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“Somebody didn’t protect my friend.”
Quite a few people were thrown under the bus on FX and Hulu’s New York Times documentary “Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson” — and now one of them is hitting back.
The doc reexamined Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s 2003 Super Bowl half time show, a show which ended with Janet’s nipple being exposed by Justin on live television.
According to Senior VP of MTV Salli Frattini, who was interviewed for the special, Janet and her stylist Wayne Scot Lukas went rogue after the costumes had been approved, spending money on new fabric and a starburst nipple cover at the last minute. She also alleged that when Timberlake arrived at the stadium the day of the performance, he was whisked to her dressing room to speak with Janet and Wayne for “a small conversation that lasted minutes,” without any producers around.
“My instincts told me that there was a private conversation between wardrobe stylists and artists where someone thought this would be a good idea and it backfired,” she added.
While Lukas didn’t appear in the doc, he told “Access Hollywood” he was asked to participate and declined because Janet asked him to turn it down. Claiming he recently received death threats, he decided to speak with Access and share his side of the story.
“I was a work for hire, I was hired to do a job and I did exactly what I was supposed to do,” he told the publication. “If I work with someone who’s a dancer, you have to be able to dance in a wardrobe and it has to never fall apart. I stand 100% by my story that I did exactly what I was supposed to do, what I was hired for and if I ever hurt my friend, I wouldn’t have worked with Janet for six years after the Super Bowl. I would have been fired that day.”
As for what went wrong, he put the blame on producers for not cutting the cameras to black before her bare breast was shown on television.
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“You were never supposed to see a movement where a breast was out, a body part was out. It was never supposed to be lingering on something that they say was this terrible thing for such a long time. They were supposed to cut to black,” he alleged. “You were supposed to get the idea of, ‘I’m gonna have you naked by the end of this song,’ nobody was supposed to be naked. And I’ve never said that. Somebody didn’t push the button. Somebody didn’t protect my friend.”
Fatttini adamantly denied this account, telling Access, “This is a false statement as per all of my comments previously written and now broadcast.”
Wayne said he and Timberlake “haven’t spoken since he blamed me” for everything that went down. “[He] came off the stage and said, ‘it’s just a little wardrobe malfunction, we all want to give you something to think about.’ He coined that phrase,” said the stylist, “And when he said that I thought ‘friendship over.’”
“Wardrobe malfunction? I don’t malfunction,” he added. “I was a professional stylist, $10,000 a day back then. I can’t fail.”
Lukas added that he has spoken with Jackson since the documentary aired and she allegedly told him not to speak with the press. “Lukas don’t talk to anybody, just let this go. We’re gonna handle this in January, I’m going to talk about this in January,” he said she claimed, likely referring to her upcoming A&E documentary, “Janet,” which drops January 2022.
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