Roseanne Barr has claimed Lisa Marie Presley privately ranked Michael Jackson as her “best lay.”
Barr, 73, made the allegation in a Hollywood Reporter interview published Tuesday, insisting she was not fabricating the account. The comedian said Presley, who died in 2023 at 54, spoke openly about her famous husbands and their intimate lives during their friendship.
“He had it going on,” Barr said of Jackson, according to Presley’s reported assessment. “She said he told her all the things girls want to hear.”
Barr claimed Jackson ranked “No. 1” in Presley’s estimation. She added that Presley “never lied about s–t like that” and extended her disclosures to Nicolas Cage, to whom Presley was briefly married in 2002.
“She told me everybody she was with and their business, the size of it and the use and all of it,” Barr continued. Because of this candor, Barr called Presley “the best person that [she] ran around with.”
Presley’s own posthumous memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” published in 2024, offered her direct account of her physical relationship with Jackson. The Grammy winner was “still a virgin” when they met, she wrote.
“I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss,” Presley recalled. “He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened.”
Presley remembered being “shocked” when Jackson began “instigating… The physical stuff” and declared he was “not waiting.” She referred to those days as the happiest she’d ever been.
Priscilla Presley, 81, addressed the romance in her own 2025 memoir, “Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis,” She wrote that she directly questioned her daughter about the physical nature of the marriage.
“Like so many people, I wasn’t sure,” Priscilla noted. “She said yeah.”
Priscilla’s assessment of Jackson was far harsher. She dubbed him a “manipulative man” and revealed his marriage to Lisa Marie “appalled” her.
Priscilla also detailed Lisa Marie’s tumultuous union with Cage in the tell-all. She described a blowout fight on the “furious” Oscar winner’s yacht that ended with Cage throwing his then-fiancée’s $65,000 engagement ring into the ocean.
“As far as I know, the ring is still there,” Priscilla wrote of the six-carat bauble. She clarified that Cage later acquired “an even bigger diamond (ten carats), and they got engaged all over again.”
Lisa Marie Presley was married four times. Her first marriage to Danny Keough lasted from 1988 to 1994 and produced two children: daughter Riley, now 37, and son Benjamin, who died in 2020 at 27. Her union with Jackson followed from 1994 to 1996. After Cage, she married Michael Lockwood from 2006 to 2021; their twins Harper and Finley turned 18 earlier this month.
Reps for Cage, Presley and Jackson’s estate did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis” is currently available.