Priscilla Presley has revealed Elvis Presley offered for her to have an abortion when pregnant with their daughter Lisa Marie in a new memoir.
It’s just one of a number of startling revelations that Priscilla, 80, makes in her new book, “Softly, As I Leave You,” out Tuesday, and seen by Page Six.
The former “Dallas” actress says she struggled to control her wayward daughter, who was left “so broken” by her father’s death in August 1977.
Priscilla then introduced Lisa Marie to the controversial Church of Scientology, but confesses she was “naive” about the religion.
And she tells how Lisa battled years of financial woes and drug abuse – at one point taking 80 pills a day – before her death at 54 in January 2023.
“My daughter was a conundrum, complicated and challenging,” Priscilla writes. “Lisa was a free spirit, a determined and restless soul.”
As the daughter of an icon, Lisa dubbed her public persona, “Lisa Marie F—ing Presley.”
“It was an identity that both enamored and haunted her for the rest of her life,” writes Priscilla.
Elvis and Priscilla famously met when she was just 14 and he was 24 and serving in Germany in the US Army. They married in 1967 and had only been wed a few weeks when they found out she was pregnant.
“Our wedding had meant I could finally come out in the open,” Priscilla said, “I was so excited. But when I got pregnant on my wedding night, those dreams fell apart.
“Neither Elvis nor I was ready for a child.”
“For weeks, Elvis and I worried in silence about what was to come. At my lowest point, I even wondered how I’d feel if I had an accident and miscarried. I felt so guilty that I was even having these thoughts,” she said.
Then, Elvis “looked at me one day and asked if I wanted to have an abortion. He told me he’d support whatever I wanted. His words were a wake-up call.
“The enormity of it hit me head-on, and I began to cry. I told him, “No! We can’t do that. This is our baby!”
When Lisa Marie arrived in February 1968, the couple immediately “fell hopelessly in love with her.”
Priscilla left Elvis when Lisa Marie was four after having an affair with her karate instructor, Mike Stone, but insisted this was not the reason for her departure.
When Elvis found out about Stone, Priscilla said he “forced” himself on her, “the way he imagined a karate master doing it…it left me with an unhappy memory of my last experience of sexual intimacy with Elvis.”
Elvis, who frequently cheated on Priscilla, was so upset he even asked his closest pal, Joe Esposito, to find a hit man to take out Stone – but was persuaded to calm down.
“As difficult as it was, I never regretted my decision to leave Elvis. But I never ceased to mourn it,” Priscilla said.
“Raising my daughter was a challenge for both of us,” Priscilla admitted. “She was strong-willed from the beginning. Like her dad, she just came that way. Lisa had a mind of her own, and being Elvis’s daughter only reinforced it.”
Indeed, Lisa struggled to fit in at school and her go-to line was “I’m Lisa Presley. My father’s Elvis Presley!…So watch it!”
When Lisa got into her teens she became “preoccupied” with boys, and when she was 14 “the world as I knew it fell apart,” Priscilla said.
After returning home from a trip, Lisa said Priscilla’s boyfriend, actor Michael Edwards, had come into her room and lifted up her bed covers to look at her.
Although Lisa said he did nothing physical to her, Priscilla asked Edwards to move out – and four years later was “sickened” when he published a book admitting to a “sexual obsession” with her daughter.
Priscilla said she was shocked when, 40 years later, Lisa claimed in her own memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown” (published posthumously in December 2024), that Edwards had molested her. Edwards has denied the claims.
“I was encouraged to embellish a harmless anecdote about Lisa Marie in my memoir from the 1980s and now regret that I did,” he previously told Page Six.
“I understand that these stories sell books, but the notion that I molested Lisa Marie is just a fabrication.’’
Priscilla says Lisa Marie told her something “completely different” to what was in her book at the time.
“I struggled to make peace with Lisa’s words,” Priscilla 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.”
By the time Lisa got her inheritance fom her father’s estate aged 25, she was already married to musician Danny Keough, and mom to daughter Riley and son Benjamin.
But the marriage broke down and Priscilla was “appalled” when Lisa went on to marry Michael Jackson in May 1994, after he had been accused of child molestation.
“I didn’t believe he loved her,” Priscilla said, revealing that she only met Jackson once. “He married her at a time when he desperately needed good publicity that depicted him as a desirable heterosexual man.
Softly As I Leave You’, out Tuesday.
“It was one thing to fight the child molestation charges against him. There was no way to come out of that looking good. But photos of Elvis’s daughter wearing the huge diamond engagement ring he’d had made for her? That image was pure gold.
“On January 18, 1996, Lisa filed for divorce. I could practically hear Elvis sigh with relief,” Priscilla said. Jackson died in 2009.
By 2005, Lisa was “broke” and sold 85 percent of her inheritance off, although Elvis’ iconic Memphis home, Graceland, remains with his family.
Lisa Marie’s joy at marrying third husband, guitarist Michael Lockwood, and welcoming their twin girls, Finley and Harper, in October 2008, however, was marred by opioids she was given after the birth.
“Lisa had inherited Elvis’s vulnerability to opioid addiction and was addicted by the time she left the hospital,” Priscilla said.
By 2014, “the problem had gone way beyond painkillers,” and Lisa was taking opioids and “mixing cocaine with large amounts of alcohol,” leading her to rehab for the first time.
This led to the end of her marriage to Lockwood. Priscilla said she was “stunned” when the truth about Lisa’s drug addition came out in court filings during her 2016 divorce battle.
“I had no idea how much poison she was pouring into her body,” she said. Priscilla temporarily took custody of the twins, but they went back to their mom after a year.
Despite this, “Lisa had gone steadily downhill from the day she first filed for divorce. It was like my daughter was disappearing inside a woman I had never met. She was no longer my Lisa Marie. Her drug usage climbed as high as eighty pills a day.
“Desperate to keep her girls, she lived in a tornado of drug-fueled emotions with no relief in sight.”
She was also furious when Priscilla refused to testify in court and take her side by claiming Lockwood was an unfit dad. Lisa Marie eventually got primary custody, but Lockwood got to see his kids part-time.
“I knew that arguing with her was futile. I would be arguing with her addiction,” said Priscilla. “I also knew with a stab to my heart that she would never completely forgive me. And she never did. I was losing one of the two people I loved the most. I didn’t know yet that I would soon lose her permanently. The events poisoning our lives would prove fatal.”
Lisa Marie lost Benjamin at age 27 to suicide in July 2020, which was “the beginning of the end for my daughter,” Priscilla claims in the book. “We all knew that with Lisa, we were living on borrowed time.”
By the time the pair attended the Golden Globes to celebrate the Baz Luhrmann movie, “Elvis” on January 10, 2023, Lisa could barely walk and had to be aided by family friend Jerry Schilling.
She complained to her mom that her stomach was hurting and left early. “I didn’t know it was the last hug,” Priscilla said.
Just two days later Lisa was found unconscious by her ex, Keough, who had moved back in with her. “I knew from the first moment I walked into Lisa’s hospital room that she was gone,” Priscilla said.
Lisa had suffered a cardiac arrest after developing a small bowel obstruction, a severe complication of bariatric surgery.
Priscilla ends the book, saying, “My little wild child, I love you forever.”
The post Priscilla Presley tells all on abortion, Elvis ‘forcing’ himself on her and why she never trusted Michael Jackson appeared first on Page Six.
