It has been an eventful past 12 months for Riley Keough. She welcomed her first child in August 2022, mourned the loss of her mother in January 2023, and was engulfed in a 4-month-long legal battle with her grandmother – all while promoting her new mini-series Daisy Jones & The Six, which premiered in March.
With the legal battle behind her, Riley Keough can finally shift her focus to her life as a new mother – something she has never lost sight of over the past 12 months. For those that haven’t been following the 34-year-old lately, she and her husband, Ben Smith-Petersen, welcomed their first child in August 2022.
While that was a full year ago, Riley and Ben have kept their baby under wraps as much as possible since then. In fact, we first heard about the baby in late-January during Riley’s eulogy to her late mother (which was read by her husband), but they didn’t reveal the baby’s name until recently – very recently.
It was during a cover story for Vanity Fair that Riley Keough finally revealed what we’ve all been waiting for – her daughter’s name. She had just welcomed Britt Hennemuth (editor of VF) into her home when he heard the sound of an infant crying. “Hi baby,” Riley said to the baby. “This is Tupelo,” she said to Britt.
She goes on to reveal the baby’s full name as Tupelo Storm Smith-Petersen and confirmed that she was welcomed via surrogacy. She describes the surrogacy process as ‘a very cool, selfless, and incredible act that these women do to help other people’ before revealing the meaning behind her daughter’s name.
Her daughter’s name is an ode to both her late grandfather, Elvis Presley, and late brother, Benjamin Keough. Tupelo (a city in Mississippi) is the birthplace of Elvis, while Storm was her brother’s middle name. Elvis died in 1977 (12 years before Riley was born) and Benjamin died of suicide in 2020.
“It’s funny because we picked her name before the Elvis movie. I was like, ‘This is great because it’s not really a well-known word or name in relation to my family—it’s not like Memphis or something,” she said. “When the Elvis movie came out, it was like, Tupelo this and Tupelo that. I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ But it’s fine.”
Riley Keough Breaks Silence Over Family Drama
Elsewhere in her interview with Vanity Fair, Riley Keough spoke about the four-month-long legal battle with her grandmother, Priscilla Presley – which followed the death of her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, in mid-January. That legal battle resulted in Riley being named the sole trustee of her mother’s living trust.
She described the fiasco as ‘chaos’ and said it ‘felt like the carpet had been ripped out and the floor had melted from under us.’ There was a bit of a ‘panic’ as the family tried to understand how to best move forward – describing the ‘details of the situation’ as ‘complicated,’ but maintained that they are a family.
“We are a family, but there’s also a huge business side of our family. So I think that there was clarity that needed to be had,” she said before confirming her relationship with Priscilla is returning back to normal. “She’s a beautiful woman, and she was a huge part of creating my grandfather’s legacy and Graceland.”
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“All she wants is to love and protect Graceland and the Presley family and the legacy,” Riley Keough said of her 78-year-old grandmother. “That’s her whole life. So it’s a big responsibility she has tried to take on. None of that stuff has really ever been a part of our relationship prior. She’s just been my grandma.”
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