Let’s throw the full weight of the shebeen behind the lawsuit brought by one Riley Keough, who is fighting foreclosure on her grandpappy’s estate. From The Washington Post:
In a lawsuit filed last week, Riley Keough asked a Shelby County, Tenn., court to stop what she called a fraudulent sale, after a lender claimed the family failed to pay back a $3.8 million loan borrowed by Keough’s mother, Lisa Marie Presley.
A foreclosure auction had been scheduled for Thursday, but a judge temporarily delayed the sale before the case goes to court Wednesday. Keough became the sole owner of the Memphis mansion last year after the death of her mother in January 2023.
Graceland is on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s been designated a National Historic Landmark. I mean, every house of everyone who had dinner with a Founder is safe from the vultures, but do any of them have a half-million visitors a year? Do any of them have a damn Jungle Room? I mean, c’mon, people. And the circumstances of the lawsuit are pretty close to murky.
Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC, the creditor behind the foreclosure, claims it made a $3.8 million loan agreement with Lisa Marie Presley in 2018 that she failed to repay. She used Graceland as collateral, the creditor says. The loan agreement bears the signature of a Florida notary, Kimberly Philbrick.
Keough alleged in the lawsuit filed in Shelby County Chancery Court that her mother never borrowed any money from Naussany Investments and never gave a deed of trust to the company, contrary to the creditor’s claims.
Keough’s attorney also alleged that Naussany Investments “is not a real entity.” Instead, the lawsuit said, it appears that the company was created to defraud the family. “These documents are fraudulent,” wrote Keough’s attorney Jeff Germany, who did not respond to a request for comment. Philbrick, the notary, wrote in an accompanying affidavit with Keough’s lawsuit that she never signed the loan agreement and never met Presley. “I do not know why my signature appears on this document,” she wrote.
If Keough loses her lawsuit and the property is foreclosed, its status on the National Register will probably keep it safe from being sold for condos or a new strip mall. But I think it should stay in the family and not fill the pockets of some shady investment house. This is now our new cause around these parts. You don’t mess with the property of the U.S. Mail.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
