In one of the biggest bombshell claims from her posthumous 2024 memoir, Lisa Marie Presley alleged that she had been molested by her mother Priscilla’s boyfriend, starting when she was 10 — and now Priscilla is telling her side of the story.
“Her revelation didn’t make sense to me,” Priscilla, who shared Lisa Marie with her ex-husband, Elvis, writes in her new memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis. “She had told me something completely different at the time.”
The Naked Gun actress, 80, writes that her “world fell apart” when Lisa was 14, and accused Priscilla’s then-boyfriend, actor Michael Edwards, of drunkenly coming into her room at night and lifting the covers to look at her in bed.
Priscilla describes how upset she was by the news but insists that Lisa assured her he had never done it before and he hadn’t touched her inappropriately.
When Priscilla confronted Edwards, he made it sound like he’d innocently entered Lisa’s room to tuck her in. Knowing her daughter “sometimes made up stories,” she writes, “I wanted to believe him. But Lisa had sensed that something was wrong, and I believed her.”
Priscilla claims she was going to ask Edwards — who she dated for about six years — to move out, but Lisa “begged” her not to.
But in 1988, four years after their split, Edwards admitted to “craving Lisa sexually” in his tell-all, Elvis, Priscilla and Me.
“I was sickened,” Priscilla writes, adding that the Mommie Dearest actor called her years later to say he regretted writing about his attraction to a child.
“If he wanted my forgiveness, he didn’t ask for it and wouldn’t have gotten it,” she writes. “One thing was certain. If Elvis had still been alive, Michael wouldn’t have been calling me about his regrets. Elvis would have shot him.”
In her memoir, From Here To The Great Unknown, Lisa Marie alleged that Edwards began molesting her at 10, adding that after she told her mother, Edwards apologized.
But the abuse continued, she wrote. “Eventually it became that he would touch me and spank me, telling me not to look — ‘Don’t look at me,’ he’d say, ‘don’t turn your head.’ I assume he was jerking off.”
Edwards, 81, vehemently denied the molestation allegations last year, claiming in a statement to People that he “was encouraged to embellish a harmless anecdote about Lisa” by his editors.
In her memoir, Priscilla claims that Lisa Marie had never told anyone else about the molestation before writing about it in her book, which was published after her death at age 54 in 2023.
“I struggle to make peace with Lisa’s words,” the Dancing with the Stars alum writes. “Because I didn’t hear them until after her passing, we never got to talk about it together. I know I will never have closure.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source globemagazine.com ’
