Billionaire Twins Abused Like Slaves by Dad
Only heirs of Doris Duke, teens describe horrific childhood.
Aug. 5, 2013— -- Child abuse isn't pretty, no matter how much money you have.
Twins Georgia and Walker "Patterson" Inman III, now 15, are set to inherit $1 billion when they are 21. But in the meantime, the two, who are the only surviving heirs of Doris Duke, have been to hell and back, according to an interview in the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine, "Poorest Rich Kids in the World.''
The teens described a life of plenty in their 10,000-square-foot Wyoming mountain retreat and a South Carolina plantation -- a pet lion cub, diamonds for show-and-tell and snorkeling in Fiji.
But juxtaposed against that was a slavelike childhood, being locked in a basement filled with feces and scalded by boiling baths.
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They were terrified most of the time, "dead bolted" in their rooms at night where they had to relieve themselves in the corner, according to the interview. They were raised by various nannies and subjected to the explosive nature of their father.
"I never asked to be born into any of this," Georgia told Rolling Stone. "Sometimes I wish I was never born."
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Their father, Duke's nephew Walker Patterson Inman Jr., was a heroin addict who got custody of the children when he divorced their mother when they were 2. Racking up five wives, he lived on an estimated $90,000 monthly inheritance.
Walker Jr. died of a methadone overdose in 2010. It was then that the twins moved in with their mother, a former model and his third wife, Daisha Inman, according to the magazine.
ABCNews.com emailed and called Inman, 53, at her Park City, Utah, home, but no one responded.
The family had a few brushes with authorities, and several calls to social services stopped dead in their tracks. Once, police were called to a diner after Inman Jr. slapped his daughter "so hard, diners feared for her life," according to Rolling Stone. The twins were at one point sent to a mental hospital for three months.
What was most striking was that by and large, few people intervened to help the children.
"Absolutely, money does not protect you from abuse -- in fact, it seems like a lot of people were worried about reporting this potentially because of their money," said Jamie M. Howard, director of the stress and resilience program at the New York-based Child Mind Institute.
"It's really disheartening that people didn't reach out to child protective services," she said. "People don't realize you can make anonymous reports without fear of retribution. ... There were a lot of staff who were paid high salaries and could have felt threatened to lose their incomes."
Both children reported that they had considered suicide and suffered from anorexia.
In the interview, Georgia said of her wealth, "People can look at this as a blessing all day long, but it's blood money."
Some might argue that is a fitting description of the family fortune, culled from the Lucky Strike cigarette brand. Duke became the "richest little girl in the world," when she inherited $100 million in 1947, the only child of tobacco tycoon James Buchanan "Buck" Duke.
But the 6-foot-tall glamour queen went on to do good works, donating much to North Carolina's Duke University, which had been named for her tobacco-growing ancestors, and the Duke Energy Corporation. Her Doris Duke Charitable Foundation gives away hundreds of millions of dollars, championing good causes around the world.