News footage of Katherine Jackson from a story about her chronically ill daughter (WANE).
An Indiana woman who garnered public sympathy for her ill daughter was allegedly caught lying about the true nature of the girl's condition.
According to court documents obtained by WANE, a local CBS affiliate, Katherine Jackson, 41, was charged by prosecutors with felony neglect and fraud. Jackson had appeared on WANE in the past as she raised awareness and sought gifts for her young daughter, who had what Jackson allegedly claimed was a terminal genetic disorder.
Prosecutors said that while the daughter had a genetic condition, it was chronic, not terminal. Investigators who worked on the case also accused Jackson of allegedly neglecting to refill medications that were prescribed to her daughter.
Going back several years, Jackson made several allegedly false claims about her young daughter having a genetic condition called Pilarowski-Bjornsson Syndrome (PBS), as well as an additional disease known as Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome (LGS). The symptoms of LGS, Jackson apparently claimed on a GoFundMe page in 2021, caused her daughter to experience "80-90 seizures per day."
Seizures can be a symptom of PBS, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The GoFundMe page, which was first posted in July 2021, stated that the then-5-year-old only had six months to a year to live, and that it was her dream to go to Walt Disney World. Her story got the attention of the Make-A-Wish Foundation as well as WANE, which ran a story on the child's illness in August 2022.
Jackson told WANE at the time, "Only 10 people in the whole world ever had it and she's the only survivor. It's called Pilarowski-Bjornsson Syndrome. She will never get better."
Court documents stated that while the girl was confirmed to have PBS, Jackson misrepresented the nature of the disease, which is not terminal but chronic.
But the medications the girl needed were not being made available to her, prosecutors said.
Three weeks after the 2022 WANE story, Jackson took her daughter to the hospital, where doctors suspected that there was medical abuse going on. The girl had continued to have seizures and other symptoms despite being prescribed medications to treat them.
Doctors at Peyton Manning Children's Hospital in Indianapolis reportedly discovered that Jackson was not refilling the medications that were being prescribed for her daughter. Following that hospital visit, Jackson's other two children — who were ages 5 and 6 at the time — were put in foster care. The foster parents reportedly told authorities that neither child was potty trained or in school.
Jackson was charged with one count of fraud and two counts of neglect of a dependent. All the charges are felonies.
UPDATE: Tracey Harkins, an attorney representing Jackson, provided a statement to Law&Crime that called the attacks on her client "baseless." Harkins also said that Jackson "did not lie about the disease to receive any support from the Make-A-Wish Foundation and is extremely grateful for their contributions — so much so that all the funds in the GoFundMe account, which was set up by a friend, were donated by Ms. Jackson back to the Make-A-Wish Foundation — all of which can be confirmed with documentation."
The statement added, "At no point in time did Ms. Jackson lie, exploit, or exaggerate the truth of her daughter's illness. The claim that Ms. Jackson was not providing her children with the proper medication after days of being in the ER is not only absurd, given that said care was now the responsibility of medical staff, but also false." Harkins concluded by saying "we look forward to watching the truth prevail in court."
