Michael Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley in 1994 but their relationship was short-lived. Despite their insistence — in the face of claims their romance was a sham — that they were in love, the pair’s marriage came to an end less than two years later. Last year, in an interview with The Sun, the King of Pop’s former personal assistant and friend Scott Shaffer spoke out about the relationship.
“I noticed things kind of going downhill between them because he wouldn’t tell her things — like where he was going, for example,” he said.
One instance Shaffer recalled was when the singer took him to Euro Disney for his birthday but lied to Presley about where they would be.
“She found out by seeing it on the news — he was on TV on the balcony,” he said.
The “final straw” for their marriage, Shaffer claimed, was when Jackson collapsed on stage whilst filming his HBO special in New York 1995.
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“She rushed out to come and see him in the hospital and he told he she was only allowed to see him for a certain amount of time,” the insider remembered.
“He gave her an hour or even less that she could visit him and then she had to leave — so essentially he put a time limit on her.
“At that point she’d just had enough and that was literally when she called her lawyer to start divorce proceedings,” he added.
But Shaffer also shared his memories of how Jackson reacted to the split and divorce from Presley.
“I couldn’t tell what was happening,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2010. “Dehydration, low blood pressure, exhaustion, a virus?”
“What did your gut tell you?” the talk show host asked. “You thought there was some drug use?”
“Yes,” Presley replied, before going on to reveal her side of the story about what led to their split.
“He had to make a decision” at one point, she said. “Was it the drugs and the vampires or me? And he pushed me away.”
Presley said she and Jackson continues to talk for a number of years after their divorce, but that when he died she hadn’t spoken to him since for a number of years.
Their last conversation was a phone call in 2005, she told Winfrey, when he asked if she still loved him.
“I told him I was indifferent,” she said. “He didn’t like that word. He cried.”
Shaffer first met Jackson on the set of the music video for Black and White in 1991, where he had been working as a production assistant.
He went on to become close friends with the popstar, acting as his personal assistant for seven years.
