Rowe Wants Kids— or More Cash

After Debbie Rowe announced she wanted custody of Michael Jackson’s two older children, her lawyer “scrambled to say she had reached no final decision,” writes Michael Daly for the New York Daily News. Which means she could probably still be persuaded to, say, accept another big payment to relinquish her parental rights for the third time. So far she’s received more than $4 million, plus a house.

Rowe voiced barely any “difficulty detaching from her offspring and the matter seemed closed until Jackson's death,” Daly continues. “If she really does want custody, that could turn into a messy fight whose primary victims would be the kids”—and the kindest thing would be “to leave them with their younger sibling, their grandmother, and the nanny who has been the closest thing to a mother they have known.” (More Debbie Rowe stories.)