Riley Keough breaks her silence on legal battle with grandmother Priscilla Presley saying their relationship is ‘complicated’ after ‘upheaval’

In January of this year, just days after attending the Golden Globes to support the Baz Lurhman biopic “Elvis,” the rock n’ roll legend’s only daughter Lisa Marie Presley died suddenly of a bowel obstruction. The surviving Presley family, which includes Priscilla Presley and Riley Keough, were then thrust into a legal battle for control of the Presley estate, which includes Graceland.

Now, Riley, granddaughter of Elvis and star of “Daisy and The Six,” is speaking out for the first time since the resolution of that legal battle with her own grandmother, admitting that their relationship went through “upheaval” and the situation is “complicated.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair for their September cover story, Riley is asked point blank if she’s happy now that she has been named the sole trustee of Lisa Marie’s estate and the owner of Graceland.  The outlet reports that in return for becoming the sole trustee of Lisa Marie’s estate, Riley will reportedly pay her grandmother a million dollars and cover $400,000 in legal fees.

The actress chooses her words very carefully in crafting her response, noting, “I’m trying to think of a way to answer it that’s not a 20-minute conversation,” but then admits, “There was a bit of upheaval, but now everything’s going to be how it was.”

She continues, “[Priscilla’s] a beautiful woman, and she was a huge part of creating my grandfather’s legacy and Graceland. It’s very important to her. He was the love of her life. Anything that would suggest otherwise in the press makes me sad because, at the end of the day, all she wants is to love and protect Graceland and the Presley family and the legacy. That’s her whole life. So it’s a big responsibility she has tried to take on. None of that stuff has really ever been a part of our relationship prior. She’s just been my grandma.”

After Lisa Marie died on January 12, on January 26 The Hollywood Reporter reported that Priscilla had filed a petition to void a 2016 amendment to Lisa Marie's will and testament that put Riley and her late brother Benjamin Keough in charge of the estate. Elvis's only wife Priscilla claimed that Lisa Marie's signature on the document was questionable and seemed to be not notarized among other inconsistencies. After months of battling through the courts, the grandmother and granddaughter came to a settlement agreement on May 16.

As such, questions have arisen if Priscilla will be permitted to have her burial at Graceland should she choose. Riley is quick to brush that off.

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t be buried at Graceland,” she tells Vanity Fair. “I don’t understand what the drama in the news was about. Yeah. If she wants to be, of course. Sharing Graceland with the world was her idea from the start.” 

“I always had positive and beautiful memories and association with Graceland. Now, a lot of my family’s buried there, so it’s a place of great sadness at this point in my life.”

In the interview, Riley opens up about the pain she has endured over the last few years with the death of her mother preceded only by a few years by the death of her brother Benjamin from suicide in 2020.

“I have been through a great deal of pain and I’ve had my.… Parts of me have died and I’ve felt like my heart has exploded, but I also feel.… I’m trying to think of how to phrase this.… I have strengthened the qualities that have come about through adversity.”

“He, in a lot of ways, felt like my twin,” she says of her late brother. “We were very connected and very similar. He was much quicker and wittier and a little smarter than me. He was a very special soul.” 

She also talks about the last time she saw her mother, which was at the Golden Globes. “We had dinner,” she says. “That was the last time I saw her. I remember thinking about how beautiful she looked, and that was my strongest memory of the dinner.”

She continues, “When I lost my brother, there was no road map whatsoever, and it was a lot of big emotions that I didn’t know what to do with. When I lost my mom, I was familiar with the process a little bit more, and I found working to be really helpful. I find it triggering when people say happiness is a choice, but in that moment, I did feel like there was a choice in front of me to give up and let this event take me out or have the courage to work through it. I started trying to move through it and not let it take me out.”

Now, with the legal unpleasantness behind the Presleys, Riley says that things are “complicated” but that was all down to the “panic” of having the rug pulled out from underneath them.

“When my mom passed, there was a lot of chaos in every aspect of our lives. Everything felt like the carpet had been ripped out and the floor had melted from under us. Everyone was in a bit of a panic to understand how we move forward, and it just took a minute to understand the details of the situation, because it’s complicated. We are a family, but there’s also a huge business side of our family. So I think that there was clarity that needed to be had.”

You can read the entire interview with Riley here.