Michael Jackson’s two eldest children remain protectors of his legacy but Prince and Paris are also forging their own paths as artists and activists.

As unusual as it might have looked from the outside, Paris Jackson‘s childhood—and the values that came with it—felt normal to her, though in hindsight she’s realized that she didn’t have your average upbringing.

“It was difficult, a blessing, a privilege to be able to experience so much at a young age,” Michael Jackson‘s only daughter explained to Naomi Campbell in a recent chat on the supermodel’s No Filter With Naomi series. “And my dad was really good about making sure we were cultured, making sure we were educated, and not just showing us, like, the glitz and glam, like hotel-hopping five-star places. But it was also like, we saw everything. We saw third-world countries and we saw, like, every part of the spectrum.”

And when Naomi suggested that Paris was too famous to have to go through a casting call for a modeling job at this point (“They know who you are,” the supermodel said), Paris thought that was sweet but quickly added, “I’m also a full believer that I should earn everything…I go to auditions, I work hard, I study scripts, I do my thing and it’s—even growing up it was about earning stuff. If we wanted five toys from FAO Schwartz or Toys R’ Us, we had to read five books It’s about earning it, not just being entitled to certain things or thinking, ‘Oh, I got this.’ It’s like, working for it, working hard for it. It’s an accomplishment.”

But that being said, “they” do know who she is, as do so many others.

Michael Jackson died in 2009, when Paris was 11, but her life then and now as the child of one of the most famous (and endlessly scrutinized) entertainers on the planet also gave her and older brother Prince Jackson a heightened awareness of just how often what the public thinks it knows doesn’t necessarily match up with what’s really happening behind closed doors.

Watch: What Paris & Prince Jackson’s Lives Look Like Today

The premiere of the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, in which two grown men who knew him as kids gave detailed accounts of being groomed and molested by the pop music titan, pushed his legacy to the brink. Hs estate sued HBO for $100 million over the two-part doc, alleging the network violated a 1992 non-disparagement clause it had with Michael; so far the lawsuit has been allowed to proceed to arbitration, an appellate court determining in December that the complaint might be “frivolous” but that’s up for an arbitrator to decide.

Incidentally, the allegations then and in years prior have also tended to being out his staunchest defenders time and again, including countless fans who never met Michael Jackson but would swear that they knew him anyway.

Meanwhile, Prince and Paris (and presumably their younger brother Bigi, who was 7 when their dad died) are aware of these stories. But as protectors of his legacy, as well as the only keepers of the memories of the relatively short time they had with their dad, the siblings have never wavered in their view of who was out to get whom.