Suing the King of Rock and Roll’s Estate
Suing the King of Rock and Roll’s Estate
Some people have trouble letting go when someone passes away. Sometimes, they don’t believe that the person is really gone. They are stuck in the stage of disbelief. Typically, this will happen with family members. However, it can sometimes happen with celebrities. A record producer named Major Bill Smith who had worked with Elvis in the 1950s by producing some work and promoting some concerts brought a lawsuit against the estate in 1993.
He claimed that the estate was making a substantial amount of money off the death of Presley and that there was not any proof that Elvis was actually dead. He said that he had met with Elvis several times after the King had supposedly gone off to the big concert in the sky.
Typically, people who claim that Elvis was still alive after his death were random folks who claimed to see him in a diner or walking down the street. The Major had a personal connection, and it seems that he had a personal stake in whether Elvis was still alive. He wrote a book called Memphis Mystery: Elvis… The Man and the Myth. In that book, he claims that Elvis faked his own death. Perhaps he thought the lawsuit might help to spur sales of the book. He sued for $50,000 but did not win the case.
There have been plenty of people over the years who believed that Elvis was still among the living. Given the fact that the King enjoyed many vices to excess in his life during his final years, it is quite likely that his death happened just the way it was reported.
So Many Other Lawsuits
You might think that someone who is dead wouldn’t get sued very often, but it happens more than you might think. In fact, it’s happened to the Elvis Presley Estate on multiple other occasions and for different reasons.
A Swiss tourist who visited Graceland said that the visit was not what he had hoped, and it actually ended up leaving him with a hearing problem and ruined his marriage. He said that while he and his daughter were staying at the hotel, a fire alarm woke him up. When they tried to get out of the building, he said the elevators weren’t working and the red walls of the hotel made it hard to find the exits. He was unable to get out of the hotel, and after the alarm finally stopped half an hour later, he found that he had tinnitus. He said this altered his ability to work, altered his speech, and ruined his marriage.
Another lawsuit occurred when a woman named Lisa Johansen published a book called I, Lisa Marie: The True Story of Elvis Presley’s Real Daughter. In her lawsuit against the Presley family, she said that she is actually the real daughter of Priscilla Presley and Elvis, and that after Elvis died in ’77, she and her mother fled the United States in fear for their safety and she was made to take on a new identity.
As you can see, a lot of bizarre cases surround the King.
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