Riley Keough’s bizarre fight to keep Graceland from being auctioned off

We figure by now you’ve seen some of the same stories we have about the strange situation in Memphis where a court hearing is scheduled today about a bizarre legal fight: Riley Keough, daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and granddaughter of Elvis Presley, is fighting to keep a lending company which may or may not actually exist from having her grandfather’s iconic home Graceland sold off in an auction on Thursday.

The auction was quietly scheduled because a firm named Naussany Investments and Private Lending LLC claimed that in 2018 Lisa Marie had borrowed $3.8 million and pledged Graceland’s deed of trust as collateral for the loan. She didn’t pay the money back before her January 12, 2023 death, and so the lending company filed to have the iconic home, which Elvis purchased in 1957 and lived in until his 1977 death, put up for auction.

Riley assumed ownership of the home after her mother’s death, and she filed a lawsuit to have the auction stopped, claiming that her mother never signed the loan documents, and in fact that her signature had been forged.

Elvis Presley Enterprises, which runs the home as a tourist attraction, put out a statement: “Elvis Presley Enterprises can confirm that these claims are fraudulent. There is no foreclosure sale. Simply put, the counter lawsuit has been filed is to stop the fraud.”

Riley’s lawsuit names a man named Kurt Naussany as a defendant, but he has denied that he’s been with the lending firm since 2015.

What a wild fight is scheduled for court today, and the press coverage should be intense: Was Lisa Marie desperate enough for cash during her bruising custody fight with former husband Michael Lockwood that she risked the future of Graceland? Or is the famous landmark the target of a dastardly legal hoax and should, if Riley Keough is right and signatures have been forged, result in criminal charges? And if Kurt Naussany isn’t behind it, who is?

Over the last 24 hours we’ve heard from a number of you who wonder if there’s some Scientology angle to this rapidly developing story. Lisa Marie, Riley Keough, and also Lisa’s mother Priscilla Presley were all involved in Scientology. We’ve seen it suggested that Lisa may have borrowed against Graceland because she wanted to give Scientology more money.

But as far as we know, there’s no evidence of that, and we haven’t seen any connection to Scientology emerge yet.

We’ll repeat what we do know, that in 2015 we had lengthy discussions with Lisa about her Scientology history, which had ended in October 2014 when she attempted to have a showdown with church leader David Miscavige over the way his father Ron Miscavige was being treated after he had dared to leave the organization.

Dave sent his sisters Denise and Lori to see Lisa at that showdown at the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, Florida rather than face her himself. She told us that after that humiliating and strange encounter, she was finished with Scientology, the culmination of a process of breaking away that had been going on for years.

She also told us that she took Priscilla and Riley out with her, telling them that she needed their support. And as of the time of our discussion, in 2015, that was the case — all three were out of Scientology, Lisa assured us.

Mike Rinder told us that he too had spoken to Lisa about her attempted showdown with Miscavige, and that after it took place in October 2014, she and Riley had gone to a rented house in Nashville, where Lisa called him.

“Riley was there with her and got on the phone. I had never spoken to her in my life. The first thing she said to me was, ‘You’ve got to take these motherfuckers down.’ I was thinking in my head, wow, that’s quite an introduction to Riley,” Rinder told us.

In the decade since then, however, we wondered about all three women and whether they had changed their minds about leaving Scientology. Lisa had stopped talking not only to us but also to Ron Miscavige, he told us before his 2021 death. Riley posted photos of herself with Scientologist friends on her Instagram account. And Priscilla has more recently spent time with longtime Scientologist Gottfried Helnwein, and also appeared to be wearing a Scientology pendant during filming of footage with Sophia Coppola about Coppola’s A24 film about Priscilla that came out last year.

However, at this point we don’t really know Riley Keough’s interest or involvement in Scientology, and we haven’t seen anything that connects this sudden and alarming story about Graceland with the church.

Frankly, we hope Riley can keep the house from being auctioned, and if her mother’s signature was forged on bogus loan documents, we hope a serious criminal investigation gets underway.

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