Rich and Horribly Neglected

Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.

“We were so fearful. I would hide in cupboards smaller than that,” says Georgia in her Southern-tinged lilt, pointing to a two-foot-tall cabinet in the kitchen of their spacious Park City, Utah, home where the twins, now 15, are reassembling their lives and residing with their mother, a woman who has seen her own share of trouble and who has only recently become a presence in her children’s lives.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone story about two kids who are part of the Duke family fortune (Duke, as in the tobacco tycoons who established Duke University) and were horribly neglected and abused is pretty jaw-dropping. The kids were often locked in basements and forced to fend for themselves while their parents were binging on drugs, and despite numerous visits by the police and complaints by former nannies who were fired for complaining about the abuse, were never placed in protective custody.

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