Riley Keough opens up about Michael Jackson being a stepfather

Riley Keough shares some candid thoughts about her late mother Lisa Marie Presley’s marriage to King of Pop Michael Jackson.

Shown on Tuesday “Call Her Daddy” podcastKeough looked back on the two years she and her late brother, Benjamin Keough, had Jackson as their stepfather.

“Our life wasn’t crazier because it was already there. It was already there, like the press and the crazy people and the paparazzi and, you know, all that,” she explained. “But … I think when (Lisa Marie Presley) saw Michael’s life, were there things he had that she didn’t. She didn’t have a plane at the time or anything like that.”

“So she said then, ‘Oh, I’ve got to have a plane, and I’ve got to have this and that,’ and so our lives got bigger like that,” she 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 that, and I think that changed.”

Lisa Marie Presley married Jackson on May 26, 1994, less than a year after divorcing Keough’s father, Danny Keough, after about six years of marriage.

Since Lisa Marie Presley was the daughter of music legend Elvis Presley, her marriage to Jackson was perceived as the fusion of two era-defining cultural dynasties. However, their union was short-lived and the couple separated in 1996.

As host Alex Cooper pointed out, Lisa Marie Presley and Jackson’s marriage came shortly after Jackson was first investigated by the police after being accused of sexually abusing the families of four children. The 13-time Grammy winner denied the allegations and was later acquittedbut the claims would continue to be revived until his death in 2009 at the age of 50.

Keough, who was just 5 years old when her mother married Jackson, said she was “never told” about the allegations during the marriage.

“I could imagine my dad being really devastated reading the news and… I could imagine him saying all sorts 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 about the kids. We never say anything about them.’ We were not aware of any allegations.”

Keough, 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 his mother’s posthumous memoir, “From here to the great unknown.”

Although Lisa Marie Presley was still working on the book at the time of her death in January 2023, Keough used her mother’s audio recordings to complete it.

Listen to Riley Keough’s “Call Her Daddy” interview here. Her comments about Michael Jackson begin around the 23:40 mark.