Priscilla Presley’s scandalous memoir reveals her true feelings about late daughter Lisa Marie — suggesting her birth destroyed the beauty’s marriage to Elvis Presley and charging the songbird’s two-year union with Michael Jackson in the 1990s was a PR stunt concocted by the King of Pop.
Those are just some of the startling bombshells dropped in 80-year-old Priscilla’s tell-all Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis — which has Elvis fans fuming over her seemingly mean-spirited takedown of the dead music legend’s only child, who passed away at age 54 in January 2023.
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In the 336-page tome, the onetime first lady of Graceland — who divorced the “Suspicious Minds” singer in 1973 — throws doubt on Lisa Marie’s child molestation charges against Priscilla’s actor ex-boyfriend Michael Edwards, who has vehemently denied the claims.
The Naked Gun actress also rehashes the 2020 gunshot suicide of Lisa Marie’s son, 27-year-old Benjamin Keough, and points out that her grief-stricken daughter lived with his dry-iced corpse for more than two months.
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“Priscilla was always jealous of Lisa because Elvis gave all his attention to his daughter,” a furious insider tells the National Enquirer. “Priscilla is essentially spitting on her daughter’s grave.”
According to the source, Daisy Jones & the Six star Riley Keough — Lisa Marie’s 36-year-old daughter — is “upset” about the memoir but “she’s holding her tongue.”
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The book reveals Priscilla was appalled by Lisa Marie’s 1994 marriage to “Billie Jean” singer Jackson because she “didn’t believe he loved her.”
Priscilla writes, “I asked her if they had a physical relationship. Like so many people, I wasn’t sure. She said, ‘Yeah’ … I knew in my bones that Michael wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty.”
The insider says the mother and daughter had a fraught relationship — and that angry Lisa Marie got hitched to the hitmaker because “she knew it would bother her mother.”
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Priscilla also claims in the book that Elvis openly asked her if she wanted to get an abortion after she unexpectedly got pregnant with Lisa Marie on their wedding night in 1967.
“Our wedding had meant I could finally come out in the open,” she writes. “I was so excited. But when I got pregnant on my wedding night, those dreams fell apart.”
She further laments, “Making everything worse was the fact that Elvis lost interest in me sexually once Lisa was born. He had never been able to make love to a woman who’d had a child.”
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The insider charges Priscilla always blamed her daughter for wrecking her marriage to Elvis and claims, “Lisa was treated bad by her mother — she really was. They would have feuds and spend four to eight months at a time not talking to each other.”
Lisa Marie’s posthumously published biography, From Here to the Great Unknown, states that at age 10 she alleged to her mom that she was being abused by Edwards. But in Priscilla’s book, she claims Lisa Marie’s writings were “the first time I had heard her say that [Edwards] sexually abused her. The graphic descriptions stunned me.”
Other shocking claims in Softly, As I Leave You include:
■ Priscilla insists she naively introduced Lisa Marie, who she described as “complicated and challenging,” to Scientology because she was “broken” after Elvis died.
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■ She reveals Lisa Marie began experimenting with serious drugs at a young age, adding, “I eventually found out she was using pot, cocaine, alcohol, and sedatives while she was in school.”
■ She secretly dated the late Robert Kardashian after divorcing Elvis — and once had to slip out of their bed to talk to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll when he called at 2 a.m.
■ The Dallas alum claims she regretted leaving Elvis and insists she would’ve taken him back if he hadn’t died in 1977.
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■ She admits betraying Lisa Marie during her bitter custody battle with then-husband Michael Lockwood over their twin daughters, Finley and Harper, now 17, by refusing to sign an affidavit stating the musician was an unfit dad. “Signing it would be perjury,” Priscilla asserts.
■ She also details the decision to remove Lisa Marie from life support after she went into cardiac arrest following a small-bowel obstruction, which was a complication from an earlier bariatric surgery. “I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was already gone,” Priscilla shares. “There was little brain activity.”