Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir details disturbing allegations about her mother Priscilla Presley’s ex-boyfriend Michael Edwards, who began dating Priscilla when Lisa was 9 years old.
Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir details chilling allegations about her childhood.
In From Here to the Great Unknown, released posthumously—with help from daughter Riley Keough—after her January 2023 death, Lisa writes about how her mother Priscilla Presley’s boyfriend Michael Edwards allegedly molested her when she was 10 years old. Priscilla dated the actor, who was in movies such as Mommie Dearest and Terminator 2, for about seven years.
However, Michael, now 80, told Page Six that no one from the publisher called him for comment on the memoir, adding of Lisa’s allegations, “I’m in shock, that’s untrue…I was like a father to Lisa Marie.”
Michael, for his part, released his own memoir in 1988 titled Priscilla, Elvis and Me, in which he detailed living with Priscilla and then 9-year-old Lisa—and of the inappropriate feelings he developed for Lisa as she grew older.
In one instance, Michael detailed an afternoon in the pool with Lisa, in which at one point Lisa wrapped her legs around him as he bounced her up and down.
“I became aroused,” he writes. “A sick feeling crept slowly into the pit of my stomach. I was craving Lisa sexually.”
Rick Diamond/Getty Images & Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesEventually, his feelings for Lisa became a point of conflict between him and Priscilla, leading to the end of their relationship.
“Priscilla’s fears had been justified all along,” Michael writes. “My love for Lisa always bordered on intimacy. As Lisa grew to a young woman it was a constant battle for me to keep my feelings in the proper perspective.”
He continued, “When Lisa threw her arms around me in a daughterly way and said, using one of her many pet names for me, ‘Merky, I love you. You’re so cute,’ I melted. She unknowingly exuded the same power of sexual charisma that her father had wielded over millions.”
But while Lisa previously addressed Michael’s book—in 2003, she told Playboy of the memoir, “He’s a sick f–k. He made his attempts at coming into my room and being inappropriate while drunk,”—it wasn’t until writing her own memoir that she elaborated on her claims.
Bryan Steffy/WireImageThe first instance of Michael allegedly touching Lisa inappropriately, she wrote in the memoir, occurred when she was asleep in bed and she “woke up to find him on his knees next to my bed, running his finger up my leg under the sheets, and if I moved, he stopped—so I moved.”
Lisa also detailed a second disturbing interaction which allegedly occurred when she was 10.
“He said he was going to teach me what was going to happen when I got older,” Lisa wrote. “He was putting his hand on my chest and saying a man’s going to touch here, there, he put his hand between my legs, and he said they’re going to touch you here. I think he gently kissed me and then left that night.”
According to Lisa, whose father was Elvis Presley, after telling her mother what had occurred, Priscilla “flew into her room and slammed the door. Eventually she called me in and said that Edwards wanted to apologize.”
In his apology, Lisa said, the Mommie Dearest actor cited his time abroad for the interaction, telling Lisa, “‘I’m so sorry, but in Europe that’s how they teach the kids so that’s what I was doing.’”
Lisa, however, claimed the abuse continued.
“Eventually it became that he would touch me and spank me,” she wrote, noting she’d be left with bruises, “telling me not to look—‘Don’t look at me,’ he’d say, ‘don’t turn your head.’ I assume he was jerking off.”
