Elvis Presley’s Cousin Says Priscilla’s Actions Towards Late Lisa Marie Are ‘Betrayal of the Highest Form’

Elvis Presley’s first cousin, Donna Presley, is standing up for the late Lisa Marie Presley.

The daughter of Elvis’ aunt Nashval Presley Pritchett, 85, released a seven-minute video on her official YouTube channel titled “Donna Presley SLAMS Priscilla’s Lies” in September immediately following the release of Priscilla Presley’s memoir Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis. In it, Donna fires back at multiple claims made by Priscilla, 80.

“There comes a time when you have to speak, and silence is no longer an option,” Donna began. “I have stayed silent with regard to Priscilla Beaulieu, but there comes a time when a person takes a step too far.”

After pointing out things Priscilla has said about Elvis, including that he was allegedly addicted to drugs before his death at age 42 in 1977, she zeroed in on Lisa Marie.

Following Lisa Marie’s death at age 54 in 2023, her posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown claims her mother’s boyfriend Michael Edwards molested her as a child. (Edwards denied the allegations, and in Softly, As I Leave You, Priscilla said Lisa Marie’s “revelation didn’t make sense.”)

Donna, however, told her YouTube following she must “defend Lisa Marie Presley,” adding: “She was a talented, intelligent and caring soul. Her life after Graceland presented challenges, but part of that pain came from being severed from the family who loved her and from the home that was truly hers.”

“In her own book, Lisa bravely admitted to abuse suffered at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend,” Donna continued. “That reality, not some imagined genetic weakness inherited from Elvis, was part of the burden that Lisa carried along with her own personal issues that Lisa documented in her own book.”

“For Priscilla to now discredit her daughter’s words by suggesting that Lisa’s testimony should be dismissed on the grounds of her own struggles is not merely unjust, it is a betrayal of the highest form,” Donna insisted. “It is an attempt to strip Lisa of her credibility, to discredit her voice and to diminish the truth she fought to put into public record.”

“Nobody, not even her mother, had the right to attack her truth in that way,” she said. “Elvis deserves to be remembered in truth, not in scandal. And his daughter Lisa deserves the same — to be honored as a gifted, compassionate and resilient woman.”

For his part, Edwards wrote in his 1988 memoir Priscilla, Elvis and Me that he developed inappropriate feelings for Lisa Maire as she grew up.

In one passage, he recalled spending time in the pool with Lisa Marie, whom he bounced up and down in the water. “I became aroused,” he wrote (via E! News). “A sick feeling crept slowly into the pit of my stomach. I was craving Lisa sexually.”

In a statement to People, Edwards said Lisa Marie’s claims were “absolutely untrue,” adding in part: “I never molested Lisa Marie and am shocked at the suggestion that I did. I was encouraged to embellish a harmless anecdote about Lisa Marie in my memoir from the 1980s and now regret that I did.”