The former business advisers who claim Priscilla Presley prematurely ”pulled the plug” on her daughter for financial gain have filed an amended complaint purportedly shedding new light on Lisa Marie Presley’s final hours.
The new complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, attaches two pages said to be from Pricilla’s upcoming memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, due to publish on Sept. 23. The excerpts appear to offer a detailed account of the day Elvis’ only child died inside a San Fernando Valley community hospital from complications surrounding a small bowel obstruction linked to a prior bariatric surgery.
According to the pages labeled as court exhibits, Priscilla rushed to her daughter’s bedside and was holding her hand, stroking her face, and telling her she was loved as family members gathered. Lisa Marie’s eldest daughter, Riley Keough, was on a plane to join them when a “code blue” emergency alarm indicated Lisa Marie’s heart had stopped, the pages read.
“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 purportedly writes. “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 excerpts, Priscilla allegedly claims Lisa Marie had “little brain activity” and that the daughter she knew as “always so vital, wasn’t there.”
“I thought about my girl, my wild, rebellious, passionate girl, lying in a vegetative state for the rest of her life,” she wrote, according to the exhibits. “I said what I had to. ‘Take her off the machine, Doctor.’ My voice was barely above a whisper.” She then broke down and blacked out.
“It was unbearable. I began to sob. I don’t remember falling,” she purpotedly wrote. “After that, everything went dark. … I don’t want to remember.”
Priscilla’s reps had no immediate comment when asked about the book excerpts on Friday. Her lawyers, Marty Singer and Wayne Harman, previously called the first version of the $50 million fraud and breach-of-contract lawsuit, filed last month by Priscilla’s former business advisers Brigitte Kruse and Kevin Fialko, “one of the most shameful, ridiculous, salacious, and meritless lawsuits” they had ever seen.
On Friday, Singer and Harman issued a new statement focusing on other claims in the amended complaint that alleged Priscilla pushed Elvis to an early grave. According to the new complaint, Priscilla’s efforts to increase her divorce settlement “exerted 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, before going on the offensive. They then claimed Kruse “engaged in a relentless and calculated campaign of elder abuse and fraud in order to take control of Ms. Presley’s finances for her own benefit.”
In a separate financial elder abuse lawsuit, filed last year, Priscilla claims Kruse and Fialko duped her into signing a series of contracts that gave her only minority interests in the companies they formed to exploit her name, image and likeness. For their part, Kruse and Fialko claim Priscilla entered the contracts knowingly, benefitted from their services and then cut them off, in breach of their agreements, when her fortunes changes in the aftermath of Lisa Marie’s death. (Video unearthed by Rolling Stone shows Priscilla signing the contracts 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 lawyer representing Kruse and Fialko, said Friday, responding to the latest statement from Priscilla’s lawyers.
Lisa Marie was 54 when she died in the hospital on Jan. 12, 2023. When Kruse and Fialko filed the first version of their Los Angeles lawsuit last month, they garnered headlines with their blockbuster claim that Priscilla violated Lisa Marie’s advanced health care directive. They attached the directive, in which Lisa stated she wanted her life “prolonged as long as possible within the limits of generally accepted health care standards.” The advisers claimed Presley discontinued life support “within hours” because she was estranged from her daughter and knew Lisa Marie was on the verge of removing her as the sole trustee of a $25 million life insurance trust. They said Priscilla already had been removed from her role managing Lisa Marie’s Promenade Trust and was facing threats of possible legal action from Lisa Marie.
As Rolling Stone previously reported, a few weeks after Lisa Marie’s death, Priscilla challenged Lisa Marie’s 2016 amendment to her main asset, the Promenade Trust. The amendment removed Priscilla as co-trustee and replaced her with Riley Keough, as well as Lisa Marie’s now deceased son Benjamim Keough, who died in July 2020. Priscilla was never a beneficiary of the Promenade Trust, so the change meant she lost her only influence over Promenade’s marquis assets, including Elvis’ Graceland mansion, its archives, and Lisa Marie’s 15 percent interest in Elvis Presley Enterprises, the company that owns and manages Elvis’ name, image, and likeness. Priscilla wanted the court to declare the amendment “invalid.”
With a potential legal war looming, Keough reached a generous settlement with her grandmother in a matter of months. Under the deal, Priscilla received a $1 million lump-sum payment off the top of Lisa Marie’s $25 million life insurance policy. Keough also agreed to pay Priscilla $50,000 to resign as co-trustee of the irrevocable trust whose sole asset was the life insurance policy. And Priscilla was awarded an annual salary of $100,000 for 10 years for her new role as a “special adviser” to the Promenade Trust.
The next hearing in the elder abuse case is set for next week. The first case management conference in Kruse and Fialko’s breach of contract case is set for February.
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