As the Jackson family’s wrongful death lawsuit against tour promoter AEG continues, more details about the deteriorating health of Michael Jackson in the months before his death in 2009 are being made public. During testimony on Friday, an expert said that the King of Pop went 60 days without real sleep before his death.
Harvard Medical School sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler said that Jackson hadn’t had REM (rapid eye movement) sleep in 60 days. Each night, Dr. Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, would administer a dosage of propofol, which no sleep expert would do.
“The symptoms that Mr. Jackson was exhibiting were consistent with what someone might expect to see of someone suffering from total sleep deprivation over a chronic period,” Czeisler said, reports CNN.
According to The Huffington Post, the propofol would only make the patient feel like they were having a full night’s sleep, even if the person didn’t have REM sleep. That is essential to keeping the brain and body working. Czeisler called the ‘sleep’ caused by propofol a “drug-induced coma,” not actual sleep.
Czeisler testified about a test done on rats that showed that they could only survive five weeks without REM sleep. He said that this test had never been tried on a human before Murray went ahead and gave Jackson 60 nights of propofol doses. Murray had told police that he was trying to wean Jackson off the drug starting on June 22, 2009, just three days before Jackson died.
“It would be like eating some sort of cellulose pellets instead of dinner,” Czeisler explained. “Your stomach would be full, and you would not be hungry, but it would be zero calories and not fulfill any of your nutrition needs.”
According to The Associated Press, Czeisler is being paid $950 an hour to testify. He started after Katherine Jackson’s attorney gave a 17-minute summary of the evidence Czeisler used.
Jackson’s mother, Katherine, and his children are suing AEG, claiming that they were negligent by hiring Murray to be JAckson’s doctor while he prepared for the This Is It shows. AEG says that it was not responsible for hiring him and didn’t know he was using propofol.