Priscilla Presley is trying to rewrite the story. In her new memoir, Softly, As I Leave You, and on the press tour to publicize it, Elvis Presley’s ex-wife is addressing the lawsuit against her regarding the death of her daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. Presley has addressed the lawsuit previously, but now she’s describing the day she removed Lisa Marie from life support in January 2023. She writes in the book that, after the doctors restarted Lisa Marie’s heart but it was beating only with the help of a machine, “I asked the doctor, ‘What kind of life will she have if we keep her on that machine?’ He looked at me with compassion and shook his head. ‘No quality of life at all.’” The intention behind that decision has been called into question by Lisa Marie’s former business partners, Brigitte Kruse and Kevin Fialko. They are suing Presley for $50 million in damages and accusing her of defrauding them and of intentionally taking Lisa Marie off life support to wrest back control of Elvis’s estate — though actress and singer Riley Keough, Elvis’s granddaughter, is the estate’s only trustee.
On September 5, Presley’s lawyers called Kruse and Fialko’s claims “absurd and despicable, but unfortunately not surprising.” Throughout the press tour for her memoir, Presley has not directly addressed Kruse and Fialko’s claims and instead has talked about Lisa Marie’s death. She claims their relationship was better than the current public perception. During an appearance on Today, Presley said, “To this day, I can’t get over it. Especially having a great night before and then the next day, taken away.” She also called it “the second saddest day of my life, other than losing Elvis,” to People. “I know there’s a lot out there, that I did this to Lisa, I did that to Lisa,” Presley added. “There’s a lot of people who didn’t want Lisa and I to be close. We were very close. Lisa could be hard-headed, but so could I sometimes. We had a lot of good times together.”
The relationship between Presley and her granddaughter, Keough, is also coming up during the press tour. Like with her relationship with Lisa Marie, Presley claims that her and Keough are doing just fine, despite a letter made public by Kruse and Fialko’s lawsuit in which Keough calls her grandmother “hurtful.” “Unfortunately Nona as you are taking me to court I am being forced to defend my mother’s wishes legally and publicly which would not have been my choice,” Keough allegedly wrote in the letter, referring to legal issues over Lisa Marie’s will that were settled in 2023. “It is really hurtful that after years of me trying to resolve your and my mother’s broken relationship and restore our family, you are taking me, of all people, to court.”