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Topics: Celebrity, Sex and Relationships
Rhiannon Ingle
Priscilla Presley has candidly opened up about what she has called an 'unhappy' final memory of 'sexual intimacy' with Elvis.
The pair famously met when she was just 14 and he was a decade her senior, aged 24, while serving in Germany in the US Army.
They ended up tying the knot in 1967, when Priscilla was 21, and had only been wed for a few weeks when they discovered she was pregnant with their daughter, Lisa Marie, who sadly passed in 2023.
Throughout their relationship, Elvis frequently cheated on Priscilla, yet was furiously enraged when she finally left him in 1973 after having an affair with her karate instructor, Mike Stone.
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Priscilla has, however, maintained that this was not the reason for her departure.
Discussing the revelation in her newly-released book, Softly, As I Leave You, which came out today (23 September), Priscilla claimed that when Elvis found out about Stone, he 'forced' himself on her.
“Elvis made love to me forcefully, not forcibly,” she wrote. “His usual tenderness and consideration for me were missing. It was emotionally hurtful, and it left me with an unhappy memory of my last experience of sexual intimacy with Elvis.
"But it was not the reason I left."
She says Elvis then took it upon himself to ask his close friend, Joe Esposito, to find a hit man to take out Stone, but was eventually persuaded to calm down.
"As difficult as it was, I never regretted my decision to leave Elvis. But I never ceased to mourn it," the 80-year-old reflected.
After her divorce from Elvis, Priscilla stayed with Stone until 1975 and was later in an intermittent relationship with model Michael Edwards between 1978 and 1984.
She then had a long-term relationship with screenwriter Marco Antonio Garibaldi and welcomed her second child, Navarone, with him in 1987.
The pair were together from 1984 to 2006.
Elvis also did not remarry after divorcing Priscilla, but had a four-year relationship with Linda Thompson from 1972 to 1976 before getting engaged to Ginger Alden, his girlfriend at the time of his death in 1977.
Elsewhere in her memoir, Priscilla opened up about the awful moment she took her daughter Lisa Marie off life support.
"I thought about my girl, my wild, rebellious, passionate girl, lying in a vegetative state for the rest of her life," she said.
"I said what I had to. 'Take her off the machine, Doctor.' My voice was barely above a whisper."