Katherine Jackson has lost custody of Michael Jackson's three children after a judge awarded temporary guardianship of Prince, Paris and Blanket to their cousin Tito Joe "TJ" Jackson Jr.
The news comes after the 82-year-old Jackson matriarch "disappeared" earlier this week, and was later found recovering from ill health at an Arizona spa.
Katherine told ABC News (in the US) she was "devastated" that her grandchildren had been "taken away" from her.
As for why she never called to notify her three wards of her "short vacation", she said, "One reason I didn't call is, I just gave up my phone and I didn't want to have any phone calls while I was here."
According to Radar Online, Katherine's attorney Perry Sanders expects to be back in court within the next several days to have her custody of Michael's children reinstated.
Meanwhile, TJ, the son of Michael's brother Tito, now has access to funds from the US$500m estate to help him care for the children, who are believed to be in favour of him being their temporary guardian.
During the custody hearing, TJ recounted a strange phone conversation he had with Katherine during her time away, saying, "I've never heard my grandmother talk like that."
"She wasn't sharp. The pauses, choice of vocabulary... she has not used certain phrases like that before."
While Judge Mitchell Beckloff said that he did not believe TJ's application was a "power play", Randy Jackson took to Twitter to condemn his nephew's "performance in court":
"Trust me — the Executors are behind this. The "powers that be" use tabloid media to spin their lies and divide our family," Randy later tweeted.
Speaking of Twitter, things have toned down a lot on 14-year-old Paris' profile. Just one day after her personal family tweets led to an altercation with aunt Janet, Paris has shown remorse, tweeting, "A lot of ppl have been saying that i 'changed' ... I wanna apologize for the attitude ... there's just a lot going on ... I promise: the ego = gone (:"
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