When Neverland and Graceland collide! Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley shocked the world with the news of their brief romance in the mid-1990s.
The King of Pop and the daughter of Elvis Presley briefly met in the 1970s at a concert in Las Vegas but did not get to know each other until nearly two decades later, when they had dinner with a mutual friend in Los Angeles. At the time of their reunion, she was married to Danny Keough, with whom she shares two children: Riley and Benjamin.
Jackson and Lisa Marie quickly became friends and often talked on the phone, but their relationship did not progress beyond that right away. Then, in the summer of 1993, the “Thriller” singer was accused of sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy named Jordan Chandler, which he vehemently denied. He turned to Lisa Marie for support amid the investigation and proposed to her over the phone later that year.
After reaching a $23 million settlement with Chandler’s family in January 1994, Jackson fast-tracked his romance with the Memphis, Tennessee, native, who officially separated from Keough that May. The new couple took trips to Vegas and Florida before jetting off to the Dominican Republic, where they married in an off-the-cuff ceremony — just 20 days after she finalized her divorce.
“My married name is Mrs. Lisa Marie Presley-Jackson. My marriage to Michael Jackson took place in a private ceremony outside the United States weeks ago,” the bride later announced in a statement to the media. “I am very much in love with Michael. I dedicate my life to being his wife. I understand and support him. We both look forward to raising a family.”
From there, the newlyweds flaunted their union all over town, most famously kissing on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 1994. Behind closed doors, however, they were struggling, in part due to the “Billie Jean” crooner’s addiction to the painkillers he had been prescribed a decade prior for the second-degree burns he suffered in a fire on the set of a Pepsi commercial.
By December 1995, Jackson and Lisa Marie were done. She filed divorce papers and announced their separation the following month. They finalized the case in August 1996.
“They lasted longer than I thought they would,” Judge Hugo Francisco Alvarez Perez, who officiated the stars’ wedding, later told Entertainment Weekly. “I gave them a year. They lasted a year and a half.”
Scroll down for a timeline of Jackson and Lisa Marie’s brief marriage.