Michael Jackson's dermatologist denied on Wednesday that the entertainer was undergoing skin lightening out of a desire to deny his black heritage, according to local media reports.
The doctor also said he never gave the pop star dangerous sedatives such as Diprivan.
"That's absolutely false," Arnold Klein said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America" in reference to Jackson's skin care.
Klein said Jackson suffered from lupus. "And then I had to deal with vitiligo, the loss of pigment, and that was also a very traumatic thing to do, because they are both autoimmune diseases ... and so, I had to go through this whole process with him by keeping him looking relatively normal."
The pigment condition made Jackson look "like a leopard with speckles all over," Klein said. "He had to even out (his) skin tone.
"And I think that his black heritage is something that he lived with very strongly. ... He was very close to everyone who was black in entertainment. And so I don't think in any way he didn't want to be black. What he wanted to be was the world's greatest entertainer."
Refuting allegations that he gave the pop star dangerous drugs, Klein said "I was not one of the doctors who participated in giving him overdoses of drugs or too much of anything. In fact, I was the one who limited everything, who stopped everything."
Klein said he sedated Jackson in the past for painful medical procedures but never administered dangerous sedatives like Diprivan, also known as propofol.
He said he doesn't even know to use the sedative, which is reported to have been found at the rented Holmby Hills mansion where Jackson died on June 25. The drug is to be administered only by an anesthesiologist.
A nurse has said Jackson once asked her for the drug to help him sleep, which horrified her.
Klein blasted plastic surgeons who treated Jackson over the years.
"... He was in the hands of plastic surgeons, who didn't know when to stop their work," he said.
He said his efforts to steer Jackson away from plastic surgeons was complicated because the pop star "felt he was a piece of art --that his face was a piece of art, that he wanted it to be really thrilling for people to view it."
Klein also said the singer did not appear ill when he saw him recently.
"He danced in my office," he said. "He danced for my patients."
Klein was asked if he could be the biological father of Jackson's two older children, who were carried and delivered by Debbie Rowe, who was a nurse in Klein's office.
"To the best of my knowledge, I'm not the father of these children," Klein said. "I can't answer it in any other way."
The cause of Jackson's death has been listed as deferred, pending the results of toxicology tests, which typically take around six weeks, and neuropathy tests, which require the brain to have hardened -- a process that takes about two weeks. Part of Jackson's brain remains with the Los Angeles County coroner.
(Xinhua News Agency July 9, 2009)
