sees my associate. So my opinion of Debbie Rowe is very bad at present because all she does is harass me. So, do I have an opinion of her? No.

Levin         Why? I mean, why would she do that? I mean, what happened?

Klein          What happened with me and Debbie Rowe is that I remained friends and close to Michael and she didn’t.

Levin         Is it jealousy?

Klein          I think there’s a tremendous amount of jealously with her, a tremendous amount and she’s not nice now. She used to be a very honourable person but I don’t think she’s being very nice. And I mean, you know someone else who knows her a long time and knows that she’s changed violently. You know that from your description of what your friend’s told us, because we have someone mutually who knew her then. She’s not the same Debbie Rowe I remember, and I think it’s very sad. But she writes me these nasty emails, which I have these nasty emails, she screams at me on the telephone and she says that this Roger Friedman is going…or Robert Friedman… What is the name, her friend the reporter?

Levin         Roger.

Klein          Roger is going to write a book, the true book about how I took Omar away from her. And you know what, give me a break. I didn’t take Omar away from her. I mean…

Levin         Did you refer to Michael Jackson as Omar.

Klein          She did in a letter to me and in an email to me, she referred to how I took Omar from her. And I’m telling you she said all these names you got from Cindy. Cindy was a friend of hers who worked for Randy Rosen and she’s the mystery woman who gives away all the names.

And I think that her behaviour towards me has been abhorrent because not one time has she ever come up to my side. Don’t forget she met him in my office, okay? And she had his child in my office, okay? She did all those things in my office. She had her pictures, photographed nude or whatever, wrapped up in whatever leather, in my office. So if anyone has any complaints here, it may be my complaints against her, rather than her complaints against me. But why does use my office as a photo studio for herself. But I’m very cautious with my nurses presently. I’ve got a long history of them. But I’m tell you she’s very angry at me and she’s very close to Marc, you know, Marc Schaffel, who wrote me another lovely email I sent you today. So I think this whole thing is rather strange and I don’t want to comment on it other than what I’ve told you.

Levin         Okay. Do we have questions from people who are watching?

Person in studio Yeah. First question is did Michael Jackson want the kids to go to college?

Klein         He wants the kids to be highly educated, absolutely, because he wants them to have the chance of education that he didn’t have. Now I have to tell you that his children, his son, you know Prince, is brilliant when it comes to photography and anything making movies. I mean, he could make a movie now. He knows how to stage it and everything. So I think that, who knows? I think they’ll outgrow college before it’s time for them to get ready for college. He wants them to be educated the way he was not. That’s what he told me. Absolutely, no question. And they’re brilliant children and their wonderful kids. And I don’t like children, remember that.

Person in studio Somebody said: Do you think it’s possible that MJ overdosed himself with propofol because he wanted to sleep so bad?

Klein          No. I don’t think he would overdose himself purposefully whatsoever.

Person in studio One person wants to know, this is from Jason: Was Michael Jackson still under the influence of propofol at his trial in 2005 when he had to be helped into court in his pyjamas?

Klein          He came to court in his pyjamas, remember? He didn’t have to be helped to court in his pyjamas.

Levin         I believe he had gone to the hospital and the judge had said he was going to hold him…

Klein         Right, and so he showed up in his…

Levin         …in contempt if he didn’t show up in time, and he showed up in his pyjamas.

Klein          And so I’m telling you that he was in the hospital and he came… in the pyjamas.

Person in studio Was he under the influence of any…?

Klein          I don’t know, who knows. I wasn’t there at the hospital…

Levin         Well, you know, but you were in contact with him at that time.

Klein          Not at that time. Not during the whole second trial. I was not.

Levin         You never talked to him?

Klein          Not during that trial.

Levin         You had a falling out?

Klein          No, it wasn’t a falling out but he was up there in that trial and I never talked to him during that trial whatsoever. There were periods of time, vast periods of time, from 2003 to now that I never spoke to him. You know that. I hadn’t spoken to him since 2003…

Levin         Who was treating him if you had been treating him consistently? When you weren’t, who was?

Klein          I have no idea but I can tell you, whoever it was they weren’t doing a good job, else his face wouldn’t have been caved in when I saw it. But, I mean, I wondered that but, I mean, when he called me from Las Vegas and said he was coming to see me and we talked on the telephone, he didn’t mention anyone but I’m sure that he must have seen someone.

Levin         There’s a guy named Chris Carter, who’s a bodyguard, who was a bodyguard for Michael Jackson, who said that he saw, and he told the sheriffs this in Santa Barbara, that he saw when Michael Jackson would go to offices, and I believe he was referring to yours as one, but offices in LA, New York and Florida, that he would go in very lucid and come out looking totally out of it.

Klein          Now one, it was not in my office, okay. Can I tell you why? Because the one he went to in New York, I know he came out crazy because he was running down the street, swallowing his tongue, okay? I told you that already.

Levin         Right.

Klein          I’m telling you, in LA he would have large doses of propofol but it wasn’t in my office.  I mean, I would walk him out and I’d walk him out with Jason, you know, we’d walk out together, and he was totally lucid. There was one day he came to my office when I felt he had something on him, okay? But I didn’t know what it was and he didn’t seem quite normal. But this is towards the last time I saw him.

Levin         You said to me that the last couple of weeks of his life you saw a radical change in him.

Klein          Absolutely. And I didn’t know what it was but there was a radical change in his behaviour and I couldn’t really put my finger on it but there was something really strange going on, and I just felt…

Levin         How did that manifest itself?

Klein          He just didn’t seem as comfortable with himself, in his own skin, as he was before, and he was a little nervous and I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, and it really was one visit more than any other visit.

But he used to… he started dancing for all my patients and singing, and he would go and meet them. And there was one girl, who was a Charlie’s Angels girl, she’s now Kevin Spacey’s manager, Joanne Horowitz, who came into the office and he danced for her for a long time, and he danced for Laurie Stark from Chrome Hearts(?) too, in my office.

He would always like to dance and sing with all the patients and can you imagine what this did to my patients? Here they’re coming in and suddenly Michael Jackson comes in the room, because he, you know, they always wanted to meet him, and I’d introduce him and then he’d start dancing around the room, doing all these body movements. So I thought that was extraordinary but he would do that in my house too because I live in, you know, that house I live in is, what? It was built in 1940, and I bought it by the way, this luxurious house, for $325,000 in ’74.

Levin         That is sick by the way.

Klein          I know, it’s18,000 square feet. It’s the old Rigby house, but it’s a neat house.

Levin         I was there on Sunday when we met and it’s shocking.

Klein          Isn’t it?

Levin         But I want to get into the manifestation of why he was so…

Klein          So he was like this all the time, but then I kept looking at his eyes and the eyes were a little glassy, you understand and there’s little things you’d pick up because I look at the body very closely, you know, and I just picked up little things about him that told me that, you know, something was not quite right and I couldn’t figure out what it was but he was not stoned, he was being stoned, he just didn’t feel right. And I felt that he didn’t really want to go to England. That’s how I read the whole thing.

Levin         The London concert?

Klein          The London concert. And it’s very…you have to know, have you ever been back stage of a performer before they go on stage? Well Tom Petty’s a really good friend of mine and I love him too and his wife Dana, and I used to sit back stage with him and they go through this whole rigmarole before they go on stage. Michael does yoga, he does meditation. So, I mean, they go through this…

It’s a big stress to do a concert and I just assumed he was going through the stress of doing these concerts but it just seemed a little bit off kilter to me, and then he was going to do fifty concerts. I was sure that he was in good physical shape. He was not the string bean they describe, you know that, when we saw him, because he had muscles everywhere when we last saw him.

Levin         But he was, see that’s…

Klein          How could they say he was emaciated when he weighed135 pounds.

Levin         Well, my understand, and I maybe wrong, but my recollection is that it was115 pounds…

Klein          No, that’s what I thought, it was135 poundsis what he weighed. I mean, I know the weight very well because I remember it very specifically.

Levin         …riddled with injection marks at the time he died…

Klein          Yeah. I haven’t seen the pictures so I don’t know that.

Levin         Riddled, riddled.

Klein          And I think that is because, what I’m telling you, is that they had lost whoever was starting the IVs, that’s what I’m trying to tell you repeatedly, and they started giving intramuscularly and that’s what we know from Murray, that he was giving multiple IM injections. The problem with IM injections, again, is propofol is very controllable as you get it intravenously. Now if you, remember when Saeed got the, gave it as a demonstration on CNN and he gave him a bolus of it and they guy stopped breathing, remember that? So they had to use an ambu bag on him and try to get him to breathe again.

Levin         I do. But when he died there was an IV in his arm, there was an IV in him.

Klein          Was it clogged or was it open?

Levin         It was open. I’m told it was open.

Klein          Well, I don’t…you know, then why did they start one in the back of his knee if it was an open IV?

Levin         I don’t know.

Klein          You see, that’s what doesn’t make sense to me. They say it was open but they had to start an IV in the back of his arm. That meant to me…

Levin         Knee. It was in the back of his knee.

Klein          Knee. That means the IV wasn’t open. If they had an open IV, why did he give an IM shot of propofol?

Levin         I don’t know the answer to that.

Klein          So I’m saying… I’ll tell you what the answer is to that – I don’t think we have the truth here, well, it only exists in one form and that’s the truth and I think the truth is that, I mean, he was very, he was in the hands of a doctor who didn’t know what he was doing. I mean, that’s obvious to me. And I think that the doctor was not competent in doing this and what you should have had if this is what he wanted, you should have someone who was very competent as a physician.

And if you wanted me to give someone propofol, I would never do it for a hundred years. You know why? It’s like telling me to do an appendectomy, I don’t know how to do it, I’ve never done it, nor would I do it for money.

Levin         I do have something else that came up when we talked on Sunday…

Klein          Sure.

Levin         …about a phone call that came to your office during the emergency when Michael Jackson was taken to the hospital, by one of Michael Jackson’s people.

Klein          Yes. Frank Dileo called the office. Now here’s the question that always remains. Who was called by Dr Murray? We know I wasn’t called, contrary to what a certain doctor said. Again, this lovely doctor said I was called. But who was called? And, I mean, is it public who was called? Do people publicly know who was called?

Levin         No.

Klein          Okay. But there’s been conjecture about many people who’s been called.

Levin         Right.

Klein          And one was a conjecture was that the head of AEG was called. That’s a conjecture. One was Frank Dileo, who used to be his manager, was called and whoever the third call was, was supposedly a patient who was suing Dr Murray. Okay? That was supposedly what the third call was about and that’s my knowledge. I can’t say for a fact and it maybe a big lie but that’s what I was told.

I was told one call went to a patient who was suing Dr Murray – that’s the first person he talks to after his patient has died, next thing went to the head of AEG, then they talked to Frank Dileo and those were the three calls. And I know fairly well, I was assured yesterday that the first call was to this patient who was very angry. So I don’t know where these calls…

Levin         What happened when Frank Dileo called to your office?

Klein          Well, he was telling us that it didn’t look very good. Now I didn’t take the call. I mean, Jason, who’s my office manager, took the call.

Levin         And what did he say.

Klein          He said that it didn’t look very well, it didn’t look very good.

Levin         Did it…my understand is there was something said about what caused Michael Jackson to have an emergency.

Klein          Yeah, and I mean you have to repeat it…I mean, I wish Jason was around to repeat it but he’s not here right now to repeat it…

Levin         Okay, fair enough.

Klein          …unless he’s in front of us because I didn’t take that call.

Levin         Fair enough.

Klein          And I can only repeat what I hear in my own ear.

Levin         Fair enough.

Klein          But you remember what he said, don’t you? You probably remember better than I do.

Levin         Well, there was so much said that I don’t want to put words in…

Klein          Well, why don’t we do this sometime again because this hasn’t been horrible and unless I get some horrible things happening on your…

Levin         That’s the TMZ review – “It hasn’t been horrible.”

Klein          No, no, what do you want me to…I think it’s been great you know. What do you folks think?

Levin         “It hasn’t been horrible.”

Klein          Do you folks have any questions for me?

Person in studio There are two more questions that kept popping up from the fans, from the audience.

Klein          From the fans?

Person      From the TMZ audience. The first. People want to know about Michael’s relationship with Janet. It’s a popular topic.

Klein          Janet’s relationship was very, very interesting, with him and Janet. He used to talk to Janet but never in front of me, and he’d tell me what Janet would tell him she would do and whether he thought it was good or bad. But I think he had a decent relationship with Janet, much better than he had with La Toya because he didn’t… to me La Toya was the woman who was doing the things about the secret minds. What was that thing she was doing about the…?

Person      Psychic…

Klein          Psychic healing, psychic…on the internet. Then she did that thing in Playboy and then she said he was a pedophile.

Person      Did Janet know that he was on drugs?

Klein          Did Janet know he was on drugs. I think the whole family knew he was on drugs.

Levin         Well you had talked about an intervention.

Klein          They made an intervention. You know, they called the doctor to make an intervention.

Person      When?

Klein          We know that they called him at least two days before. But we also…

Levin         Two days before he died?

Klein          Yes. We know that. We had that phone call and we also know that Grace was at the house. Correct? And we know that Grace talked to the family. Remember Rebbie and Grace got into a…

Person      Grace is the nanny.

Klein          The nanny. Got into a slugfest, remember that.

Levin         But this was a while before he died.

Klein          Yes, but we know that Grace knew what was happening in the house. Correct? Grace talked to the family.

Levin         Yes, but Grace…I just happen to know that Grace was in Switzerland when Michael Jackson died.

Klein          There are telephones.

Levin         Right.

Klein          I talked to Grace at that time. I called Grace, you know that? Afterwards. I talked to her all about a minute. But she lived in the house. She obviously knew what was happening in the house because Grace…he fired Grace and then re-hired Grace, remember that. So Grace obviously knew. And the family was aware. The family is not saying. They’re aware that something happened. For them to tell you that they were totally not knowledgeable of what was happening in the house…I mean, we know that Murray knew Joe Jackson, right?

Levin         Joe Jackson introduced Dr Murray to Michael Jackson.

Klein          Do you think that Joe Jackson never talked to Murray once he came to Los Angeles?

Levin         Well then, who staged the intervention? You’re saying two days before Michael Jackson died.

Klein          They called the doctor to do an intervention.

Levin         Which doctor?

Klein          I don’t want to say his name.

Levin         Not Dr Murray, clearly.

Klein          No. They called a doctor, a drug addiction specialist. And they called, all over the city, drug addiction specialists and no one wanted to intervene because once before they tried…attempted an intervention, that his plastic surgeon attempted to do with him and it was a total failure because they went up there and he had fentanyl patches all over him. So they attempted two interventions. And remember this also, they attempted to do an intervention once in Las Vegas. Remember they went to the house in Las Vegas?

Person      Right.

Klein          They attempted to go in and they couldn’t even go in the house and that’s not that long ago.

Levin         The guards kept them out.

Klein          Yeah, the guards kept them out.

Levin         But I want to go back to this two days before. So you’re saying that two days before… What caused them to be so alarmed that they would call…?

Klein          Because I think they were aware that something was happening, that there was problems with drugs in the house and they called a drug specialist, and I have that email and I can’t reveal who that name is. You have that email. Please do not say who the doctor is because I swore I would never say it. But it’s a call…that the doctor said he was, in fact, called and that they had called many doctors in the city to do an intervention on Michael prior to his death, okay? And we have that letter.

Levin         But if they were estranged essentially, from Michael Jackson, how would they be in a position to know enough that they would think there’s a problem.

Klein          I don’t think they were totally estranged to the point that I think he did, at times, talk on the phone to his mother, or to whatever, and also don’t forget, the people who worked around him talked a lot. We know that. So we certainly know that he may have been talking to members of the family. We know that Grace talked to various members of the family at various times. So we do know that people surrounding him talked to members of the family. But they attempted, the family, an intervention prior to his death. I know that.

Levin         And what happened?

Klein          The doctor refused to do anything because it had been so ineffective in the past. And so I tried to get more information out of him…

Levin         Did you know this prior to the death…

Klein          No, no. This I found out after he died.

Levin         But, you know, with all due respect, if they knew there was a problem and you’re a doctor and he was coming to see you, how come you didn’t know?

Klein          Because I didn’t go to his house at night. So I didn’t know what was happening at night in his house. Don’t forget Janet stayed at the house overnight, two days, for two days after he died and so they…and don’t forget Janet…

Levin        La Toya.

Klein         La Toya, excuse me. And La Toya lived right down the street from him, did she not? And so she’d obviously been over to the house, so La Toya must have had some knowledge of what was happening. You can’t go over to the house at night and not know that something’s happening when you meet this strange doctor there. So don’t forget…where else does La Toya have a house…so she was losing it because of money.La Toya has a house in Las Vegas.

Levin         Did the…I mean, did the kids say anything? I mean, there were oxygen tanks in this house, you had a chef there. I mean, there was this regular routine where Dr Murray… Michael Jackson would come down at 9.30 inthe morning I believe, that, you know, the doctor was in the house during the night but not in the day time, he was there every day. I mean, when you saw these oxygen tanks, did anybody say anything?

Klein          Not to me. But I’m telling you one thing, those children were in that house, correct? But we don’t know if the children understood what the oxygen tanks represented. They could think they…remember Michael used to…

Levin         Oh, I’m not suggesting that they’re to…no, what I’m saying is that you have children in the house who might raise an alarm by saying, you know, “Daddy has oxygen tanks.”

Klein          Remember when he was in the oxygen chamber years ago?

Levin         Yeah.

Klein          And they took pictures of him in an oxygen chamber?

Levin         And they thought it was more…?

Klein          Who knows what they thought. I can’t tell you what they thought but we know we have pictures of him in an oxygen chamber.

Levin         You have a chef there that sees what’s going on day-by-day-by day.

Klein          If I was there and I saw something happening I would obviously call the authorities because we know something is really wrong here and, I mean, you know, you have to know one thing, that he would come down at 9.30 every morning and have breakfast, and on the day he died he didn’t come down. So I think there’s something terribly wrong in the situation but I think we can’t use a retrospective-scope and analyse it without knowing exactly what happened on that given day.

Levin         Okay. We’re going to do one more question and call it.

Person      We’re getting a lot of people writing in, saying that you twittered yesterday, and I don’t know if it’s your twitter, that you saw the movie, and you’ve been telling us you haven’t seen the movie.

Klein          Let me tell you something. I saw the movie but I couldn’t…I saw the movie and what I saw of it was sensational, okay? I couldn’t find myself…I got really emotional during it because I’m really an emotional person. I mean, I may look strong but I don’t do well with these types of things and I had to leave, you know, so I haven’t seen every part of the movie, but I have to tell you, from what I saw, and don’t forget, I saw him wearing my clothes in the movie, which is really interesting. So if anyone finds my coat out there, it would be nice to get it back, actually two coats he was wearing of mine. But you know…

Levin         Well, that one, I apologise, because when we spoke on Sunday I thought, what I understood was you had not seen the movie.

Klein          No, I’d seen the movie and I didn’t see the whole movie because I couldn’t emotionally stand it, I really tell you one thing, I really…

Levin         Okay, sorry about that.

Klein          I’ll tell you one thing. Let me tell you something…

Person      You left in the middle?

Klein          I couldn’t make it through it because, I mean, I was far too involved with him as a person, as a human being. So here’s the thing, imagine if someone…

Have you ever lost a relative here? Have you ever lost your brother? I lost my brother and my father when I was in medical school. My mother was left on welfare. So I haven’t always been this ritzy person that you know. I put myself through Penn on a full scholarship, under grad at Penn. It wasn’t easy. You make it in the end, you somehow make it in the end and you find that people keep kicking you and the Botox case, and I kicked again when I go speaking to the FDA against all the drug companies because they’re so terribly dishonest, and you get kicked again by this Michael thing and you’ve lost someone. So you’re going through this terrible loss period of your life and you’re getting kicked in your face, it’s not really comfortable at all.

So I went to this movie and I really wanted to enjoy it. The first thing I ran into was someone who knew me there, which was the first mistake because I can’t really go out anymore because my face is recognizable. And the second thing is I found myself too emotional in the whole thing because when he started singing the song, and he was one of my close friends, I couldn’t go see a movie about Carrie or someone, you know, because I’m really close to her, if she, God forbid, something happens to these people because they’re my friends. I don’t have a lot of close friends but if you saw something, a movie, a family movie, after you’d just lost a family member, you don’t want to see it.

And also, I kept think of what you said, could I have prevented it, could I have stopped this, was I in part, responsible for this whole thing, could I have somehow recognized something I didn’t see, you know, could I have, like, really gotten into this and figured it out. And the answer is, and I’ve thought about this a lot since I saw you because I didn’t sleep well one night after I saw you, and the answer is, no, because there was nothing that really gave me a big [clue]…and I’m a good person who lives on clues. Like, I look at your mouth and I can tell you slight gnaw your teeth and things like that, which you don’t want to hear it from me but I can see that. I can live by clues…no he does because, you know…

Levin         Okay, okay.

Klein          Let’s not go there. I mean, I’ll tell you something, this is a very bright man, I’ll tell you this. You’re very good at what you do and I’m very impressed with what you do and I really…this turned out much nicer than I thought it was, because I was very frightened to do this, you know that?

Levin         And I, listen, and I appreciate you doing it for whatever…

Klein          And I hope it was informative to all of you folk…

Levin         It was really informative.

Klein          Now do you have any questions of me. Do you folks have any questions.

Person      Did you cover the question about the sleep drugs. Why…?

Levin         Yeah.

Person      Yeah, you did. Okay.

Klein          What was the question about?

Person      No, you covered it.

Levin         I had asked you the question about…

Klein          No, I mean, let me tell you one thing. We have to consider him as a gift. He was one of the greatest performers, if not the single greatest performer ever of our time. I think you’ve done an excellent job of really showing the public what we know because I told you, there’s nothing I hid from you, there’s nothing I have to hide from you. The movie’s sensational what I saw of it but to ask me to go sit through that movie right now…ask me in a year, okay?  It’s better that I… I went out and brought the video of Transformers2, avideo of that and watched that at home because I really can’t…

Person      I’m sorry. (Laughter)

Klein          I didn’t mind that little car that turns into a monster, you know. But I have to tell you the honest-to-God truth, it’s a very tender subject with me right now because I have been crucified for it. You feel like you’re a jewel in a cross again, you know? And I didn’t do anything wrong. I tell you the best thing is that I’ve done nothing wrong.

Person      Someone had a question about Jesus juice – how much you knew about the alcohol.

Klein          Jesus juice is how he referred to alcohol. It was how he referred to alcohol. But I’ll tell you something. They say he was an alcoholic but I never saw Michael drunk. So I’m telling you he would walk around his house…now he had a wine room and friends of mine found the wine room, which is under the costume…which was under the video game room and they took his wines and he had ancient wines and he never drank it all the time, so he called…Jesus juice was wine to him and he used to drink it and he thought there was nothing wrong with giving everyone in the house the wine to drink but he didn’t drink to the point of inebriation.

Levin         What about giving kids that?

Klein          I mean, giving kids that is not right.

Levin         Did he? Or did you see it?

Klein          It was written about, I never saw it.

Levin         Yeah, I mean it was written about extensively in the criminal case.

Klein          Yeah. In the criminal case it was written that he gave them Jesus juice…

Levin         Right

Klein          …gave them wine and they drank wine to him. But you have to understand, raised as a Jew… How old were you when you first had wine? At first Passover, how old were you?

Person in studio I got grape juice in a cup.

Levin         Yeah, I got grape juice in a cup.

Klein          My father was a rabbi, I got Man o shevitz.

Levin         Yeah, I remember. Man o shevitz almost made me alcohol free for a long time.

Klein          I thought all wine tastes like Man o shevitz.

Levin         Yes.

Klein          I mean, that was the same thing with me. So, I mean, being raised with the juice…

Levin         This is turning into the Jewish hour.

Klein          The Jewish hour. Yeah, Molly Goldberg will show up right away. But I have to tell you the truth being that I did an alcoholic survey in high school. I wrote a book, I think, on alcoholism and when you did a survey of all the people who drank, the Jews drank the youngest because, you know, we were drinking wine but we don’t…

Levin         Except for the French.

Klein          …we don’t make up a large amount of alcoholics. Current juice, people with traditions, but we don’t have the same traditions so they do all the drugs that we didn’t do, you know.

Levin         Okay. You know what, let’s call it right now. Thank you very much for doing this. I so appreciate it. You’ve been great.

Klein          I really appreciate doing it in the manner in which you did. You’re an honest man and I really can’t thank you enough for really allowing me to say what I feel.

Levin         And we all thank you for coming here. I mean that was…

Klein          You know, I really think it’s important to get the real story out there. I think it’s important to show the people out there what’s happening because I think that we have something…we have a family who I think is trying to blame everyone for everything wrong, they use a doctor who I think is, who did things that I think was very wrong, and I’m talking about this plastic surgeon.

And he’s trying to blame everything on me and I didn’t do that and I think everything will eventually come out of this and I just don’t want to be tortured anymore by this. I mean, it really…with all the paparazzi my office was shut down for a long period of time and it was very difficult. But I think right now, I think I’ve told you everything I know and if I think of a few more things we could do this again if questions come in.

Levin         I would like to.

Klein          …question come in because I enjoyed doing it. You’re easy to talk to and you’re easy to tell the truth to and that’s what I have to offer you, nothing more than the truth, okay?

Levin         I appreciate it, I really appreciate it.

Klein          Me too. You really have a good day.

Transcribed by Bev