“What became his compulsion with cosmetic surgery,” Chopra told me, “was an expression of self-mutilation, a total lack of respect for himself. He was so ashamed of his body image, he had no self-esteem. It was only on stage, when performing, that he became someone comfortable in his own skin. It was there that he was no longer a person in emotional distress, but instead someone dancing in the world of the Spirit.”

In 2005, after Jackson was acquitted in his sexual-abuse trial, the singer came to spend a few days with the Chopras before leaving for an extended stay in the United Arab Emirates.

“And that was the first time he ever asked me for a prescription,” Chopra told me. He wanted oxycodone, a powerful opiate pain reliever. Chopra refused. Jackson pleaded with him.

“You are my friend,” Jackson said. “I have a lot of pain.”

Chopra stood firm: “I was alarmed.” When Chopra began making quiet inquiries with mutual friends, he quickly learned that the singer “was getting a lot of stuff from a lot of people. He had doctors in Miami, doctors in Los Angeles, everywhere.”

The next day, Jackson decided to leave. But before he did, Chopra sat him down and asked him, as a friend, to come clean about his drug use. “I don’t want to talk about it,” the singer told him.

Over the next several years, the two stayed in touch, but they never discussed Jackson’s drug use until someone close to Jackson came and asked Chopra for help to intervene with the singer.  When Jackson discovered what they were up to, he temporarily stopped talking to both his friend and to Chopra. Subsequently, the Jackson family tried its own failed intervention.

“There was no one then, not even his mother, who could get through to him,” Deepak told me. “That is because although he trusted me, he could not eventually reveal all of himself to me. He could not do that to anyone. He did not know how to trust anyone with his soul.”

Two days before he died, Jackson called and left Chopra a cellphone message. “I want to share some good news with you,” he said.