Lisa Marie Presley 'Felt This Desire to Be Alone' When She Left Scientology, Riley Keough Reveals (Exclusive)

Riley Keough opens up about her late mother Lisa Marie Presley’s addiction and her departure from Scientology.

In his posthumous memoirs From here to the Great Unknownwhich Riley, 35, completed for her mom after her death in 2023, Lisa Marie writes about first joining Scientology with her mother, Priscilla Presley, when she was 10 years old.

After several stints at the Scientology Center of Fame as a teenager, Lisa Marie finally walked away from the church in 2013, years into her opioid addiction. (She started taking them after the birth of her twins Finley and Harper Lockwood in 2008).

“She left everything behind,” Riley tells PEOPLE of her mother. “She left her friends, her house, Los Angeles. She had this life that was really big, and she just wanted to run away and disappear.”

When her twins were born, Lisa Marie and her then-husband Michael Lockwood decided to move from LA to England, after she found out that staff were overcharging her cards. She also bought a house in Calabasas, California for Riley and her brother Benjamin Keough to live in.

“Her community is gone,” Riley writes. – She was in the countryside with two babies and no friends.

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Riley Keough and Lisa Marie Presley at the launch party for “Commando: The Autobiography of Johnny Ramone” on April 27, 2012 in West Hollywood, California.

John Sciulli/WireImage

While Lisa Marie was in England, Riley writes that she had “no idea” that her mom was “on the pill growing slowly.” Lisa Marie went to rehab in Mexico, but found an excuse to cut her stay short to return to England when the twins started school.

After another stint in rehab, Lisa Marie moved to Nashville with Michael and the twins. Two weeks after she moved, Riley writes that her mom went back on opioids and “the addiction got worse.”

“After I left Scientology, I started taking more pills,” Lisa Marie writes in the book, adding that “it escalated to 80 pills a day.”

Speaking about that period in her mom’s life, Riley tells PEOPLE, “I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

“I don’t know if she made that mass exodus because she started doing drugs or if it was the other way around,” Riley continues. “She felt this desire to be alone with her children and her husband and away from everything. And then that, I feel, maybe contributed to the isolation of that, the drug problem that got worse.”

After Lisa Marie sent Riley and Benjamin a series of worrisome texts asking them to kick her out of Nashville, they hired an RV for Benjamin to pick her up and drive her to LA

When they returned to LA, Lisa Marie was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was sent to court-ordered rehab, but continued to get high on “the post-rehab cocktail,” Riley writes in the book. At the same time, she told Lockwood that she was leaving him.

Lisa Marie finally decided to get sober when she was admitted to the hospital again, this time for a seizure. “She was very distressed by the seizure,” Riley writes.

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Riley Keough and Lisa Marie Presley in 2017.

Neilson Barnard/Getty

During Lisa Marie’s battle with addiction, Benjamin’s addiction problems began to grow in private, as did his depression. He died by suicide at the age of 27 in 2020.

“My brother was just an incredibly sensitive person and there was an addiction to him,” Riley says. “But it’s something I keep repeating in my mind, ‘What happened?’ Because it seemed to me that everything was fine and very normal for many years, so it was very destabilizing and shockingly incredibly difficult.”

Lisa Marie Presley and Benjamin Keough 2010 Mark Humphrey/AP/Shutterstock Lisa Marie Presley took 80 pills a day at the height of her opioid addiction: ‘It was too painful to be sober’

After Benjamin’s death, Riley knew her mother would not live long. She died three years later, at the age of 54, from a small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication of bariatric surgery.

Despite the difficult times of recent years, Riley is hopeful From here to the Great Unknown shows that her family is not only defined by tragedy.

“Most of our lives were very happy,” she says. “The tragedy in my family was so heartbreaking, but we also had an incredible amount of fun and these beautiful experiences that I don’t know if people get to experience very often. I feel extremely grateful for that.”

From here to the Great Unknown is now available.

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Source: HIS Education