Even though she already helped finisher her mother Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir, Riley Keough was an open book herself during her Wednesday appearance on the Call Her Daddypodcast.
She not only revealed for the first time ever how she came to be arrested as a teenager, and how her mom reacted when she called her from jail, but also opened up about life with Michael Jackson
Presley and Jackson were married briefly from 1994 to 1995, shortly after the King of Pop was hit with a first round of allegations of inappropriate behavior with minors. Jackson maintained his innocence against all allegations until his death in 2009 at age 51. He was never convicted on any charges.
Shortly after breaking it off with Riley’s father Danny Keough, with whom she’d been married from 1988 to 1994, Lisa Marie married Michael. The marriage came a year after Michael was first accused of child sexual abuse by a 13-year-old boy in August 1993.
The iconic singer was subjected to a strip search and had his Neverland Ranch home thoroughly investigated before he ultimately settled the case out of court with the accusing family for $23 million. No criminal charges were brought against him.
While this news was certainly fresh in the public eye, Riley told host Alex Cooper, “I was never told anything.” Born in 1989, Riley was just five years old when Michael and Lisa Marie wed.
“It’s actually not something I ever asked as an adult,” she added, referring to her relationship with her mother. “I think it just was what it was. I don’t know, it just never came to mind, I guess.”
Speaking about her father during that time, Riley speculated, “I would imagine that my dad was really heartbroken and reading the news and I’m sure that — I’m just imagining — I would imagine he said all kinds of things to my mom that we didn’t know about.” Danny Keough died in 2019.
She recalled growing up with her late parents that they were pretty adamant that they “don’t fight around the kids,” which she says is why she doesn’t know a lot about what they might have discussed.
“We didn’t know anything. We didn’t know about any allegations,” she said. “We didn’t know. We had no awareness of that.”
While she has no memory of ever talking about any allegations against Michael with her mother Lisa Marie before her death a year ago, Riley does have distinct memories of that short period in her young life, saying that Michael’s presence made things “bigger.”
She said that the craziness of his life at that time with the paparazzi following him around and fans flocking wasn’t anything particularly new for her family. As the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, Riley and mom Lisa Marie had always known the spotlight.
“Our life wasn’t crazier because that was already there,” she said. “But … I think when she saw Michael’s life, there were things that he had that she didn’t have,” Riley said of her mother. “She didn’t have a plane at the time or things like that. She then was like, ‘Oh, I should have a plane, and I should have this and that.'”
She explained that before Lisa Marie’s marriage to Michael, her family had been living a relatively “simple” life, outside of the famous lineage. “She didn’t have 10 million assistants. She didn’t need all of that,” Riley shared. But after Michael, “I think that changed.”
Another change she remembers is that Michael would close things down for them. “Well, it was kind of like the only way that our family could do things, if we wanted to go to a toy store or like something like that, or ride rides,” she explained.
She has a vivid memory of walking through a toy store with her brother Benjamin, who passed away in 2020, when they were the only ones there.
“So it was just my brother and I in the whole toy store, and we were just going floor to floor to floor and filling up our thing. That was the first thing that comes to mind, but I don’t know if it was for us or just the way that our life was.”
As for life at home, despite the relationship quickly becoming fodder for tabloid speculation, and going the 1990s equivalent of viral for moments like a televised lip lock, Riley believes the feelings between Lisa Marie and Michael were genuine.
“The one thing I know is that they were in love and that their love for one another was genuine because I was there and I remember,” she said. “Everything else, I don’t know ’cause I wasn’t there.”
Those words are an echo of what she said in an Oprah Winfrey special timed with the release of Lisa Marie’s memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, on October 8, 2024. There, Riley said, “I can only speak to my experience with Michael and my experience was that he was only kind and loving to me and my family, and I saw them in a very seemingly happy, loving relationship.”
While she didn’t know anything about Michael’s troubles with the law when she was five or six years old, Riley found a bit of her own trouble a decade later.
Joking that she probably should have brought her publicist along to the Call Her Daddy taping, the Daisy Jones & the Six star admitted something she’s never before revealed … that she got arrested for breaking and entering as a teenager.
She then quickly offered some context to the story, so it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds. Instead, she compared it to Lisa Marie’s “rebellious moment” from her own life.
“I also had that, like where I would sneak out and you know, hang out with people I shouldn’t, wasn’t allowed to,” said Riley. But then she got arrested.
Riley explained, “I went to a party at my friend’s house, but I didn’t know that it wasn’t my friend’s house. It was a house for sale.”
She said the police were called and while most people escaped, she was one of about 10 kids that did not, with all of them getting arrested. “My mom was pissed. She was like, ‘This is on you, girl.'”
Making matters worse, Riley said she had to call her mom, who was out of town at the time. “I had to call her and tell her to come back from Vegas and pick me up in prison,” she recalled.
“I’ve never told anyone this! She’s like, I can’t get there,” Riley continued. Instead, her aunt had to come and get her. Nevertheless, Riley compares it to Lisa Marie’s own wild child era.
She shared that she was grateful that news of her arrest never made it into the newspapers, though she did get grounded for three months, which totally blew her 15th or 16th birthday.
Now that she’s a parent herself, Riley fully expects her children to the repeat the mistakes their parents made, just as she did with hers. Riley shares a 2-year-old daughter, Tupelo, with husband Ben Smith-Petersen.
As she looks ahead to navigating those tough teen years ahead, the actress has nothing but praise for how Lisa Marie raised her. “I think she was such an amazing parent and she wanted us to have, I think like her father did, these amazing experiences all the time,” she told Cooper.
“For me personally, I think that the problem there could be for some that when you’re used to so much, it’s hard to find joy in simple things,” she added, which is a cycle she’s hoping to change.
“I really want my children to be able to find joy playing in the backyard and doing normal kids stuff and not need elephants and circus and all these things all the time,” she said, though she why her mom went all out. “I think her intention was really wanting to give everything she could to her kids.”
