Tycoon’s anger at claims he’ll force son, 14, to have sex with a prostitute
THE teenage son of a celebrity property tycoon is scared to return to the UK because he will be forced to have sex with a prostitute to ‘make him a man’, his mother claims. Heather Bird made the extraordinary claim in a transatlantic custody battle with estranged husband Robert Tchenguiz over their 14-year-old boy. Mr Tchenguiz yesterday accused Miss Bird of ‘fabrication and lies’ in an attempt to keep hold of a child he says she abducted during a twoweek holiday to the US a year ago. The pair became famous in the 2018 BBC documentary The Rise and Fall of the Playboy Billionaire which revealed their unconventional postseparation living arrangements in their £20million four-storey mansion next to the Royal Albert Hall. While 61-year-old Mr Tchenguiz and his girlfriend, Polish model Julia Dybowska, 30, occupied the upper floors, Miss Bird, 51, and their two children lived below. Mr Tchenguiz had cooperated with the programme makers but later accused the BBC of making out that he and his girlfriend wallowed in luxury while his family scraped by downstairs. She has now accused him in a US federal court of subjecting her to ‘years of intense psychological abuse’ and placing the boy at ‘grave risk of harm’ if he returns to London. Mormon-born Miss Bird, who is American and ran an anti-ageing clinic in London, insists the teenager and his 17-year-old sister had tried repeatedly to return to the UK but had been thwarted by the pandemic travel ban. She says they are now settled in their new home in rural
Montana and want to stay there with her.
The boy ‘feels fear and anxiety’ about a father who was often abroad and who had ‘abandoned’ him, she claims.
‘The root of his fear is due to the thought of being returned to London where his father will follow through on his threat of making [the boy] into a man by having sex with a paid sex worker that his father will arrange for,’ she claims in court papers.
‘The threat made clear that this would happen whether [their son] wants to participate or not.’ Miss Bird says the age that Mr Tchenguiz, the son of a Jewish businessman who fled to London after the fall of the Shah in Iran, considers appropriate for the boy’s sexual initiation is around the time of his bar mitzvah.
The boy, who is British, celebrated this in November last year just before going to the US.
Mr Tchenguiz, a former boyfriend of the model Caprice, said he had made ‘numerous attempts’ over the past year to return the children to the UK but Miss Bird had ‘denied him access at every stage’.
A statement from his office said: ‘Robert Tchenguiz commenced legal action in the US in October for the repatriation of his son to London who had been unlawfully taken from the UK.
‘Mr Tchenguiz’s former wife Heather Bird took his son and his daughter to the United States last December for a two-week vacation and is unwilling to return the children to London.
‘International law under the Hague Convention requires the return of a minor to their place of residence (which in this case is the UK) if there is not consent from both parents for the children to live elsewhere.’
He added: ‘She is desperate to justify her unlawful actions, and has already been warned by the US court of the serious consequences she could face… if found to have unlawfully retained the children.’
The businessman and his brother Victor at one point owned a business empire of 600 properties although he admitted in 2012 that he’d lost nearly £1billion on failed investments.
‘Desperate to justify her actions’