Riley Keough is sharing a few candid thoughts about about her late mother Lisa Marie Presley’s marriage to Michael Jackson.
Appearing on the latest episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, Riley took a look back on the two years she and her late brother, Benjamin Keough, had the Billie Jean singer as their stepfather.
“Our life wasn’t crazier because that was already there. That already existed, like the press and the crazy, the paparazzi and, you know, all that,” she explained.
“But ... I think when [Lisa Marie Presley] saw Michael’s life, there were things that he had that she didn’t have. She didn’t have a plane at the time, or things like that.”
“So she then was like, ‘Oh, I should have a plane, and I should have this and that,’ and so our life in that way kind of got bigger,” Riley added. “Before that, she was with my dad, and their life was very simple ... she didn’t have 10 million assistants. She didn’t need all of that, and I think that changed.”
Lisa Marie married Michael Jackson in May 1994, less than a year after splitting from her children’s father, Danny Keough, after about six years of marriage.
Given that Lisa Marie was the daughter of music legend Elvis Presley, her marriage to the King of Pop was perceived as the merging of two era-defining cultural dynasties. Their union, however, was short-lived, and the couple split in 1996.
As host Alex Cooper pointed out, the marriage came shortly after Michael Jackson was first investigated by police after being accused of sexual abuse by the families of four children.
The 13-time Grammy winner denied the allegations and was later acquitted, but the claims would continue to be revived until his death in 2009 at age 50.
Riley, who was just five years old when her mother wed Jackson, said she was “never told anything” about the accusations during the marriage.
“I would imagine that my dad was really heartbroken and reading the news, and... I would imagine he said all kinds of things to my mum that we didn’t know about,” she said.
“The way my parents parented was very much like, ‘We don’t fight around the kids. We don’t ever say anything around them.’ We didn’t know about any allegations. We had no awareness of that.”
Riley, whose acting credits include Mad Max: Fury Road and Daisy Jones & the Six, has spent much of the past few months on a promotional tour for her mother’s posthumous memoir, From Here To The Great Unknown.
Though Lisa Marie was still at work on the book at the time of her January 2023 death, Riley used her mum’s audio recordings to complete it.
Listen to Riley Keough’s Call Her Daddy interview here. Her comments on Michael Jackson begin around the 23:40 mark.