Lisa Marie Presley Shares She Had Abortion While Dating Danny Keough Before Having Daughter Riley Keough
Before her passing, Lisa Marie Presley opened up about her most difficult memories.
In her posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown—which was completed by her daughter Riley Keough after her death—Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley's daughter got candid about her pregnancies with Danny Keough, whom she was married to from 1988 to 1994.
"The first time I got pregnant I didn't even know it," Lisa Marie wrote in her memoir. "During the first four months we dated I had ended up in the ER with horrible pains and they rushed me into surgery."
The "Shine" singer explained that doctors at first thought she had an issue with her appendix, but after surgery she was told it was actually an ectopic pregnancy, which is when a fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus.
"I had never gotten pregnant with any other person," she recalled, "which is fascinating because I'd been equally sloppy, not using birth control or whatever. But with Danny it happened that first time, and then it happened again when we got back together."
According to Lisa Marie—who died at the age of 54 in January 2023 due to a small bowel obstruction following bariatric surgery—when she got pregnant a second time, she and Danny weren't sure what to do.
"I ended up having an abortion," she wrote. "And it was the stupidest thing I've ever done in my whole life. I was devastated."
After the procedure, she recalled both she and Danny cried, explaining they "were both destroyed and not long after that we fell apart and broke up. I couldn't live with myself."
Shortly after, Danny joined a band on a cruise ship, while Lisa Marie traveled around Europe.
"All the while, I could not believe that I had had an abortion," she remembered. "I was so upset with myself."
And that was when she began to form a plan, writing, "I plotted and I schemed. I pinpointed exactly when I was ovulating."
Lisa Marie went to visit Danny, and the two spent the night together without her telling him she was hoping to become pregnant.
"I didn't really care anymore what he thought about it," she explained. "I didn't care if he wanted to be a part of it or not. I felt that I had to redeem, to make amends, because I still couldn't believe I had had an abortion. I thought, 'I'm going to have this child. There is a child I need to be having.'"
The "Lights Out" singer remembers talking to her lost child, saying, "'I'm so sorry, I can't believe I f--king did that. Please forgive me and stay with me until I get pregnant again.'"
According to Lisa Marie, two weeks after her visit to Danny, she found out she was pregnant and the two were married shortly afterwards.
"Danny knew he had to marry me," she said. "I trapped him. I didn't really mean to, but I did."
The couple welcomed Riley in May 1989 and son Benjamin Keough in October 1992. Two years after their divorce, she went on to marry Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and then Michael Lockwood, with whom she shared 15-year-old twin daughters Harper and Finley Lockwood.
Sadly, her son Benjamin died by suicide in 2020 at the age of 27, an event that Riley believes contributed to her mother's own death.
"My mom tried her best to find strength for me and my younger sisters after Ben died, but we knew how much pain she was in," she told People in September. "My mom physically died from the after effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart."
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