"What made that incident so inexplicable was that he was an OVER-protective father," Boteach says.

Others who've been close to Jackson in the past agree. When the children stayed in hotels, says one photographer who spent several years working for Jackson, his handlers had long lists of all the foods the children could and could not eat. He was afraid of allergies but also poisoning, says the photographer, Ian Barkley. At the ranch, Jackson would not let the children roam far for fear of coyotes, he says.

When Barkley spoke to the kids himself, he was impressed. "Paris and (the older) Prince really blew me away with how smart they were. They were really well-mannered and nice." And Jackson made sure they kept up with their studies. "Once I heard him ask the nanny if the kids had done their homework that day, and they hadn't yet and he was really not happy."

Yet Jackson also indulged his children in extravagances — he was known to rent out entire movie theaters so he and his kids could see a first-run movie in peace, said close friend Uri Geller, the entertainer, who accompanied the family on one such outing.

"The times I've seen Michael with his kids, he was simply a great father," says Geller. "When I saw him alone in London, the first thing he said is how much he missed them. I know he loved them, and they loved him."

US Weekly editor Janice Min, whose magazine reported on Jackson's children this week, was surprised to discover how positive an outlook many Jackson associates had on the kids and their lives. "I would have thought it was a very gloom-and-doom picture, but across the board, everyone talked about these nice and seemingly normal kids," she says.

Still, for many people, the hardest thing to get past about Jackson's parenting style was those facial disguises. Geller, for one, is convinced the family saw it as a game. "It was a private joke on the media between Michael and the kids — the kids loved it," Geller says. "That's what Michael told me."

But others speak of more serious reasons. Stacy Brown, a former Jackson family confidant who fell out with the family at the time of the 2005 molestation trial — he was a prosecution witness — says Michael was truly afraid of kidnapping. But also, Brown notes, there was a strategy: If the kids wore masks when they were with Jackson, they could go safely unmasked when they weren't with him.

Still, says Brown, who co-wrote "The Man Behind the Mask," a Jackson biography, "mentally, it was just not right. Why put a mask on these beautiful children?"

There may be another, more poignant reason. "He detested the media interest in whether he looked like his children," says Boteach, the rabbi. "I think that was another concern. Those rumors were hurtful to them."