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Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumously published memoir From here to the great unknownreleased on Tuesday (October 8), contains a raw and candid memoir of the joys and traumas she experienced in life before her death in 2023 at the age of 54.

One of the most shocking claims is that she was sexually abused at a young age by one of her mother’s ex-boyfriends, actor Michael Edwards.

Edwards, now 80, appeared in the 1981 melodrama Dearest mom and 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Daydates Priscilla Presley from 1978 to 1984.

“The first time Edwards came into my room drunk and on his knees in the middle of the night was years ago. I think I was ten. When I woke up, I saw him kneeling next to my bed and running his finger along my leg under the covers, and when I moved he stopped – so I moved. “I was awake, but I was trying to sleep,” writes Presley, the only child of rock ‘n’ roll legend Elvis.

“He said he would teach me what would happen when I got older. He put his hand on my chest and said a man would touch you here, then he put his hands between my legs and said they would touch you here. I think he kissed me softly and then left that night.”

Recalling the moment she told her mother about the alleged incident, Presley says her mother flew into the house and slammed the door before calling Presley into her room and telling her that Edwards wanted to apologize.

“Edwards was sitting on her bed looking very sullen and grumpy. He said: “I’m so sorry, but in Europe that’s how they teach children, so I did that,” she added. “At one point it happened that he touched me and spanked me and told me not to look.”

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She continues: “I assume he was jerking off. He wouldn’t be mad at me – he would do it calmly, just sit in a chair and beat my ass. My butt would be black, blue, orange, green.”

Presley recalls that Edwards would excuse his behavior, saying he was drunk or that she had actually been flirting with him.

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“I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,” she writes. “He would still come into my room every now and then, but I would move or do something to make him think I was waking up. Then he ran back down the hall to my mom’s room, freaked out, and stayed away.”

A contact for Edwards could not be found. The Independent has reached out to Priscilla’s representatives for comment.

Presley briefly addressed the alleged abuse in a 2003 interview with playboy.

She called Edwards “sick” and referenced a passage from his 1988 memoir Priscilla, Elvis and mein which he remembers “longing for Lisa sexually.”

“After a disturbing afternoon in the pool, I had to cut short our swim together,” he wrote. “Lisa had innocently thrown her arms around me and we were jumping up and down. I became aroused. A feeling of nausea slowly crept into the pit of my stomach. I longed for Lisa sexually.”

Edwards does not say in his memoirs that he ever mistreated Presley, and there is nothing to suggest that he ever accepted it.

Elsewhere in From here to the great unknownwhich was completed by her eldest daughter Riley Keough in the months following her death, Presley reveals that she kept her son Benjamin’s body in her home for two months.

She writes that she was so heartbroken over Benjamin’s suicide in 2020 that she preserved his body on dry ice in a separate casitas bedroom while she considered where to bury him.

From here to the great unknown is out now.