Lisa Marie Presley always protected daughter Riley Keough from the outside world.
During an appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday, Jan. 15, the Daisy Jones & the Six actress revealed she had “no awareness” of Michael Jackson’s sexual abuse allegations when she was growing up.
“I was never told anything. And it’s actually not something I ever asked as an adult,” Keough, 35, told the podcast host of the allegations against Jackson, whom Presley was married to from 1994 to 1996.
“I think it just was what it was. It just never came to mind,” she added. “I would imagine that my dad was really heartbroken in reading the news… I would imagine he said all kinds of things to my mom that we didn’t know about.”
Presley married Danny Keough in 1988 and revealed in her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, that she left him for Jackson after he professed his love on a trip to Las Vegas.
“The way my parents parented was very much like, ‘We don’t fight around the kids. We don’t ever say anything around them,'” she further explained. “We didn’t know anything. We didn’t know about any allegations.”
What she did know, however, was that Jackson and Presley “were in love” and “their love for one another was genuine.”
“I was there and I remember. Everything else I don’t know because I wasn’t there for,” she said, before adding that when Presley ended relationships, including her marriage to Jackson, it would greatly upset her.
“When she would break up with people, Michael, her other partners, I would cry,” Keough recalled. “I’d get mad at her. I was really upset… I’d be pissed, not knowing what happened.”
In From Here to the Great Unknown, which was published in October with her daughter’s help, Presley opened up about their love story.
“Michael said,’ I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children,’” Presley wrote in her memoir. “I didn’t say anything immediately, but then I said, ‘I’m really flattered, I can’t even talk.’ By then, I felt I was in love with him too.”
Presley died at 54 of a small bowel obstruction, while Jackson died of cardiac arrest in 2009 at age 50.
In the memoir, Presley praised him as a “great conversationalist” who was “super interested in people and could really lift them up.” She also revealed that he was a virgin when they first got together.
“There was something about him that was truly remarkable, something I’ve never, ever seen in my entire life, except my dad [Elvis Presley],” she wrote. “I fell in love with him because he was normal.”
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