Was Michael Jackson Castrated to Insure his 3-Octave Voice?

A few years after his death, news linking late King of Pop Michael Jackson with abuse of prescription drugs made the rounds again, as a French doctor alleged that Michael Jackson owed his legendary three octave voice to chemical castration.

Alain Branchereau, an opera buff and professor of vascular surgery at Timone University Hospital in France’s Mediterranean port of Marseille, told the French News Agency AFP that he discussed Jackson’s unusual range with colleagues and they deduced that the Pop Star might have been accidentally castrated through medications used to treat acne – a condition Jackson suffered from at the age of 12.

Experts say that Jackson might have used Cyproterone – a drug used widely for the treatment of acne in the sixties and seventies and until the development of leuprolide, cyproterone was one of the few drugs used to treat precocious puberty. It was also used in animal experimentation to investigate the actions of androgens in fetal sexual differentiation. Cyproterone is an anti-androgen, which works by suppressing the production of testosterone – the male hormone.

A 1966 experiment investigated a ‘homosexual model’ looking at the effect of anti-androgens on sexual behavior and preference. Speculations became rife that the prolonged use of the drug might have been deliberately inflicted on the then teen-star as a means of protecting his vocal assets. In the opinion of Alain Branchereau, Jackson had the “voice of a castrato!“.