Jermaine Jackson had a year-long affair with Whitney Houston, it has been claimed. The older brother ‘Thriller’ hitmaker Michael Jackson is said to have inspired the video for late singer’s 1985 single ‘Saving All My Love For You’, which tells the story of a woman’s romance with a married man, with the singer even hiring a lookalike of him for the footage.
The Sun Sunday has now claimed that while the 57-year-old singer’s affair ended after a year, the pair never lost touch, with Houston comforting him following Michael’s death in 2009. When Houston tragically lost her life last month, the ‘Somebody’s Watching Me’ hitmaker was left grief-stricken by the passing of his close friend and alleged former lover.
“Her death has devastated Jermaine because of the history between them,” the Daily Mail quoted a source as telling The Sun Sunday. “No one understood the scale of his grief because they didn’t know what they shared,” the source said.
It is claimed that their began in 1984 when Jermaine was married to Hazel Gordy.
While Jermaine wrote about his friendship with the late singer in the HarperCollins book he released last year ‘You are Not Alone: Michael, Through A Brother’s Eyes’, he has never spoken about reported affair. But in the tome he does write that he struggled with his feelings for Whitney, although put them aside for the sake of his marriage.
“As much as I wanted to lose myself in all these feelings, I told her to wait. Ultimately, we had to go our separate ways and it killed us both,” he wrote.
However, the source added that Jermaine had deliberately left intimate details of hisrelationship with Whitney out of his book to make it sound as if they were just friends rather than lovers.
“The reason it ended was because Jermaine wouldn’t leave his wife - and Whitney was angry. The video for Saving All My Love For You was about all of that,” the source said. In his book, Jermaine also revealed that Michael had warned him off pursuing an intimaterelationship with Whitney.
“He didn’t fuel the temptation as some guys would. He reminded me about Hazel, about family,” Jermaine wrote.
Jermaine and Hazel split three years after his reported affair with Whitney, following a 14-year marriage. He has since had three long-term relationships, and is now married to Halima Rashid - his third wife.
