There is a particular cruelty to the way the world remembers Priscilla Presley. She is frozen at seventeen, dark-haired and porcelain-skinned, standing in the doorway of Graceland as though she were merely an accessory to the man inside. The narrative has always been convenient: she was the King’s wife, then she was the King’s ex-wife, then she was the custodian of his fortune. What gets lost in that retelling is the woman who, at eighty-one, has just published her second memoir, made a surprise cameo in a summer blockbuster, survived a family trust war, and is now locked in a $50 million fraud lawsuit that has produced one of the most explosive allegations in recent celebrity legal history. Priscilla Presley, it turns out, has no intention of being a footnote.
On 24 May 2026, Presley turned eighty-one. The occasion passed without the sort of lavish party the tabloids might have expected. Instead, she spent the spring touring internationally with her one-woman show, a live event companion piece to her September 2025 memoir Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis. She performed in London, Bristol, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, New York, and across Australia and New Zealand. At Westgate Las Vegas in April – the very property where Elvis cemented his Vegas legend when it was still the International Hotel – she delivered a personal retrospective to a packed audience. “I love doing it, talking about all this, sharing, and of course answering all their questions,” she told Hello! magazine in January. “I get some good questions!” One audience member asked whether Elvis ever wore a toupee. The answer: “No, that’s not true; that was his beautiful hair.”
The Memoir That Took Eleven Months to Write
Softly, As I Leave You is not a vanity project. Published by Grand Central Publishing in North America and Headline in the UK, and co-written with Mary Jane Ross, it is a frank accounting of the decades after Elvis. Where her 1985 bestseller Elvis and Me documented the romance, this second memoir interrogates what came after – the divorce, the grief, the single motherhood, and the slow construction of an independent identity. “This book covers eight decades of my life,” Presley said in a statement. “Writing it has been a learning experience on many levels. I have reflected deeply both on myself and on those I love.”
The book spent one week on The New York Times bestseller list, a modest showing compared to its predecessor’s forty-six weeks. But sales figures miss the point. The memoir’s power lies in its unflinching examination of loss: Elvis in 1977, Benjamin Keough in 2020, and Lisa Marie Presley in 2023. “It took me a while to finish it up – more than 11 months,” Presley admitted to Hello!. “You remember a lot of things, and it was a good thing to be honest. A lot of remembering wonderful times and difficult times, and you’re reliving your life.”
The tour itself has become a cultural event. In Las Vegas, alongside her son Navarone Garibaldi, Presley spoke about the shifting family dynamics following Lisa Marie’s death. Garibaldi offered a poignant observation: that Benjamin Keough’s suicide in 2020 had fractured the family further, while Lisa Marie’s death in 2023 paradoxically drew the survivors back together. “You would think that would be something that should bring everybody together, that somehow separated us further,” he said of Benjamin’s passing. But, he added, his half-sister’s death ultimately had the opposite effect.
The Naked Gun and the Art of the Surprise Return
In August 2025, Presley did something she had publicly sworn she would never do. She appeared in The Naked Gun reboot, the Akiva Schaffer-directed film starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. In 2022, Presley had told The London Standard flatly: “No, I won’t be in it. I wouldn’t do it, really, if I was asked because you don’t fix something that’s already fixed.” She spoke with genuine affection about her experience filming the original trilogy with Leslie Nielsen between 1988 and 1994, and expressed scepticism that the chemistry could be replicated.
Yet when the film arrived in cinemas, there she was – reprising her role as Jane Spencer in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo. The scene: Frank Drebin Jr., played by Neeson, suffers a wardrobe malfunction during a live televised MMA event on New Year’s Eve. The camera cuts to Jane, sitting on a sofa, watching the broadcast with an expression of pure horror. She has no dialogue. The entire moment lasts seconds. It is, as SlashFilm noted, “pretty cool that she changed her mind.”
Anderson revealed that Presley had left her a voicemail before filming began. “She just said, ‘Have a good time. Embrace the silliness. You’re going to do great,'” Anderson told People. It was a gesture of generosity from one generation to the next, and a reminder that Presley’s film career – often overshadowed by her association with Elvis – includes genuinely beloved comic work. Her chemistry with Nielsen was the beating heart of those spoof films, her gift for deadpan timing arguably as essential to the franchise as his own. On Instagram, Presley marked the occasion with characteristic understatement: “Over 35 years later the laughs continue.”
From Bankruptcy to a Half-Billion Dollar Empire
The financial dimension of Priscilla Presley’s story is, in many respects, her most remarkable achievement. When Elvis died on 16 August 1977, his estate was worth approximately $5 million, weighed down by debts, tax liabilities, and years of profligate spending. Graceland, the thirteen-acre Memphis compound Elvis had purchased in 1957 for $102,500, was hemorrhaging money on maintenance. The estate was, by any rational measure, heading for bankruptcy.
Priscilla, appointed trustee for their nine-year-old daughter Lisa Marie, made a series of decisions that transformed a financial catastrophe into an empire. She hired a CEO, Jack Soden, and together they opened Graceland to the public on 7 June 1982. Within four weeks, the attraction had recouped its entire investment. She established Elvis Presley Enterprises in 1981, overseeing the licensing of Elvis’s name, image, and music. By the time Lisa Marie inherited the estate on her twenty-fifth birthday in 1993, the trust had grown from $1 million to over $100 million. Forbes has estimated Graceland’s current value at approximately $500 million, generating an estimated $10 million annually in tourist revenue. Over 600,000 visitors pass through its gates each year.
As we explored in a previous analysis of how Priscilla built her fortune after divorcing Elvis, her divorce settlement was modest by celebrity standards – a lump sum, child support, five per cent of Elvis’s music royalties, and half the proceeds from the sale of their Beverly Hills home. Her real wealth was generated through decades of entrepreneurial labour: running EPE until 1988, launching a successful perfume line called Moments, and later building a bed linen brand. She sold 85 per cent of her EPE shares to the Sillerman family for $100 million in the late 1980s, and retained a 15 per cent stake that continues to generate value.
The Legal Wars That Won’t End
Yet for all her business acumen, Priscilla Presley’s later years have been defined by litigation. The most publicly visible dispute was the 2023 trust battle with her granddaughter Riley Keough, following Lisa Marie’s death in January of that year. Lisa Marie’s 2016 will had removed Priscilla as a trustee and installed Riley as the sole manager of her estate. Priscilla contested the amendment, alleging forgery and procedural irregularities. The case was settled out of court in May 2023: Priscilla received a $1 million lump sum from Lisa Marie’s $25 million life insurance policy, a role as special advisor to the Promenade Trust worth $100,000 annually, and the right to be buried near Elvis at Graceland. Riley was confirmed as sole trustee.
Priscilla has consistently denied any feud with Riley. “Riley and I have never had a problem,” she told People in September 2025. “There’s been so much that’s untruthful out there.” A letter Riley wrote to Priscilla, made public in September 2025 as part of separate litigation, suggested otherwise: “Unfortunately Nona as you are taking me to court I am being forced to defend my mother’s wishes legally and publicly which would not have been my choice. It is really hurtful that after years of me trying to resolve your and my mother’s broken relationship and restore our family, you are taking me, of all people, to court.”
The more explosive legal front, however, involves Brigitte Kruse and Kevin Fialko, the heads of Priscilla Presley Partners. In August 2025, they filed a $50 million fraud and breach of contract lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court. The allegations are staggering. According to the complaint, Priscilla falsely claimed ownership of her name, image, and likeness rights despite having sold them to Elvis Presley Enterprises in 2005 for $6.5 million. The lawsuit further alleges that, following Lisa Marie’s cardiac arrest in January 2023, Priscilla “pulled the plug” on her daughter’s life-saving treatment in order to regain control of the family trust – a claim her attorney, Marty Singer, has called “one of the most shameful, ridiculous, salacious, and meritless lawsuits I have seen in my practice.”
Priscilla had herself sued Kruse and Fialko in 2024, alleging elder abuse and financial exploitation. The duelling lawsuits paint a picture of a woman caught between competing forces: those who see her as a victim of opportunistic advisers, and those who accuse her of ruthlessly weaponising her celebrity and her family’s tragedies. What is beyond dispute is that at eighty-one, Priscilla Presley remains a central figure in one of America’s most enduring cultural dynasties – and that the story is far from over.
A Legacy Still Being Written
What Priscilla Presley has done, perhaps more than anything else, is refuse to be static. The Sofia Coppola film Priscilla, released in 2023 and starring Cailee Spaeny, offered a sympathetic portrait of her early years with Elvis. As we previously examined, Coppola’s film reframed the narrative around Priscilla’s agency, casting her not as a passive muse but as a young woman navigating the constraints of a world built around a man’s ego. The film’s release coincided, with uncomfortable precision, with the real-life family drama unfolding over Lisa Marie’s estate.
Priscilla’s plans for 2026 involve continued touring and, one suspects, continued litigation. She has been honoured with Tennessee’s highest civilian award for her contributions to the state’s cultural heritage and her role in preserving Graceland as a historic landmark. She has a square named after her in Egersund, Norway – “Priscilla Presleys plass” – near the house where her grandfather was born in 1899. She is a great-grandmother to Riley’s children, Tupelo and a baby born in 2025.
When asked by Hello! what she imagined Elvis would be doing in his nineties, had he lived, Priscilla did not hesitate. “I think he’d be doing the same thing in life – singing and touring. He loved it.” There is something telling in the answer. It is the response of a woman who understands what it means to keep performing, to keep showing up, to keep working the room long after the audience might have expected you to take your final bow. At eighty-one, Priscilla Presley is not merely surviving. She is, by her own stubborn logic, still getting started.
