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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Lara Olszowska

Cher has been accused of kidnapping her son — so what’s going on?

In real-time, Cher is making headlines for rekindling her romance with on-off boyfriend Alexander Edwards. The pair are at Paris Fashion Week and got cameras flashing at the Givenchy show. But, meanwhile, documents filed last December have emerged, which see the singer accused of having four men kidnap her son, Elijah Blue Allman.

The allegations are made in divorce papers filed by his estranged wife Marieangela King. The documents, seen by several media outlets, accuse Cher of staging an intervention in her estranged son’s life, by having him taken from his hotel room in New York.

It allegedly happened on the night of his wedding anniversary on 30 November 2022, in an attempt to prevent him from reconciling with his wife.

King (who goes by Queeny), says in the recently surfaced court documents, that four men arrived and removed Allman from the room. She suggests that this happened on Cher’s orders.

King also stated that the couple had been staying at the hotel for 12 days to try and resolve the issues in their marriage after Allman had filed for divorce the year before.

Marie Angela King accuses Cher of “kidnapping” her son from a hotel room (Instagram @iamqueenyking)

King claims that one of the men who came to the hotel told her upon entering that it was her Grammy-winning mother-in-law who had sent them. It is believed that Cher had planned to intervene to help fight her son’s long battle with addiction.

Allman filed for divorce from his wife Marieangela King in 2021, and then moved into the famed Chateau Marmont Hotel, Los Angeles about six months ago. He claims they split in April 2020, while she says they separated in late 2021.

Things seem to have spiralled for him since, with hotel staff reportedly keeping a watchful eye on him due to his history of addiction.

In a 2014 interview with Entertainment Tonight, Allman, now 47, has said he started taking drugs at around 11 years old while at boarding school: “I mean it’s just what you did, it’s just what everybody did,” he said. He also admitted he had started taking opiates and heroin later on, leading to several near-death experiences.

The staff’s fears nearly came to fruition when he was reportedly found unconscious on the pavement outside the hotel entrance two weeks ago. He is now said to be in rehab and has moved out of the Chateau Marmont.

When Allman was growing up, Cher is said to have tried to keep him at a distance from his heroin-addicted rockstar dad, Gregg Allman, and to have sent him to boarding school when he was seven.

Allman previously spoke on this experience and how it made his relationship difficult with his mother. “When you go to boarding school at seven years old, it's kind of hard to feel like you're not being shunned,” he said.

Cher was not invited to her son’s Beverly Hills wedding to Queeny King in 2013. Was this the singer’s way of trying to make amends in their estranged relationship?

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