Lucky Strike heirs make abuse claims
WASHINGTON — As the twin heirs to a slice of the $1 billion Lucky Strike tobacco fortune they were born into a world of unimaginable privilege, but behind the closed doors of their Wyoming mansion they now claim they were being battered and horribly abused.
According to claims by Georgia and Patterson Inman, now 16, they were cruelly treated by their drugaddicted father and a succession of nannies who locked them in a filthy, rat-infested basement and forced them to eat vomit and human waste.
“People see this luxurious life but at the same time we were living in hell,” Patterson said in the pair’s first television interview Friday with Dr. Phil, a popular American psychologist. The pair, who stand to inherit part of the fortune of Doris Duke, the late tobacco heir, when they turn 21, say they now want to take legal action against their alleged abusers.
“I want these people to be put away. I want to see all these people in a jail cell with me giving a thumbs up,” said Patterson, adding: “I’m coming after the --------. This is a battle cry. This is serious. They’re going down. I don’t want to be a victim. I want to be a victor.”
Among more extraordinary allegations was that a nanny had once made them play Russian roulette and — when they were four years old — that their father had forced them to watch a thief being tortured to death with bamboo spears while on a trip to Japan.
The pair have spoken before of their deeply troubled and cloistered childhood, which included owning a pet lion cub and bringing diamonds to school for “show and tell.”
In an interview last year with Rolling Stone magazine they said they had never heard of the game musical chairs and still believed in Santa Claus at the age of 15.
They are currently living in Utah with their mother, Daisha Inman, 54, who took custody of the two children in 2010 after their father, Walker Inman Jr., died of a methadone overdose.
Inman, the nephew of Doris Duke, was a drunk and a heroin addict who married five times and lived on a reported $90,000 monthly allowance.
The twins’ fortune is held in a trust by JP Morgan and is the subject of a legal tussle between Inman’s fifth wife and their mother, who has made headlines for her alleged demands on the trust that included $6,000 for a Halloween party and $1,000 per month for the children to eat out, especially at Starbucks.
Court filings showed the trustees had turned down several of these requests, raising questions about the true size of the twins’ inheritance.
Both children detailed a litany of alleged abuses, including being dropped into a scalding hot bathtub and eating excrement. “They were feeding me my own ----,” Patterson said.
His sister also accused their father of beating and abusing her.
“He would pick me up by the ankle and just drop me on my head because he wanted to make me stupid,” Georgia claimed.
Her brother, who also shared fonder memories, refused to speak about the claims against his father, but did allege that his father had forced him and his sister to watch the torturing to death of a thief in Japan as a four year old.
“They put him on a chair,” Patterson claimed. “They stripped him nude. They were sticking an object — bamboo — between the splits in the chair. They did it nice and slowly.”