A former celebrity bodyguard has spoken out about his experience working with Michael Jackson less than three years before his death.
When the 'Thriller' hitmaker visited the London, England, in November 2006, Simon Newton was one of a host of bodyguards hired to protect him for his 10-day visit to the UK.
You'd imagine that it could be difficult, given the controversy that had surrounded him in his later years, and it seems like that was the case for a 27-year-old Simon Newton - who described the experience as 'consistently horrendous'.
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Having served a number of years in the British military as a mechanical engineer in the Middle East, he soon found himself working as a close protection officer for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Afghanistan.
After leaving that post, he returned to London to work as a bodyguard. He has guarded Kendall Jenner, Rita Ora, Bella Hadid, as well as billionaire royals from the Middle East.
The hardest of all his tasks was looking after the 'King of Pop', with Jackson having flown over for the World Music Awards.
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"The biggest thing with him was just his fan base - it was huge," 46-year-old Newton explained.
"We had people paying for black cabs on meters all day, just so they were sitting there and they could jump in whenever we left to follow us, literally just everywhere we went.
"The biggest problem we had was crowd management, you know, trying to get him in and out. We always used to get the car door almost up on the pavement, right into the doorway of where we were going, the property we were going into."
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He added: "There wasn't any sort of like immediate threat as such, but just fans, overzealous fans, maybe trying to grab him or touch him - that's, that's probably the biggest thing. I've never looked after anyone else since him, with that sort of fan base."
His efforts of guarding the likes of Jenner, Ora, and Hadid were much less eventful, and in 2018, he packed his career up to concentrate on his passion - acting.
Having featured as an extra in the 2011 Guy Ritchie film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, he is now hoping his career in Hollywood will soon to take off just like his fashion label Simon Newton London has.
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Two and a half years after Newton protected Jackson, the singer died of a heart attack at the age of 50 on June 25, 2009.
Coroners concluded his death was caused by acute propofol intoxication - the anaesthetic Jackson had used to help him sleep.
The death was ruled a homicide and in 2011, Jackson's doctor Conrad Murray was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to four years in jail.
Topics: Celebrity, Kendall Jenner, Michael Jackson, Music, London, Fashion, Hollywood
Joe Yates