Alfonso Ribeiro on His Friendship With Michael Jackson: “It Was Very Different From What People Would See in the Media”
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Actor Alfonso Ribeiro recalls meeting Michael Jackson at twelve, the friendship that followed their iconic Pepsi commercial, and a $100,000 tabloid offer made to his father to smear their friend.
Alfonso Ribeiro was a rising twelve-year-old performer starring in The Tap Dance Kid on Broadway when he was chosen to appear alongside Michael Jackson and his brothers in their iconic 1984 “Pepsi Generation” commercial.
Alfonso meets Michael for the first time
Alfonso’s first meeting with Michael took place in the rehearsal hall for the Pepsi commercial. The children were learning the dance moves with choreographer Michael Peters when Michael walked into the room¹.
“Literally, it was like our jaws dropped,” Ribeiro recalled. “He was incredible to us. He was so warm and nice.”
What began on the Pepsi set did not end when filming wrapped. Ribeiro invited Michael to see him perform on Broadway, and the two continued to see each other whenever their paths crossed.
“Michael and I clicked in terms of being able to talk to each other because we were both sort of celebrities, as they call it,” Ribeiro explained in 1993.
Like Macaulay Culkin and Corey Feldman, Alfonso Ribeiro was already navigating the intense world of show business at a young age when he met Michael. Having grown up in the spotlight himself, Michael understood that experience firsthand, and their friendship continued well beyond their work together.
Michael later invited Ribeiro and his father to the Jacksons’ Victory Tour concert in New York.
“He invited my dad and me to one of the greatest nights of my life,” Ribeiro recalled. “We went to see his concert in New York. Afterward, my dad and I went to his hotel room and hung out with him.”
“We went up there and danced for several hours in the middle of the night,” he said. “It was incredible.”
Alfonso’s father, Michael Ribeiro, also became friends with Jackson.
“My dad and Michael also became friends,” he said. “It was very cool that we could all hang out and talk. My dad was very impressed with who Michael was, especially as a cop.”
“Michael was an intelligent, well-grounded individual. It was very different from what people would see in the media. It was a very different relationship from what people saw.”
Ribeiro explained that they would continue to see Michael when they travelled to California. “Every once in a while, we would see each other,” he recalled. “It was always all of us hanging out.”
“I would come to Los Angeles and I would go to the Encino house [the Jackson family residence]. I met all the animals. I met Louie the llama. [Michael] also had a bunch of birds. Bubbles wasn’t there that day… But I met Janet Jackson.”
Alfonso Ribeiro Defends Michael After the 1993 Allegations
By the time the Chandler allegations against Michael became public in August 1993, Ribeiro was at the height of his early television career, already famous as Carlton Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Less than three weeks after the story broke, he appeared as a panelist on Geraldo and publicly came to Michael’s defense.
“Was there ever a time during that three-day period when you felt uncomfortable around Michael Jackson?” Geraldo Rivera asked him.
“Not at all,” Ribeiro replied. “At twelve years old, I thought Michael was like one of your buddies, just the type of person you felt totally comfortable with.”
“Nothing hanky-panky?”
“Not at all. Not at all.”
“Do you believe these allegations?”
“No, not at all,” Alfonso answered. “I think they’re preposterous.”
But the most disturbing moment in the interview came when Alfonso turned from defending Michael to describing how the press had tried to buy a very different account from his own family.
Alfonso then disclosed that a tabloid had offered his father, Michael Ribeiro, $100,000 to say anything negative about Michael Jackson.
The Ribeiros refused.
They were not alone. Years later, musician and Jackson family friend Ronald Newt revealed that the National Enquirer had offered him $200,000 for a story alleging that Michael Jackson had sexually molested his sons.
Families were being offered six-figure sums to rewrite their friendships with Michael Jackson with damning accusations.
The more troubling question is how many of the stories that filled newspapers, television programs and documentaries came from people who did not refuse.
Alfonso Ribeiro Against Wade Robson
Decades later, and years after Michael Jackson’s death, Alfonso still found himself defending their friendship.
In May 2013, Wade Robson – who had defended Michael for years, including under oath during the 2005 trial – filed a civil claim alleging that Michael had abused him.
Alfonso was openly skeptical.
“It just seems interesting to me that there’s a lawsuit going,” he said. “If [Wade Robson] puts his name on a lawsuit, then there’s possible money to be made. A lot of things have gone wrong for [Wade] in his career. It’s just interesting.”
Ribeiro acknowledged that he had not been present during Wade’s interactions with Michael. His own experience, however, had left him firmly convinced of Michael’s innocence.
“I’ve always stood up and said that I don’t believe that Michael has ever done that,” he said.
“Michael was young at heart – he was young in his mind – and in no way will I ever believe that Michael has ever done anything illegal with anybody. And no one’s ever going to make me believe that.”
“Being a kid and being twelve, thirteen and fourteen, knowing Michael Jackson and hanging out with Michael, it never occurred, it never seemed like it could have occurred,” Alfonso later explained. “There was nothing ever questionable. I simply won’t believe it.”
“I will always believe that Michael never did anything wrong,” he wrote. “That was my experience with him. Civil suit??? That’s about money.”
Since the allegations first surfaced in 1993, the media has continued to recast Alfonso’s friendship with Michael through sinister innuendo and ridicule.
Alfonso Pushes Back Against Innuendos
Since the allegations first surfaced in 1993, the media has continued to recast Alfonso’s friendship with Michael through sinister innuendo and ridicule.
During a 2022 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, for example, he recalled a watch Michael had given him at the end of the Pepsi commercial shoot. Kimmel responded by making the gift sound unusual and suspicious because Alfonso had been twelve years old. Ribeiro immediately clarified that it was simply a Transformer-style children’s watch. And when he told the story of the night he and Michael had danced together for hours at a hotel, he firmly shut down the host’s insinuations.
“I don’t want people thinking anything, because you all have dirty minds,” he said. “We were cool. Y’all are all wrong.”
Alfonso stood his grounds.
“My memory, ultimately, is that he was very childlike,” he said. “I didn’t look at him as an adult. I looked at him like another teenager I was hanging out with.”
“It was no different from hanging out with a friend. It didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, this is an adult,’ because there really isn’t that much difference between a teenager and an adult, except that adults have this jaded perspective. They’re like, ‘You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to fit inside this box.’”
“There was none of that with him. He had a happy, enjoyable personality. It was just like hanging out with a friend.”
Four decades after they first met, Ribeiro continued to remember Michael with the same warmth.
“He is one of the greatest icons of all time and was a great individual,” he wrote. “It was an honor to work with and learn from him.”
“It was a dream come true that you didn’t know you even had,” he said in 2024. “It was very special.”
For four decades, others tried to impose a different story on their friendship – tabloids willing to pay for a lie, media figures searching for dirty insinuations, and attempts to turn innocent memories into something suspicious. Ribeiro never accepted that version. To him, it was and remains a warm, genuine friendship with someone he knew personally – and a memory he has never allowed anyone else to rewrite for him.
¹ According to Ribeiro, his casting in the Pepsi commercial came through Pepsi and members of the commercial’s creative team. Director Bob Giraldi and choreographer Michael Peters had both worked with Alfonso before and independently recommended him to Pepsi, which then contacted him and offered him the role. He did not meet Michael Jackson until rehearsals began.
Sources
Geraldo – Alfonso Ribeiro appearance on “Victim or Violator? Panel Decides if the Michael Jackson Allegations Are True,” September 13, 1993
Alfonso Ribeiro interview with Kat Tales TV, May 15, 2013
Alfonso Ribeiro interview with Kit Hoover for Access Hollywood, August 2013
Alfonso Ribeiro appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, May 11, 2022
Alfonso Ribeiro interview with Jeff Zito for Celebrity Jobber, March 2024
Alfonso Ribeiro red carpet interview with Variety, April 28, 2026
Alfonso Ribeiro on X, May 16, 2013
Alfonso Ribeiro on Facebook, April 17, 2012
Alfonso Ribeiro on Facebook, November 2, 2014
Alfonso Ribeiro on Facebook, June 25, 2015
Ron Newt interview with VladTV, February 2016
Lisa D. Campbell, Michael Jackson: The King of Pop’s Darkest Hour (Branden Publishing Company, 1994).
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