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Louise Thomas
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Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumously published memoir From Here to the Great Unknown, released on Tuesday (October 8), includes a raw and candid recollection of the joys and traumas she faced in life before her death in 2023 aged 54.
One of the most shocking claims is that she was sexually abused by one of her mother’s ex-boyfriends, actor Michael Edwards, at a young age.
Now 80, Edwards, who appeared in the 1981 melodrama Mommie Dearest and 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, dated Priscilla Presley from 1978 to 1984.
“The first time Edwards came into my room in the middle of the night, drunk, kneeling, was years before. I think I was ten. I 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. I was awake, but I was trying to sleep,” Presley, the only child of rock’n’roll legend Elvis, writes.
“He said he was going to teach me what was going to happen when I got older. He was putting his hand on my chest and saying a man’s going to touch here, then he put his hands between my legs, and he said they’re going to touch you here. I think he gently kissed me and then left that night.”
Recalling the moment she told her mother about the alleged incident, Presley says her mother flew into the house and slammed the door before calling Presley into her room and telling her that Edwards wanted to apologize.
“Edwards was sitting on their bed looking very sullen and sulky. He said, ‘I’m so sorry, but in Europe that’s how they teach the kids, so that’s what I was doing,’” she adds. “Eventually it became that he would touch me and spank me, telling me not to look.”
She continues: “I assume he was jerking off. He wouldn’t be mad at me – he did it very calmly, just sitting in a chair, whacking my ass. My butt would be black, blue, orange, green.”
Presley remembers Edwards would excuse his behavior, saying he was drunk or that she had actually been flirting with him.
“I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,” she writes. “He’d still come into my room now and then, but I would move or do something to make him think that I was waking up, then he’d run down the hallway back to my mom’s room, freak out, and stay way.”
A contact for Edwards could not be found. The Independent has contacted Priscilla’s representatives for comment.
Presley briefly discussed the alleged abuse in a 2003 interview with Playboy.
Calling Edwards “sick,” she referenced a passage from his 1988 memoir Priscilla, Elvis and Me, in which he recalls “craving Lisa sexually.”
“I’d had to put and end to our swimming together after one disturbing afternoon in the pool,” he wrote. “Lisa had innocently thrown her arms around me, and we were jumping up and down. I became aroused. A sick feeling crept slowly into the pit of my stomach. I was craving Lisa sexually.”
Edwards does not say that he ever abused Presley in his memoir and there is nothing to suggest he has ever accepted that he did so.
Elsewhere in From Here to the Great Unknown, which was completed by her eldest daughter Riley Keough in the months after her death, Presley reveals that she kept her son Benjamin’s dead body in her home for two months.
She writes that she was so heartbroken over Benjamin’s 2020 suicide that she preserved his body on dry ice in a separate casitas bedroom as she struggled to decide where to bury him.
From Here to the Great Unknown is out now.
