Cher has been in the limelight for 60 years, with her tumultuous personal life attracting almost as much attention as her chart-topping timeless music and her acting roles. Her two sons, Chaz Bono and Elijah Blue Allman have never known life outside of that experience.
Allman, the “Believe” singer’s youngest child, has made headlines several times himself, thanks both to his moderately successful music career, his rocky relationship with his mother, and his issues with substance abuse.
Who is Elijah Blue Allman?
Elijah Blue Allman is the son of singer Cher and rock musician Gregg Allman, from the the Allman Brothers Band. He was born on July 10, 1976, in Los Angeles, but his parents divorced soon after, and thus his dad became an absent figure in his life.
According to the Daily Mail, Cher sent her son to Hyde School, a boarding school in Bath, Maine, at 8, where he met his future bandmate, Renn Hawkey. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight in 2014, Allman confessed he was only 11 when he first started taking drugs, starting with marijuana and ecstasy. “I mean it’s just what you did, it’s just what everybody did,” he said.
He graduated from school in 1994 and began making music shortly after with drummer Alec Puro and producer Josh Abraham. Allman sent some of their demos to Hawkey, and Deadsy was formed. While not exactly mainstream, the industrial metal band gained a dedicated following, releasing music and playing together until 2007. Some of their most popular tracks include 2002’s “The Key to Gramercy Park,” and 2006’s “Brand New Love.”
The years following were a bit deserted when it came to Allman’s musical output. Deadsy went on a hiatus, presumably so the leading man could release some solo work, which never really materialized. Adopting the name Elijah Blue and the Trapezoids for his solo outing, the musician ended up only releasing a few demos on social media.
A few years later, Allman contracted Lyme disease and fell seriously ill, eventually moving to Germany to receive special treatment. He met his future wife, British singer Marieangela King, known as Queenie in the rock band KING, during that period. They married in December 2013. Allman has previously spoken about the lack of support from his mom during his battle with Lyme disease, revealing in a 2014 interview that emotional support is not “one of her strong suits” and that his family was convinced the illness had been “imaginary.”
In the same interview, Allman opened up about his strained relationship with his mother, saying they’re not close and that dealing with her fame hasn’t always been easy. King also got to give her two cents on the matter, calling the legendary performer “interesting” and “complicated,” and reluctantly conceding that, although short, most of the time they had spent together had been positive.
In the same year, Allman told Entertainment Tonight that he had been sober since 2008. His father, Gregg Allman, died in 2017, aged 69, due to complications from liver cancer. He also struggled with addiction.
Elijah Blue Allman’s struggles with addiction and conservatorship
Fast forward a decade, and Cher has named her son’s wife a “destructive presence in his life,” keeping him from sobriety and mental health, in the conservatorship request court documents obtained by TMZ in December 2023. The couple have been estranged since 2020, by which point Allman’s drug abuse had become concerning. They attempted to reconcile in November 2022, but the musician was allegedly kidnapped from the hotel they were staying at together, and taken back to rehab. King alleged the men were acting on Cher’s orders.
After rehab, Allman lived at the Chateau Marmont for six months, as his mother attempted to keep him in check with the help of a caretaker. Her efforts were not successful, culminating in an episode in September 2023 when the Deadsy frontman passed out at the entrance of the hotel. According to the Daily Mail, the police took him back to rehab in Pasadena, California, two days later. His mother had been planning an intervention.
In the conservatorship suit, Cher claims that the musician is “substantially unable to manage his own financial resources due to severe mental health and substance abuse issues.” Allman has yet to release an official statement on the matter but has posted several cryptic images on Instagram in the last few days with the caption “Imprisonment via conservatorship.”