Lisa Marie Presley has passed away

So it begins. So freaking familiar. Sigh...

Yeah, same. I'm not the biggest fan of that song and it's not the best MJ video, but I'm glad now he shot it as they are gorgeous in it, especially Lisa. I love the MJ+Lisa shots in it. Lisa was really at her best while being married to him. This forever immortalizes them and their marriage this way.

Lisa gave an interview by some guy named Tony Ortega. She said that Scientology pressured her to divorce Michael. Here's the excerpt where she discusses it. The interview is quite extensive if you're interested. Shame on Priscilla for forcing Lisa to become involved with Scientology after Elvis died. It definitely sounds like a cult.

Here's the part where she mentions MJ


“I was in love with Michael, believe it or not. I didn’t want to leave him. He was in trouble and I wanted to help him. And they made sure that I left him,” Lisa told me, perhaps sensing that I, like so many others, had assumed her 1994 marriage to pop superstar Michael Jackson was some sort of put-on.

She said that her affection for him was very real, but that Scientology had its own interests in the union: It had long wanted to bring in Jackson, who had a Jehovah’s Witnesses background. “But then they realized he was getting too much bad press,” she said.

She denied ever seeing anything like what Jackson was accused of that would result, ten years later, in a trial for child molestation.

“Fucking around little boys? Dude, do you think I’d be with someone if I witnessed that?” she said.

In a 2003 Rolling Stone interview, Lisa described some of the things that were driving a wedge into the marriage. That, for example, she hadn’t seen Michael in a month as he prepared for the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, and there was also the time Jackson had said something false to a TV Guide interviewer, claiming that Lisa had told him that Elvis had gotten a nose job.

When Rolling Stone asked her how things had come to a head, she replied “I’d had enough. That’s all.”

To me, however, she said that Scientology was intimately involved in the split.

“I was in love with Michael. I wanted to help him,” she said. But there was always a Scientology presence wherever they went. “There was always someone here. Even when we did that ABC prime time interview, there was always a Scientology handler right there.”

In particular, two figures were involved in driving them apart, she said.

“DM [David Miscavige] facilitated my divorce with MJ,” she said, claiming that Miscavige and a Scientologist attorney, John P. Coale, pressured her to file for divorce.

“I was calling Dave, asking, what do I do? He was a huge MJ fan. He was all over that,” she said. She was told to make sure that Jackson didn’t file for divorce first, because it would give him an advantage in court.

“One morning I got a call from John Coale. He said, ‘Michael’s going to make a move. He’s going to file.’ So I filed.”

She explained that she felt pressured to be the first to file for divorce, but then regretted it.

John P. Coale is not only a well known Scientologist attorney, he made a name for himself suing tobacco companies in the 1980s, and has also made news as a political operator. He’s married to TV journalist Greta Van Susteren, who joined the church as a result of marrying him in 1988.

(Lisa mentioned that she thought it was unusual that a TV journalist would be a Scientologist, when founder L. Ron Hubbard had such disdain for the media. But she said that Miscavige told her that Van Susteren “helped Scientology with Fox News.” Van Susteren left Fox News the year after my conversation with Lisa, and she has historically been very tight-lipped about her Scientology involvement.)

I spoke with Coale this past Friday, after letting him know what Lisa had told me. He had a different version of events.

“First of all, I never told her to love or unlove Mr. Jackson. This is 30 years ago,” he said.

And he added it was “absurd” that he would have told Lisa to file for divorce before Jackson. The reason?

“There was no contest.”

Coale said he vividly remembered a lunch he had with Johnnie Cochran, who represented Jackson.

“What do you want to do? I asked him. They don’t have any children. They each have their own money. There’s no joint property. There was nothing to fight over. So that was it and we ate lunch. There was never any contest,” Coale said. “It was a great lunch. Johnnie Cochran was a really great guy. It’s a shame he died. He was a great lawyer and great guy. And that’s what he would do. There was nothing to fight about.”

Coale suggested that Lisa might have confused him for another lawyer handling the case. “That was what I did with Cochran. She had other lawyers who wrote up the papers. I don’t know what happened there,” he said. “I never advised her about what to do with the relationship with Michael Jackson. I don’t know if anyone else did.”

As for Miscavige, Coale said he never talked to the church leader about the Presley-Jackson matter at the time.

“I’ve known him for years, but I’ve probably talked to him under ten times,” Coale said. “It’s probably been six or seven years since I saw him.”

In 2015, nineteen years after her divorce, Lisa told me she believed that Miscavige was behind the effort to drive her away from Jackson, and she likened it to what she had read that Miscavige had done in Tom Cruise’s marriages.

“I know how in love they were,” she said, referring to Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who split in 2000. “But they were driven apart.”

Scientology’s reputation for indoctrination and control was pretty legendary, and celebrities have come forward to detail it in the past. But I wondered about her family’s involvement in Scientology’s “technology,” the arcane past-life therapy that it sold at considerable prices.

“My mom’s not Clear. She takes courses and reads books, but she’s not involved,” she said, suggesting that Priscilla had not applied herself to making it to the higher steps on what Scientology calls its “Bridge to Total Freedom.”

Lisa herself had gone nearly to the top of the Bridge, reaching OT 7.

“Operating Thetan Level Seven” is the second highest “auditing level,” and the most grueling, requiring years for some to finish it.

“I never finished it. I quit after three months,” she said. “It was bullshit. It was just about control. It was just a way of getting more money.”

And the other celebrities she’d met in Scientology? I was curious what kind of relationship she had with them.

Tom Cruise?

“I fucking hate Tom. I met him 20 years ago. I said I never want to be in a room with him again.”

John Travolta?

“John is my last Scientology friend. Kelly [Preston] kind of monitors us. John and I get unruly if we’re together. John is renting my house in Hawaii right now.”

(Preston died of cancer in 2020.) I asked what Lisa meant by “unruly,” and she described late nights with Travolta talking about what the rest of the world thought about Scientology, which the church considers a forbidden exercise.

Tony Ortega is a journalist who has been exposing Scientology's dirty laundry/tactics for years, so he's legit.

I had heard about the role David Miscavige/Scientology had on Nicole Kidman's and Tom Cruise's divorce before and how they wanted to control Katie Holmes and drove her to get away from Tom and Scientology, so it wouldn't surprise me if they applied similar tactics on Lisa's and Michael's marriage.

The documentary Going Clear and Leah Remini's series Scientology's Aftermath are quite good to realize how disgusting that enterprise disguised as a religion really is.

“I fucking hate Tom. I met him 20 years ago. I said I never want to be in a room with him again.”

LOL, Tom Cruise might be a great actor but he must be such a major asshole. I have heard that his house was built with Scientologist slave labor basically.

Travolta on the other hand seems like a nice guy, just clueless and naive about Scientology (like Lisa herself was for long).

I already heard this story before about Lisa confronting David Miscavage over Ron Miscavage. I think it's in Ron Miscavage's book as well. She seems fierce when she's angry. LOL, she had David Miscavage shaking in his boots.

The most surprising thing in this conversation to me was that Priscilla wasn't as much a hard core Scientologist as I imagined. I always thought Lisa doesn't go public with her leaving of the church because of Priscilla and Riley, but here she said they both left the church with her. And Priscilla was never that hard core - she didn't even achieve "clear" status.

I don't understand why some fans still put Debbie Rowe on a pedestal (well, I guess it's because she's the mother of MJ's kids). This woman seems to have been as bad of an influence on MJ as Arnold Klein - she just has a tiny bit more of a conscience.

BBC News - Priscilla Presley contests validity of Lisa Marie's will
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64461305