The former financial advisers accusing Priscilla Presley of ending her daughter’s life support too soon for money have filed an updated complaint that they say reveals new details about Lisa Marie Presley’s final moments.
This revised complaint, submitted in Los Angeles County Superior Court, includes two pages said to be from Priscilla’s forthcoming memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, which is scheduled to be released on September 23. The excerpts allegedly provide a detailed description of the day Elvis Presley’s only daughter died in a San Fernando Valley hospital. She passed away from complications connected to a small bowel obstruction that stemmed from an earlier bariatric surgery.
According to the court exhibits, Priscilla rushed to Lisa Marie’s side, holding her hand and stroking her face while reassuring her of her love as relatives gathered nearby. The documents say Lisa Marie’s oldest daughter, Riley Keough, was on a flight to be with her when a “code blue” alarm signaled that her mother’s heart had stopped.
“The next thing I remember is the doctor talking to me. He asked me what I wanted him to do. They had restarted Lisa’s heart, but there was no guarantee it would keep beating,” Priscilla is quoted as writing. “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.’”
In the passages, Priscilla reportedly states that Lisa Marie had “little brain activity” and that the vibrant daughter she knew was gone.
“I thought about my girl, my wild, rebellious, passionate girl, lying in a vegetative state for the rest of her life,” she wrote in the excerpts. “I said what I had to. ‘Take her off the machine, Doctor.’ My voice was barely above a whisper.” She then described collapsing.
“It was unbearable. I began to sob. I don’t remember falling,” she wrote, according to the records. “After that, everything went dark. … I don’t want to remember.”
Priscilla’s representatives did not immediately provide a comment regarding the book excerpts when asked on Friday. Her attorneys, Marty Singer and Wayne Harman, had earlier dismissed the initial $50 million fraud and breach-of-contract lawsuit, filed last month by her ex-advisers Brigitte Kruse and Kevin Fialko, as “one of the most shameful, ridiculous, salacious, and meritless lawsuits” they had ever encountered.
On Friday, Singer and Harman issued another statement, this time addressing new claims in the amended complaint, which accuse Priscilla of pushing Elvis Presley toward an early death. The filing claims Priscilla’s attempts to secure a larger divorce settlement placed “undue pressure on Elvis, pushing him to his death.”
“Priscilla did not have anything to do with the assassination of JFK, she did not cover up Area 51, she did not fake the moon landing, and she is not secretly keeping Bigfoot locked in a cabin in Canada. Take off the aluminum foil hat and face reality,” the lawyers said. They went on to allege that Kruse “engaged in a relentless and calculated campaign of elder abuse and fraud to take control of Ms. Presley’s finances for her own benefit.”
In a separate elder abuse lawsuit filed last year, Priscilla has accused Kruse and Fialko of tricking her into signing contracts that left her with only minority stakes in companies they set up to profit from her name, image, and likeness. Kruse and Fialko insist that Priscilla signed the contracts willingly, received benefits from their work, and later cut ties in violation of agreements once her circumstances shifted after Lisa Marie’s death. Rolling Stone obtained a video showing Priscilla signing the agreements at Kruse’s house with a lawyer present.
“Apparently, Ms. Presley’s defense is to list off nonsense hyperbolic statements that have no substance. The documents are in black and white and speak volumes. To date, Ms. Presley has presented zero evidence in support of her salacious claims, and we intend to hold her accountable for her reckless behavior,” Jordan Matthews, the attorney for Kruse and Fialko, said Friday in response to the latest statement from Priscilla’s legal team.
Lisa Marie was 54 years old when she died in the hospital on January 12, 2023. When Kruse and Fialko submitted the original lawsuit in Los Angeles last month, they made headlines by alleging that Priscilla ignored Lisa Marie’s advance health care directive. That document stated Lisa wished for her life to be “prolonged as long as possible within the limits of generally accepted health care standards.” The advisers claimed Priscilla cut life support “within hours” because of their estrangement and because Lisa Marie was preparing to remove her as sole trustee of a $25 million life insurance trust. They also noted that Priscilla had already been removed as trustee of Lisa Marie’s Promenade Trust and faced potential legal challenges from her daughter.
As Rolling Stone reported earlier, weeks after Lisa Marie’s passing, Priscilla disputed her daughter’s 2016 amendment to the Promenade Trust. That amendment replaced her as co-trustee with Riley Keough and Lisa Marie’s late son, Benjamin Keough, who died in July 2020. Priscilla was never a beneficiary of the Promenade Trust, and the change meant she lost her last oversight over Promenade’s most valuable assets, which included Elvis’ Graceland mansion, its archives, and Lisa Marie’s 15 percent stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises, the company managing Elvis’ name, likeness, and image. Priscilla petitioned the court to declare the amendment “invalid.”
Although legal conflict seemed inevitable, Riley Keough eventually settled with her grandmother within months. Under the agreement, Priscilla was awarded a $1 million lump-sum payment from Lisa Marie’s $25 million life insurance policy. Keough also agreed to pay her $50,000 to step down as co-trustee of a separate irrevocable trust that only held the insurance policy. In addition, Priscilla was granted an annual salary of $100,000 for ten years as a “special adviser” to the Promenade Trust.
The next hearing in the elder abuse case is scheduled for next week. The first management conference in the contract dispute brought by Kruse and Fialko will take place in February.
