Cher is ‘Hoping and Praying’ for the Best Amid Son Elijah Blue Allman’s Struggles, Says Source

Elijah Blue Allman stumbled as he made his way into the courtyard outside L.A.’s Chateau Marmont. Wearing a dirty T-shirt, drawstring shorts and slip-on shoes, he clutched a lit cigarette between tobacco-stained fingers — one digit tipped in a long, red-polished nail — and vacantly stared off before shuffling back inside the famed Sunset Strip hotel, as seen in video footage captured in early May and obtained by The Daily Mail.

A month later, the 48-year-old son of music and movie star Cher and the late Southern rock legend Gregg Allman suffered an overdose, a source confirms to Star. At about 1:25 p.m. on June 14, police officers responded to a call at a residence in the tiny desert town of Landers, Calif. — a property Elijah was reportedly renting about 160 miles from Hollywood — after receiving a call about a man “acting erratically,” the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department confirmed in a statement to Daily Mail. “Deputies located drugs inside the home and Allman was transported to the hospital.” The musician, who performs under the stage name P. Exeter Blue, “is extremely lucky to be alive,” the source tells Star. “The situation is utterly heartbreaking for Cher — it’s every mother’s worst nightmare. She’d been trying the tough love approach, but it’s totally backfired.”

Legal Battle

Elijah’s hospitalization comes a year and a half after the 79-year-old entertainment icon tried — and failed — to secure a temporary conservatorship over his estate. Just after Christmas in 2023, Page Six reported the Oscar winner claimed in court documents that Elijah was “substantially unable to manage his own financial resources due to severe mental health and substance abuse issues,” sharing fears he’d “immediately” spend any funds he received on drugs. According to Page Six, she further revealed her son made $120,000 a year and was “entitled to regular distributions from a trust established by his father for his benefit” — and People reported that he’d been treated for schizoaffective disorder and placed on several 5150 holds (72-hour involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations) — in the year prior.

But the former Deadsy frontman hit back, insisting he was sober and capable of managing his money. In early 2024, the court rejected Cher’s petition and recommended that she and her son enter mediation. According to TMZ, last September, they reached a private agreement, and Cher withdrew her case. “Back in 2024, Elijah was swearing up and down he’d stick to a life of sobriety and Cher wanted so badly to believe him. But Elijah has some major demons, just like his father,” explains the source, noting how Gregg — who split from Cher in 1979 after three on-off years of marriage — died from liver cancer in 2017 at 69 following decades of drug use.

The “If I Could Turn Back Time” singer had spent years trying to help her son, who in 2014 confessed to Entertainment Tonight he’d started using drugs at age 11 and had endured “some close calls and some moments of really feeling at the edge of mortality.” A decade after that interview, in which he admitted to using everything from marijuana and ecstasy to heroin, Elijah was still struggling. “He’d go through good spells but invariably would slip,” explains the source. “It hurt when Cher decided to back off and give him tough love, but she did it because everything else she’d tried had failed.” Others in Elijah’s orbit, however, viewed her decision as an abandonment that put her son’s life at risk. “When the conservatorship bid failed,” adds the source, “Cher took a giant step back and stopped paying for anything.”

Elijah became “resentful,” says the source. “He was horrified his mother had tried to take over his life, Britney Spears–style,” referring to the 43-year-old pop star’s battle to get out of a 13-year conservatorship largely managed by her father, “and it plunged him into an even worse place mentally than he was in already.”

More Drama

Other personal struggles have also been mounting. In 2021, Elijah filed to divorce Marieangela King, 37, the British-German musician he wed in 2013. They eventually reconciled, and she backed him amid his conservatorship battle with Cher last year. But in April, TMZ reported that Marieangela filed to end their marriage, asking the court to award her $6,000 a month in spousal support and use of their 2017 Toyota Prius. While Cher publicly stayed silent following Elijah’s hospitalization, Marieangela issued a statement of support to People. “While it is true that Elijah has faced personal challenges in the past,” she said in part, “one constant has been his unwavering commitment to sobriety and his loyalty to those he loves.”

Behind the scenes, Marieangela has clashed with her famous mother-in-law for years. “They do not get along, and that’s been a big source of stress for Elijah,” says the source. “From Marieangela’s perspective, Cher is a control freak who’s trying to remove her son’s right to function as an independent adult. And Cher thinks Elijah made a huge mistake and married horribly, that this woman has been nothing but trouble.” In a 2014 interview with Daily Mail, Elijah described them as “two strong women, two big bulls in the pen. I think there’s a respect and I think they butt heads a little bit.”

Challenging Bond

Elijah and Cher’s dynamic has also long been complicated. “He and I have such a bizarre relationship. We’ve had so many strange moments. I don’t really understand him. Somehow, Elijah and I kind of talk through osmosis,” Cher confessed on an episode of Dr. Phil in 2004, five years after she described her son to Entertainment Weekly (via People) as “a really smart, really talented, really strange person.”

In a 2014 interview with Daily Mail, Elijah accused Cher of falling short as a mom during his past battle with Lyme disease. Providing emotional support is “not one of her strong suits,” he said, adding, “That is not to say that she wasn’t supportive, which she was. But in that bitter cold of where you really don’t know if you are going to wake up and be alive tomorrow, you need extra from everybody. You need copious amounts. You absolutely need unconditional parental love in those dark hours.”

Now Cher is contemplating what to do next. “She’s reexploring her legal options concerning a conservatorship,” confirms the source, while her rep tells Star “his well-being continues to be a priority.” Elijah’s half brother, Chaz Bono, 56 — Cher’s son from her marriage to the late Sonny Bono — is also concerned. “He and Elijah haven’t had the closest relationship in recent years,” says the source, “but it’s agonizing to see his brother self-destruct.”

Ultimately, Cher is a realist. Though she, too, would like to see Elijah back in rehab, “she knows that unless Elijah wants to help himself, treatment will not be successful,” says the source. “She’s hoping and praying this near-death experience will be the rock-bottom moment for him to finally see sense and get his act together.”