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Remember the baby Janet Jackson was rumored to have conceived with then-husband James DeBarge and given up for adoption? Well James supposedly tells Radar Online that a young woman claiming to be his daughter recently reached out to him, wanting a paternity test.

“Someone had contacted me. She spoke to me by email,” he said. “The first time was two years ago. I have not been able to directly see her face-to-face.”

As Janet prepares to have a baby at age 50 with new hubby Wissam Al Mana, rumors of this secret love child have come roaring back.

DeBarge said the woman asked if they could take a paternity test, but it hasn’t happened yet because he’s afraid to meet her. He said the woman claimed that Janet was her biological mother.

“She did but without saying [it],” he said. “She was angry because another child was trying to come forward and say that she was our child. So she did out of anger.”

DeBarge says the woman wanted to keep their new connection private.

“She called me ‘papa,’” DeBarge said. “She didn’t want to get her mom in trouble. She wanted to do it quietly. She didn’t even want Janet to know.”

“She described as much as she could tell me because she was very fearful at the time,” he continued. “She was very angry about people running with this story about this [other child] being my baby. She got very angry. She’s like, ‘Papa I want to help you out.’ She had so much of personality and she was so accurate with everything she was saying, it was only things that I and Janet know. No one else but God, me and Janet.”

In the interview, James says he does believe that Janet gave birth to a baby girl when they were married and kept the pregnancy a secret from him. DeBarge claims that in the emails he received from the woman, he was told that Jackson had allegedly put her up for adoption.

“One of her adoptive parents died,” he said. “Her adoptive mother and on her death bed said she told her. She confirmed it on the deathbed.”

James said he always had his suspicions that Janet had a baby. “I hadn’t known for sure,” he said. “I went on a search. Someone went through some serious changes to make it impossible for me to find. This had to be some serious inside work being done with the paperwork. Someone was working with them.”

So when the girl emailed him, DeBarge was overwhelmed by emotions.

“I was hurt and I didn’t know why I was hurt,” he said. “I think I was hurt because I had mixed emotions. I felt kind of left out and I felt like it was unfair. At first, I felt like this was the worst thing in the world that happened to me. I was so depressed by it at first.”

DeBarge claims that he wouldn’t have cut the girl out of his life had he known she existed for sure.

“It would have to be hidden from me if she wasn’t a part of my life all the time and I didn’t know anything about her,” he explained. “There’s no way it could not have been hidden. I didn’t know. Had I known, I would never have kept it a [secret]. I would have been very proud of her.”

According to DeBarge, he believes Jackson didn’t tell him about the child because of “fear.”

“Fear and lots of pressure,” he noted. “From every angle, from inside and outside… Not knowing how it could hurt her career. A lot of outside influences were involved in our whole relationship to where we didn’t have a chance from the gate.”

DeBarge also says that people gave him and Jackson a hard time about their relationship even before the baby rumors started.

“They didn’t want us to have anything,” he said. “There were times when I was jumped, physically, and attacked. It was dangerous to the point that I was afraid to go outside.”

That same article claimed that the DeBarge family launched an investigation to find the child.

And in an open letter published in the magazine that same year, DeBarge himself cried out to Jackson to reveal the truth to him.

“I don’t care how no good I was,” he said in that letter. “I feel like you should have gotten in contact with me about the baby.”

“I don’t want to live the rest of my life not knowing the truth,” DeBarge begged. “I just want my child to know I’m her father.”

(Photo: Screenshot from Dr. Drew show)

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