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Priscilla Presley’s memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, revealed so many things, including how her daughter Lisa Marie Presley believed Scientologists were out to get her.
Lisa Marie and Priscilla were considered high-powered Scientologists after joining in the late 70s, while Lisa Marie was a child. According to Dame Magazine, Lisa Marie hinted at defying Scientology in her 2012 song “You Ain’t See Nothin’ Yet.” It was later confirmed that she left in 2013, with Priscilla claiming it all went down when Lisa Marie stormed into the church HQ in Clearwater, Florida, to tell off David Miscavige, the current leader of the Church of Scientology.
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“Her misgivings reached a crisis” when Miscavige “disconnected from his father [Ron Miscavige] and put him in the equivalent of a Scientology prison at a secluded location in the San Bernardino Mountains… Lisa had had enough. Fearless and angry, my daughter walked into the eye of the storm and confronted David directly,” Priscilla wrote. “She told him with great anger and passion just how she felt about him ‘disconnecting’ from his father. Lisa was never subtle when she was angry.”
(Ron was a leader for decades until escaping in 2012.)
Lisa Marie Presley
However, the aftermath of it all scared Lisa, and Priscilla knew her daughter was terrified.
“The aftermath was frightening for her,” Priscilla confesses. “She called me from Florida after her visit to headquarters and said, ‘Mom, I’m so scared. I gave it to David, and now they’re following me,” she said. There are black limos parked outside my house and following me around. This is real. This is what they do.’”
(Per Page Six, a rep for the Church of Scientology claimed this was all “false,” saying Lisa Marie “wished to make amends,” but there’s no record of this.)
Lisa Marie Presley, Priscilla Presley, Riley Keough
When she was alive, Lisa Marie did open up about why she left in a 2013 interview. “Uncovering the fact that I was surrounded by people who were not well-intended, for one,” she told USA Weekend, via Us Weekly, at the time. “Confidants [who were] very, very intimately and closely involved with me and my life. And had been for years. Basically, it was a big sinister situation, where there was like, kind of intel and covert ops going on, and a whole effort to control me that I didn’t know about.”
In her posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown, which her daughter Riley Keough helped finish, she wrote, “She left everything. She left her friends, her house, Los Angeles. She had this life that was very big, and she just wanted to run away and disappear.”
Before you go, click here to see inside the famous Presley family. 