40 Years After Its Release, Fans Still Want to Know If There Was a Real ‘Billie Jean’

It’s been over 40 years since Michael Jackson dropped “Billie Jean” and changed the music landscape forever, but his legacy and impact are still felt today. Now that the song has found its way back to the number one spot on the Billboard 200 chart, all these years later, and with his biopic “Michael” still number one at the box office, we’ve been thinking about how the iconic song came to be in the first place.

“Billie Jean” hit the airwaves in January 1983 as the second single from Jackson’s 1982 album, “Thriller.” The groundbreaking music video was released just two months later, after a contentious back and forth between Jackson, his agent John Branca, CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff, and MTV (a platform that had never played a music video by a Black artist before).

But what exactly was “Bille Jean” all about? Contrary to popular belief and according to Jackson himself, it wasn’t really about a specific woman named Billie Jean. Per the singer’s 1988 autobiography, “Moonwalk,” the name just symbolized all the groupies he and his brothers encountered throughout their careers.

“There never was a real Billie Jean. The girl in the song is a composite of people my brothers have been plagued with over the years. I could never understand how these girls could say they were carrying someone’s child when it wasn’t true,” Jackson said at the time.

However, Jackson’s biographer, J. Randy Taraborrelli, would later return in 1991 to explain that the song actually did stem from a specific incident. According to multiple reports and Taraborrelli’s book “The Magic and the Madness,” the “Baby Be Mine” singer allegedly began receiving multiple letters from a woman claiming that he’d fathered a child with her two years before the song was released—despite the two having never met.

The letters kept coming, and began to take a negative toll on Jackson’s mental health. Things finally reached a breaking point after the fan sent a package to his home that included a picture of her and a gun with instructions to kill himself at a certain time. In return, she’d do the same to her and their alleged child so that they could all “reunite” in the next lifetime together. Thankfully, the woman didn’t go through with it, and Jackson later found out that she’d been sent to a psychiatric ward.

Whether Jackson or Taraborrelli’s version of events is the real truth, we’ll never really know, but you’ve got to admit—the lore behind this song makes it that much more of a compelling listen!