Her Parents Gave Up.
Her English Teacher Wrote She Was Brilliant.
She Held Those Words for 30 Years.

The Margaret Cho Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"Margaret Cho walked into a high school English class at fifteen having been expelled, given up on by her parents, and barely trying. Her teacher wrote in her composition book margins that she was brilliant and funny and that he looked forward to reading her. She held those words for thirty years. Then we found out what happened to that teacher - and the story got complicated."

- David Begnaud

Kicked Out, Given Up On, and Then He Wrote in the Margins.

Margaret Cho got expelled from Lowell - one of San Francisco's most prestigious high schools - not for failing but for not showing up. Truancy. Her parents had moved to that neighborhood specifically so she could attend. When she got kicked out, they were devastated. They essentially gave up on her, she said, as having any kind of future whatsoever. She didn't hate Lowell - she just hadn't cared to go. But she was determined to do something on her own terms.

She auditioned for the San Francisco School of the Arts and got in. Her days were split between the arts program and the regular attached high school, McAteer. James Jackson taught English at McAteer - not the famous arts side, just the regular school. He gave students a composition book at the start of each year. They wrote essays. He graded them and gave them back. What he also did, in Margaret's case, was write in the margins. Not corrections. Not grades. Encouragement. He told her she was brilliant. He told her she was funny. He said he looked forward to reading her work.

Margaret said she had never been acknowledged for her writing or her creativity before. She had been an excellent student once - motivated, in advanced classes, proud of it. Then she stopped caring and all of that went quiet. When Mr. Jackson's notes arrived, something reignited. It was gentle, tender even. Not a direct conversation about what she was capable of, just the two of them passing a composition book back and forth. She had forgotten that she had ever taken pride in being a student. He reminded her it was still there.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Mr. Jackson's composition book notes and what they reignited - ~3:39

The Southern Barbara Walters on a Motorcycle.

James Jackson was not a person who was easy to describe. Margaret tried and landed somewhere between Tennessee Williams, Barbara Walters, and Marlon Brando in The Wild One. He had a very particular Tennessee drawl delivered in curly, elaborate cadences - very Southern, very specific, a little theatrical. He had 1960s hair in the 1980s, which at that point was only sixteen or seventeen years past its prime. He wore a leather jacket. He rode a motorcycle. He smoked.

He was also openly gay - which in the early 1980s at a high school full of sports teams made him a daily target. The jocks called him slurs behind his back. By Margaret's account, he was not oblivious to it. He simply didn't take it to heart. He showed up the same way every day: on the motorcycle, in the leather jacket, with the drawl, teaching English. He didn't flinch and he didn't perform indifference. He was just himself, completely, and it cost him nothing in terms of how he taught or how he showed up for students like Margaret.

Margaret was closeted then - though she didn't yet fully have words for what that meant. She knew her friendships with girls were more intense than they were supposed to be. Watching the boys try to diminish her teacher made her scared. But it also showed her something she couldn't name at fifteen. Here was a person who knew exactly who he was, showed up that way, and kept teaching. The lesson wasn't in the curriculum. It was in the fact that he kept coming back.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Who Mr. Jackson was and what his courage looked like - ~7:59

He Was Murdered. The Killer Is on Death Row. The Story Is Complicated.

Margaret came into school one day, and heard the shocking news that her beloved teacher had been brutally murdered. One day there, gone the next. Before this interview, our Executive Producer Olivier had a prep interview with Margaret. She had believed, or seemed to believe, that Mr. Jackson's killer had died. The research our team uncovered told a different story. Based on court documents from the killer's most recent California Supreme Court proceedings in 2025, he is alive. He is on death row. In those documents, he alleged that James Jackson had taken him in off the street as a homeless teenager - fed him, gave him a bed, gave him a safe place. And then, he alleged, went on to groom and sexually abuse him. The killer told police he picked up a dumbbell one night and killed Mr. Jackson. Within twenty-four hours he was involved in another crime, was caught, and confessed. He later killed another man in prison. Today he sits on death row.

David shared all of this on camera, in real time. Margaret had not known. The allegations have never been proven in a court of law. The killer's accusations have not been found true by a jury. James Jackson is not alive to defend himself. And yet the documents exist. A journalist is obligated to share what the record shows - including to the person who came on a show to say this man changed her life.

Margaret sat with it. She is a survivor of sexual abuse herself. She said she wants to always believe survivors. She understands the pain that would lead a person to an extreme act. But she also treasured Mr. Jackson's encouragement - she said it led her directly to her career and everything she has built. To think of him as a sexual predator is deeply painful. She didn't collapse into one verdict. She said two things can be true. A person can have shown up for you at exactly the right moment and also done terrible harm to someone else. She held all of it at once and said: all I know is that he was there for me when I needed him.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The murder, the death row revelation, and Margaret's response - ~13:27

She Walked Out the Day They Laughed at His Murder. She Never Went Back.

Margaret Cho does not have a high school diploma. The reason connects directly to Mr. Jackson. When he was murdered - during her senior year - the news spread through the school. In the classroom where those same jocks had spent months brutally mocking the man, they were now making fun of the fact that he'd been killed. Margaret and her best friend Jerry, who had both adored him, were sitting there listening. They looked at each other. They got up. They walked out together. They decided they were not doing this anymore. They never returned.

She wishes she had stayed. She wishes she had a diploma. She wishes she'd gone to college. She was cavalier about her education and she knows it. But in that moment, with those boys laughing at the person who had written in her margins that she was brilliant, there was nothing left to do inside those walls. She and Jerry made the decision together and left.

Jerry died in 2018 of a drug overdose. She and Margaret had been together through all of it - the years with Mr. Jackson, the grief of losing him, the ways in which the losses stacked up over time. Both of them struggled with addiction for years. Margaret has been sober for ten years. Jerry never quite got there. When Margaret talked about Jerry, she was quiet in a way that said everything. Some grief doesn't need many words. It is really hard, she said, to keep going without somebody who was there from the beginning.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Walking out and never returning; Jerry's story - ~33:23

Too Fat to Play Herself. The Diet Pills. The Blood in the Trailer.

In 1994, Margaret Cho became the first Asian American woman to headline a primetime network sitcom when ABC gave her All American Girl. She was playing a fictionalized version of herself. Almost immediately, the main criticism from the network was that she was too fat to play herself. She had always had body issues but had assumed comedy would be the one arena where that wouldn't matter - comedians weren't judged by their bodies. The network had focus groups and a different view.

They also brought in consultants from UCLA to advise on Korean culture, trying to calibrate how authentically Asian the show was while also making sure it wasn't too Asian for a general audience. At one point they hired a coach to teach Margaret how to be more Asian. She told this story with a kind of bemused disbelief, as though she still can't fully explain what they thought that would accomplish - but also acknowledged that they were trying to give the show the best possible chance using every tool they had, which was all they knew.

On the weight: they wanted her to lose it. Margaret went on fen-phen, the diet pill widely prescribed at the time. She lost thirty pounds in two weeks. Then her hair started falling out. Then she urinated blood in her trailer and discovered she had kidney failure. The network's response, more or less: just don't gain the weight back. The show ran twenty-two episodes and was canceled. Margaret was in her mid-twenties and everything had collapsed. The addiction that had already been building got significantly worse from there.

▶ Watch on YouTube: All American Girl, the diet pills, and the kidney failure - ~39:04

A Year and Nine Months. Wear It Like a Loose Garment.

After All American Girl was canceled, the addiction that had been building for years got worse. Margaret described herself plainly: she has always had an addictive personality. Food, alcohol, drugs, impulsivity in all directions - overspending, over-sexualizing, overwork, overthinking. It was going to be destructive because that's what it does, and she kept going back until the tools she has now finally held. Therapy. A very structured life. And before all of that, hospitalization - not involuntary exactly, but she also doubted she could have left if she'd asked. A year and nine months.

She described it without drama. She remembered a man bedridden in the room next to hers. She would go in every day and empty his urine pitcher. Nobody asked her to. She just wanted to be useful. She watched people arrive with every possible advantage - money, talent, youth, beauty - take everything the treatment offered and throw it away. She decided she was not going to be one of those people. She was also, she added with a laugh, going to get everything out of the facility because she had paid for it.

The thing that stayed with her most was one image: wear sobriety like a loose garment. Like a cashmere sweater draped over your shoulders in the 1980s. Not straitjacketed into it. Not perfectionistic and rigid about every rule. Free and easy. Present and light. She has been sober ten years. The impulsivity is still there - it's also, she said, probably what makes her funny. Ultimately her relationship with James Jackson, his own complicated background, has impacted her.

▶ Watch on YouTube: A year and nine months, sobriety, and the final thank you - ~43:59

Stories like Margaret's are what we do.

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