Priscilla Presley has opened up about her late daughter Lisa Marie Presley‘s relationship with Michael Jackson.
The 80-year-old wrote in her new book Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis that she was “appalled by the marriage”.
According to The Sun, which published an excerpt of the new memoir, Priscilla wrote: “I knew in my bones that Michael wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty.”
The couple had started seeing each other in 1994 and surprised everyone with a whirlwind wedding in the Dominican Republic, just weeks after Lisa Marie had divorced from her first husband, Danny Keough.
Her and Jackson’s marriage lasted two short years, finalising their divorce in August 1996.
Priscilla claims that Jackson was trying to get “good publicity” amid claims of child molestation at the time.
It was at this time that Jackson reached out to Lisa Marie, according to Priscilla.
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“Michael was a manipulative man, and I think he had his sights set on her long before she realised it,” she wrote. “The childlike innocence he projected was part of his public mask.”
Priscilla further claimed that the Beat It singer would avoid meeting with her, and when he did attend family events, he opted to play with the children rather than mingle with the adults.
She said she begged her daughter to put off starting a family with the pop icon.
Priscilla penned that when Lisa Marie filed for divorce from Jackson, she ”could practically hear Elvis sigh with relief.”
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Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter shares final photo together
Lisa Marie also spoke about her marriage in her own posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, written with her daughter Riley Keough.
Jackson confessed to being in love with her on a trip to Las Vegas in 1994, during which Lisa Marie was still married.
“Michael said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children,” Lisa Marie wrote, as per People.
“I didn’t say anything immediately, but then I said, ‘I’m really flattered, I can’t even talk.’ By then, I felt I was in love with him too.”
Jackson died of cardiac arrest in 2009 at age 50, while his ex-wife died of a small bowel obstruction that was a complication of a bariatric surgery done years beforehand in January 2023, aged 54.
