Barbara Daly Baekeland: Hell In the Ivory Tower

While you might know the Baekeland family for their plastics empire, in the 1980s -- they became known for a scandal filled with incest and murder.

It was the kind of story that "just doesn't happen" in the high society circles of America. But in 1972, the curtain was peeled back on the elite of Manhattan when one of their own was murdered in cold blood. 

This is the sordid and tragedy filled story of one of high-society's biggest scandals: the story of Barbara Daly and her son Tony Baekeland. 

Transcript

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Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another titulating episode of Scandal Queens. If it's your first time here, hi, hello, welcome. I am E B, one of the only white women who's been calling BS on Taylor Swift and other narcissistic celebrities right from the very beginning. And today, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, today. Um, uh, before we get into the topic, I want to start this episode off by saying that this was actually supposed to be a totally different episode. You're supposed to be listening to something completely different right now, a completely different topic. Um, I actually recorded a completely different episode that was, it was supposed to be a series that was supposed to start uh here where you're listening to this. Um, but it turns out that as I went down that rabbit hole on that topic, it got deeper and deeper and deeper. I'm I'm not kidding. This is not like some little TikTok. Um, this is why you've probably noticed I've been quite quiet on TikTok about this. Um, very, very serious. Like I'm not kidding. Uh the topic that we were supposed to be covering today was what I thought was just gonna be a little bit of early 2000s smut and some violent sexual crime, and we were gonna call out an abuser, and it was pretty much gonna be straightforward. Uh, and I thought, you know, we'll cover some arrests, we'll cover the women who have been harmed, we'll tell their stories. And then before I knew it, I found myself in declassified JFK assassination files. Uh, again, not kidding, not exaggerating either. Uh, I've had people helping me on this research and it's verified. Uh, so because I've ended up stumbling on something very big, uh and really in the historical frame of things, very serious, uh, I'm gonna have to take some more time on that, flesh some more things out, follow some leads, and more importantly, I'm gonna have to re-record the episode that you're supposed to be listening to today. Um, so you are getting a different episode today. I know, I know. And at the end of the last episode, I said, like, we're gonna do something more recent, but we're gonna travel back a little bit in time today, not too far back, because this story is gonna land us in the 80s, which is not that long ago, if you're someone who's my age. Um, and truly, this story that we're doing today, uh, in many ways, it's even darker and more heartbreaking and even more scandalous than the topic we were originally going to cover. And I'll be honest with you, um, it's a high society case, and it is like America's elites, elites. Like the names in this story are the genuinely some of the biggest and most recognized names in powerful inner circles in the country. And that story, of course, is going to be the story of Barbara Daly Bakeland and her son, Anthony Bakeland. Now, if you're someone who's read the 1985 nonfiction, I'll remind you, this whole story is nonfiction, bestseller Savage Grace, or you're someone who saw the 2007 movie of the same name, you may be pretty familiar with the more uh, let's call them twisted elements of this story. Starts out sad but promising enough, a beautiful young woman moves to New York, dreaming of life on a rich man's arm, only to find out that getting what she wants is the biggest nightmare of all. It gets worse. It's a truly skin-crawling tale. Uh, I mean, one that is going to make you want to finish this episode, go home, or go into your bathroom and take the hottest, most scalding bath or shower you can possibly get that thing to pump out. Because this is a story of affairs, lies, breakdowns, potential Nazi collusion, and worst of all, incest. But more than that, it's a story of American high society, the cream of the crop, the most premier and well-respected names of the most elite zip codes in the United States of America. That's right. The people in this story are considered to be America's elite. The names we cover today are names of founders and investors, financiers, and the biggest industrialists and who's who of blue bloods and homebred royalty. And every single one of them is tied to one of the most nefarious and gut-wrenching scandals in modern American history. And it's a scandal that you, a lot of you will not have heard of. This is the real story, the full story of Barbara Daly Bakeland and her doomed, tortured son, Anthony. And uh, first trigger warning of many here, uh, you need to buckle up because it's bad, especially the second half of this episode. So before we get into what is genuinely the nastiest and most deranged scandal I've ever covered on this program, let's do a quick temperature check on what the biggest names in Hollywood are doing and just cleanse our palettes. Like Grace Me, just let me cleanse my palate a little bit here before we get into it. Right up off the top, number one, is Taylor Swift an actual blue blood fascist? Well, it turns out a bombshell dropped this week on TikTok and Instagram when insanely intelligent and talented creator Ali MC Forever has now revealed to us uh that the world-famous pop songstress is actually the great, great, I think great-granddaughter of Charles Baldi, a personal friend and lifelong supporter of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Yes, that Benito Mussolini, who was a part of the Axis powers in World War II. It's a revelation that has sparked absolute silence from the Swifties the world over and a sigh of, of course, from detractors like myself. Charles Baldi rose to power in Philadelphia after exploiting an Italian laborers' dispute in the Schuyl Valley Railroad. Long story short, he took advantage of the opportunity to insert himself as a middleman between the rich people and the poor Italian laborers and finagled his own coal mine out of the operation, operated, of course, with Italian labor, staffed with Italian labor. These workers were often supplied as part of the padroni system, Ali has revealed, a system in which workers in Italy were offered fair to the U.S. Once they were in the U.S., they were essentially slaves of the wealthy Italian padrone who had provided their passage. These Italian bosses would control wages, living conditions, food, clothing, basically everything, right? It essentially, more often than not, operated as a slave system. Baldi used that first exploitation to open a chain of businesses with his brother, including extensive real estate investments, the only Italian-speaking newspaper and a freaking bank. Yeah, yeah, a bank. Baldi's bank became his main means of power. It was the only place Italians were illegally, they were legally allowed to bank because during this time, uh Italians were looked on as like lowest of the low of the low, right? They weren't allowed. It was like, it was not the same as what had been done to black people through chattel slavery. But during this window of time, in some instances, they received a similar treatment, is like, you have to go around back, you can't eat here, you can't sit here, and you can't bank here. So Baldi exploited that and opened his own bank. And basically, everyone who was Italian where he lived in Philadelphia, they were basically held slave to this bank. If they wanted a bank, they had to use his bank. So Baldi became a banking mogul in his own right. He went on to become a financier of the GOP. The GOP. And he was known in the papers, he was referred to as the paid connection between the GOP and the Italian immigrant community. Baldi would get the immigrants, the Italian immigrants to vote for the GOP in a you scratch my back, I scratch yours kind of a setup. There's a whole huge ton more to the story. So if you want to read that, go to at AliMC Forever Substack, which is AliMC Forever.substack.com, or you can find her videos on IG and TikTok at the same username. It's a crazy story, and it explains exactly what some of us have been screaming about for so long, which is Taylor Swift is MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, and everyone just kind of needs to take off the kitty gloves and freaking admit it. Next up, does Bunny XO have a kink for humiliation? Uh Bunny XO, podcaster and influencer who recently announced her split from burgeoning right-wing star Jelly Roll, made a spectacle of herself recently when she was spotted making out with a 24-year-old reality star. The reality star in question is Dylan Wolf, again, 24-year-old star of the Netflix series, soon-to-be-failed Netflix series, Calabas is Confidential, a show that follows the children of California's elites. They thought they were going to get some new Kardashians. They didn't. It's boring. It's slop. Nobody cares. Also, we don't want to watch rich people anymore. We're kind of fucking struggling. If anybody's listening to this, that matters, uh with power, you know what I'm saying? Uh the two were seen locking lips on 4th of July weekend in, of all places, Jelly Rolls Goodnight Nashville, a bar owned by Bunny's soon-to-be ex-husband. Talk about making a statement, huh? It looks like Bunny XO still wants to get her husband's attention, her ex-husband's attention, but I wonder if she's not just bringing all the wrong kind of attention to herself, you know? Like it feels desperate. It feels like I'm gonna show him, I'm gonna make him angry, which is just like teenaged. You know, you're in your 30s, I believe, if not 40s, grow the fuck up. Um, all around, it's a sad state of affairs, but I guess you can't really expect much from people with their politics. And last but not least, Paris Hilton has scored a major victory. That's right, Paris Hilton has scored a major victory in her fight against the troubled teen industry, um, which she fell victim to in the 90s. That victory comes with the announcement that Provo Canyon School in Springville, Utah, has officially had its license revoked by the state of Utah. The license revoking comes after years of alleged abuse cases, the most recent of which appears to go back to 2025. The claims against the school, which now will probably lead to its permanent closure, include engaging in unnecessary restraint and physical contact, failure to provide adequate health services, neglecting care, and failing to do appropriate background checks on their staff. The state of Utah put the school on a restricted status in May of this year, but has now revoked the school's license in full. At the time of this recording, the school has 15 days to file an appeal with the state board of health, but that notwithstanding, it looks like the reign of terror of this trouble teen industry titan is finally at an end. So fingers crossed, boys and gals, and they's and thems and everyone in between. Uh hopefully this school's gonna close. All right, it's time. Can't put it off any longer. I uh I genuinely hope you're ready for this story. I couldn't believe it that I had never heard this story before. Um, poo. Uh boy, is it enlightening. I hope you're sitting down. I hope you're comfortable. Uh, most of all, I hope you're not somewhere where prying ears can hear, because this story that I'm about to tell you is not a pleasant one. There's not a pleasant moment in it, not in the beginning and certainly not at the end, not even really anywhere in between. Because I don't think there were actually many happy moments in the lives of Barbara Daly nor her son Tony, uh, as what materially wealthy as they were, right? And they were wealthy. We're talking to people who were married and bred into the family uh that essentially invented plastic, okay? The people who invented plastic. They had everything. Yet every single moment of their waking lives seems to have been fraught with struggle and with suffering. Their story was one meant to go right to the stars. Barbara Daly, a socialite and hopeful actress, once named 10 of the most beautiful women in New York City. She had it all looks, intelligence, and an undeniable presence of energy. Barbara had the ambition to match her looks and a whole lot else besides, but having it all wasn't enough to save her from her own shadows, nor was it enough to save her son Tony, the heir to one of the greatest American family names. By the time the police enter the story in their Chelsea London apartment in 1972, no one would be able to make sense of it. How could it come down to this? How could this all happen? Blood, death, nightmare. Well, like most stories that end in bloodshed, it all went right back to the very beginning. You can't really have a conversation about Barbara Daly without the mention of tragedy. She seemed to be just like one of those people destined to live under the shadow of some invisible cloud. She was literally like a cursed Eeyore, cursed from her very birth by a preponderance of misery that seemed to never lift its boot from her thin pale neck. The tragedy didn't start with Barbara Daly either. It seemed to be entrenched in her blood. It stretched all the way back right into the arms of her parents and into their very childhoods. Barbara's mother, Nina, usually called Nene, was born in Boston in 1893 to a pair of Canadian immigrants who had come to the U.S. looking for a better life. Edward Fraser had found work on the railroad, which was an incredibly dangerous job at the time. I'm talking about like constant deaths. You can go and look up the story of Casey Jones, okay? In the late 1800s, being on the railroad, working on the railroad, incredibly, incredibly dangerous. Um, but he managed to work his way up to conductor while his wife, Matilda, stayed home and cared for their five children. Now, Nene was a precocious child, but prone to fits and outbursts of emotions, according to those who knew her. But it's not really hard to imagine, right? The Fraser household would have been fraught with like all of those pressures of a working class family in the 1900s with five kids and a high-pressure job. Like, imagine that. Mom can't really earn. She's got to stay home and take care of these five children. And her husband works a job where every day she doesn't know if he's gonna come home. He doesn't know if he's gonna come home. It's very likely they watched people that they know die. It's very likely that he himself, uh, Nina's father, Nene's father, was injured during his job his time as a conductor, right? So this is like a high pressure, high stress household. So it's no surprise then that Nene was quick to get married as soon as she reached her late teenage years and get the heck out of that house. By the time 1910 rolled around, she was married and set on starting her own family with the industrious son of an Irish immigrant immigrant family, the Daly's. So Barbara Daly's father, his name was Frank James Daly. Now, there's not much out there on the record if you go searching for Frank Daly, and trust me, I went through like the the did all the digitized newspapers. I spent hours in Cambridge and Boston area looking up 1933 newspapers. There's just not a whole lot out there. There were a lot of dailies, I found out, roaming around Cambridge and Boston at the turn of the century, thanks to the influx of Irish that were coming to start better lives for themselves in America. Search the man who captured the heart of Nina Fraser, and you're likely to get caught up in a mess of Franks and Francis's that you can't really tell apart. But we do know that Frank James Daly married Nene Fraser around 1910. And we know that because by 1913, the couple were registered as married and they were welcoming their first child into the world, Frank Daly Jr. Now, it seems like that would be a happy event for a new couple, right? They get married, they have a son right away, an heir to carry on his father's name, but it does not seem that that's the way it shook out for the new Daly family, because within a few years of Frank Jr.'s birth, Nene Fraser was put into a psychiatric hospital for what was described as a nervous breakdown. Now, you look at the timing, it's very possible that this was, you know, the result of untreated postmen postpartum depression. That is such a tongue twister for me. I struggle with that every single time. But it this essentially looks like Nene might have been a victim of some kind of postpartum depression, which is very common. But at this time, 1910s, people didn't really know much about that. Now, little detail has been given about Nene's breakdown. They just say she had a nervous breakdown after her son was born. Um, they don't really talk about her recovery a lot, but the couple seems to have recovered something and brought things back together because by 1921, uh, Nene was out of psychiatric treatment and they were welcoming a little girl into the world, Barbara Daly. Things were on an upswing, seemingly, for the growing Daly family. But those dreams and this upswing would be trashed into the ground in 1929 when the American stock market crashed, kicking off the Great Depression. Now, Barbara Daly's father, Frank, seems to have weathered the storm well enough at first. Details aren't really clear on exactly what Frank did, but it's said that he was a business owner. That's how he's referred to in biographies. Uh, it seems the one incidence I could find of who I think is him in the paper, it seems to kind of suggest the same. But essentially, when the crash came, he was a business owner. He had a good reputation in Cambridge and Boston areas, but it wasn't enough to save him. The next time we see a glimpse of the man who appears to have been Barbara Daly's father, we see him in a small newspaper clipping from the Cambridge, Massachusetts paper in 1931. The mention is for a party being given by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charity, and Frank Daly is mentioned as the secretary of this organization, which all fits because Nene was said to be a devout Catholic all of her life, and you have to be uh like a you'd have to be a man of society with a good reputation to sit on the board, even as a secretary of a charity like this. So that kind of all fits. But unfortunately, again, not enough. After that, the doors of tragedy opened their gates on Barbara Daly's young life. In 1932, Frank Daly's business, whatever that business was, took a turn for the worse. He was forced to close the doors on all his ambitions that year, and it proved too much for the proud Irish immigrant son to bear. In September of that year, when Barbara was only 11 years old, her father took his life via car emissions in the family garage. It was a devastating act, not just for Barbara and her mother, but for her older brother Frank Jr., who watched the whole thing happen from a window in the family home. Frank Sr. set the suicide up to look like an accident, so the family would receive a full payout on his hefty insurance policy. The family got the money, but the cost, well, that was a high one. Barbara would seemingly be haunted by the specter of her family's grief for the rest of her life. As the waves of the Great Depression ebbed and flowed across America, the Daly family soldiered on. Frank Daly Jr., allegedly haunted by the death of his father, moved out early and got married fast. By 1936, he was he had a son of his own and he was married. He had a wife. Barbara was left in the care of her mother, and the two formed an almost symbiotic bond with one another. They nursed one another through their mutual grief, and Barbara seemingly took on shades of her mother's personality as she aged. By the time Barbara reached her teenage years, it was clear that there was something special about her. Barbara Daly was an exceptionally beautiful young woman who took on the strong and angled features of her deceased father. She was the ghost of him, moving through rooms with a regal grace that seemed to come naturally to her. It was around this time that Nene Daly decided she had a choice to make: stay in the Cambridge area and hope that her daughter caught the eye of some struggling immigrant like the girl's father had been, or shoot for bigger fish. Nene, who was still getting large payments from her husband's life insurance policy, decided to take the Chris Jenner route on things and bet on Barbara's good looks. Sometime around 1936 to 1938, when Barbara would have been just 17 or 18 years old, her mother took her to New York City and there settled the both of them into the city's most high society hotel, the Hotel Del Monaco, located on the corner of Park Avenue and 59th Street. Now, this was the place to be and be seen by the who's who of America's elite in the 1930s. The Hotel Del Monaco, which is now the Trump Hotel, was a sweeping building featuring 529 upscale apartments for the richest and most discriminating names and personalities in Manhattan. After the stock market crash of 1929, many of America's elites decided it was too difficult and too costly to run their big estates. So they downsized and moved into tiny colonies of well-to-dos in New York's high-rise five-star hotels. The Delmonico was one of the favorite hotels of the wealthy and powerful sect. Bankers, industrialists, financiers, and bird-brained heirs rubbed elbows together in the Delmonico's discriminating bars and they hustled their flocks of flighty young women up and down its corridors. Ed Sullivan, Ingrid Berkman, Lucille Ball, the Duke of Windsor, all of them were known and established regulars throughout the decades at the Hotel Delmonico. So when Nene Daly decided she wanted to give her kid a leg up in the world, she knew that the Delmonico was probably the best bet that they had at catching a big fish. The two moved in sometime around the end of the 1930s and used the steady life insurance payments from Barbara's deceased father to foot the bill. The plan was a simple one, and like I said, just like Chris Jenners, put the pretty girl in front of as many rich men as possible and wait until one of them takes the bait. It's a tale as old as time in the world of horrible women, sell sex with their child for money. Sadly, the plan was pretty much an immediate success for Nene. I don't know if it was so successful for Barbara, as you'll see in a minute. Young and pretty Barbara, who was again in her late teens by this time, captured the attention of New York City pretty much as soon as she set foot inside the zip code, right? Inside the Manhattan zip code. Within weeks or months, she was named as one of the 10 most beautiful women in the city, a list she was no doubt put forward for by her cunning mother. After that, the magazine adverts and offers started rolling in. Barely Legal Barbara became a common feature in magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, modeling the latest fashions and being featured alongside some of the country's biggest names. It was an immediate door opener for the girl from Cambridge. Artists started asking her to be their muse. Some of The biggest painters of the time became desperate to paint her in um every form and color. After that, uh came the bigger collars, the bigger fish, the sons of bankers and industrialists, many of them regular fixtures at the Del Monaco bars where Barbara was still living with her mother. Building up a name and some recognition, Barbara found herself being invited to society parties and being let into the inner echelons of power in the city. It was a heady experience, and no doubt one that she found both exciting and addicting. Barbara Daly and her mother had big goals for their futures, and they needed a big catch to fund those goals. The money from the insurance policy wasn't going to last forever, after all, and being a model doesn't pay the kind of bills that you need to pay if you're gonna hobknob with millionaires and billionaires. So Barbara put out a line and she found a big fish chomping on the other end. That big fish just so happened to be John Jacob Astor VI, also known as Jakey or JJ. Uh, does that name ring a bell? Because if not, it should. John Jacob Astor VI was the son of doomed millionaire and industrialist John Jacob Astor V and his 19-year-old wife Madeline. The two had had a very scandalous affair and a very scandalous marriage after John Jacob Astor V left his first wife, who was a very well-known socialite. Uh, and then about a year after that, Jakey's father died on the Titanic, um, following the ship to the bottom of the sea in 1912, only moments after putting his brand new bride safely into the embrace of a lifeboat. Madeline Astor, this new wife of the now dead millionaire, uh, was five months pregnant with JJ, Jakey, at the time of the Titanic sinking. And just like Barbara and the death of her father, it seemed to be a shade that followed JJ through his life. Now, details about Barbara Daly's affair with John Jacob J.J. Astor in the 30s are pretty obscure, but it's accepted with relative ease as a matter of fact, especially in society circles where it was alleged that the two were making plans to wed one another, at least that's what the rumor was anyway. A marriage between Barbara Daly and J.J. Astor was exactly the kind of dream that Nene and Barbara had been angling to create, but it would have been challenging on a number of levels, the most notable being that J.J. Astor was a very well and publicly already married man. Yes, that's right. By the time Nene managed to get her only daughter in the arms of J.K. Astor, he had already been married for at least five to six years to Ellen Tuck Tucky French, the daughter of banking magnate Frances Ormond French. It was not a happy marriage. Ellen had married J.J. just months after he ended an engagement to her best friend, Eileen Sherman Gillespie, another wealthy banking heiress. Ellen French was actually supposed to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of Eileen and JJ, but by June 30th of that same year, she was the one married to JJ instead. Even better, and by better I mean awful. Uh, they had a high-ranking Nazi official at their wedding, one of JJ's uh high society friends, uh, accordingly. It was like the the head of foreign like the head of foreign secretary, foreign press for Hitler, and he was stationed in New York City. Yeah, he attended the wedding. Um, it was very, very controversial. It was a big deal, and people were not happy about it. Nazi attended weddings aside, JJ Astor carried on with his life much as he had before he was married, often seen canoodling and carrying on with pretty young women that he met on his many endless world travels. By the time the gossip columns of the time had him associating with Barbara Daly, he and Ellen, his wife, had welcomed their first child into the world, William Backhouse Ast III. Despite the fact that he had a wife and son at home, rumors swirled that Barbara Daly was gonna bag her big heir, but the marriage would obviously never take place because as close as Barbara, and by proximity her mother, had gotten to the center of the universe, they were still not entirely inside the inner circle. They were, after all, at the end of the day, children of immigrants with no names, and you know, not the kind of immigrants that came with a big company, a lot of money, or cachet either. Sure, being a pretty faced model was enough to get you into a room, even into a bed with a man like J.J. Astor, but it wasn't enough to keep you there unless you had a name to go with it. It was a hard lesson for Barbara Daly to learn, but it was one that she did indeed learn as the 1930s slipped into the 1940s. War was booming on the continent by then, and rumors of America's involvement were brewing. Barbara worked hard to land her prince, but it was just not to be. By the early 1940s, JJ Astor was off canoodling with younger, prettier faces, and Barbara, well, she was out of the roster. It must have been devastating for the young woman, right? To be so close to the thing she wanted most in life, the thing that she had been coached from the time she was born to get, uh, only to have it denied to her right at the finish line. It was around this time that Barbara appears to have started showing the same emotional inclinations as her mother. After the split with Aster, rumors began to swirl about Barbara's outbursts and her alleged emotional instability. She could be incredibly rude at times, people said, and she would transition unpredictably into bouts of depressive, extremely depressive moods. The decision was taken to enter Barbara into the care of Robert Foster Kennedy, a well-respected psychiatrist in Manhattan social circles and a neurologist who had come to the United States in 1910 after completing his studies in Ireland. Now, Kennedy was known to many of those on the Upper East Side who had struggled with their mental health struggles, right? Their issues, their, you know, whether it was depression or anxiety or whatever it was. And he was known to be discreet and well-established. Uh Dr. Kennedy worked at Bellevue Hospital, and he was one of the first in the city and the country to use electro-convulsive therapy on his patients. That's like his big claim to fame. That's what he's known for if you Google him. But Dr. Kennedy also had some other pretty questionable ties that I think are important to note in the context of who Barbara had already been dating. Um, and those were some questionable ties in Germany, where he had been awarded in 1936 for his belief that physically and mentally disabled people should be sterilized or exterminated for the good of society. I'm not kidding. This is the doctor that all the rich people were going to in the 1940s. Okay. In 1941, at an American Psychological Association meeting, of which he was the head, he was the head of the American Psychological Association by this time. Um, he brought out uh an array of severely mentally disabled children over the age of five and up, okay. And he brought these children out on stage and he said, Look at them, we need to exterminate them. Um, people of their sort, Kennedy claimed, pointing at these children, many of whom didn't understand what was going on. Uh he claimed they were, and I quote, utterly unfit. They were nature's mistakes and the agony of the living. Yeah. Really, really decent fellow here with lots of empathy, who is being, you know, put in charge of this woman who is perhaps troubled. Barbara Daly began receiving treatment from this Dr. Kennedy somewhere around 1940 to 1941, right around the time he called for the extermination of mentally disabled children. It's safe to assume that she probably did receive electroconvulsive therapy from Dr. Kennedy. He certainly wasn't doing fucking talk therapy with her, was he, the fucking Nazi bastard? But to what extent he treated her, we cannot be entirely certain. We just know from biographers and from sources at the time that she was a private patient of Dr. Kennedy. The treatment seems to have been a mild success at best, if Barbara's track record from this for this point forth is anything to be relied upon. With Jakey Astor in the rearview mirror, Barbara set back out on the life of a successful socialite. She had a few minor flirtations, but nothing that led anywhere, and nothing that got her any closer to her goals. The modeling gigs did continue to come in, but that was hardly enough to move the dial and keep Barbara and her mother in the luxurious arms of the Hotel Delmonico and New York City's elites. That all seemed bound to change, though, somewhere around 1943, when the East Coast Socialite was invited out to the West Coast to screen test for one of Hollywood's big directors. She was put on film alongside rising star Dana Andrews, but her dreams ultimately, again, came to nothing. Because as good as Barbara looked on camera, she just didn't have that spark on film that set her apart from, you know, like with other greats, like, you know, like let's say Arita Hayworth. It's no doubt rumors of her heavy drinking and volatile behavior were also considered in the mix of all of that. After all, Hollywood was already a small town packed with big divas. They didn't need another one, especially one who just didn't quite cut the mustard. Barbara was never invited back for another opportunity at the Silver Screen, but her time in California wasn't entirely wasted. Just as Barbara had moved among the upper sect in New York City, Barbara also found herself moving amongst the elite of Hollywood's inner circles. There were Hollywood icons like Greta Garbo, to be sure, but pretty young Barbara also found herself shoulder to shoulder with some of America's blue-blooded crew as well. One of those gold star American names that Barbara fell in rank with just so happened to be Cornelia Bakeland, a daughter of the illustrious Bakeland family. Cornelia's grandfather, Leo Bakeland, had immigrated to America from Belgium at the turn of the century. A short while later, he invented a sheer printable paper that he sold to Kodak for their film production, which netted him millions and millions of dollars for years and years and years. A few years after that invention, Cornelia's grandfather Leo had gone back into his lab, emerging months later with a new recipe for the material that would become plastic. He invented plastic. Leo Bakeland established Bakelite in 1910, sound familiar, Bakelite, just three years after his new creation. And by 1922, they had built, he had turned it into the Bakelite Corporation, which still operates as Bakelite Synthetics to this very day. By the time Cornelia's grandfather retired in 1939, he alone was worth just he himself, this is we're not even counting his companies, he himself was worth $23 million or $380 million in today's money. Because of her grandfather's entrepreneurial success, Cornelia had grown up in a truly privileged life, spending the majority of her childhood flitting between expensive boarding schools for the arts and luxurious family homes like the Bakeland Summer Retreat, the Anchorage in Coral Springs, Florida, which I'll have some pictures on Patreon if you want to see that. Cornelia Bakeland was just the sort that Barbara Daly liked to surround herself with. Charmed people who had lived charmed lives inside charmed social circles. The two women hit it off in California, where Cornelia was having some moderate success in her own film tests. She would go on to appear in a movie with Rita Hayworth in 1944 called CoverGirl, if anyone is interested in that. The two women became fast friends, and by 1943, Cornelia had decided it was time to introduce the lovely Barbara to her younger brother, Brooks Bakeland, the future heir to the Bakelite fortune. Unsurprisingly, Brooks and Barbara hit it off like hotcakes. Why wouldn't they? He was young, rich, and handsome, and she was, you know, well to do at this point. She was a recognized socialite who was stunning, gorgeous beyond all belief. So they hit it off like hotcakes. Immediate connection and a bond that solidified and something that I think was like really deep and toxic and unspoken, right? Brooks Bakeland, charmed though his life was, had been raised by a father who was described as distant and mercurial. That's like the nicest things that you'll ever find written about his dad. Uh, George Bakeland, son of Leo Bakeland, who had invented plastic, was said to be one of those, um, like the people who knew him, they said he was basically like a man born in the wrong time. He should have been born like a century earlier, uh, controlling and gruff. He had been educated in the Colorado mines and he went to college for geology so he could expand his career in the field. He was just like this really rough, tough, manly man who lived and worked with miners, and that's kind of how he operated, and that's how he wanted to operate, even with his family. George Bakelin ran his household with a cold rigidity that alienated both his wife and his children from him in every way that mattered. In the 1930s, while the family summered in the Bakeland family home in Coral Springs, Florida, George's wife Cornelia Sr., the mother of Brooks and the Cornelia that was friends with Barbara, she started a flirtation with a handsome son of a banking family named Penrose, sorry, Penrose Hallowell. Cornelia and Penrose fell in love and their affair became a total scandal in high society. Not just inside the Bakeland family, mind you, the upper circles in New York and Florida were whispering about this, talking about this, side-eyeing the family. Cornelia was disgraced, and in 1935, she filed for divorce from her husband, George Bakeland. Cornelia Sr. couldn't run into the arms of her lover Penrose, however, as he was, again, already married, with five to six children in the home at the time. Divorce was not an option for Penrose, no matter how much he and Cornelia claimed to love one another, as his wife was also from the high society sect. Margaret Bo Ditch was a member of the endlessly powerful Bo Ditch finance family. Go and look them up. It'll absolutely flabbergast you, right? So Penrose couldn't just dump this woman and insult her family. It was not an option. So after the divorce, Cornelia lived openly as this man's mistress. I mean, on one hand, it does sound kind of cool because they say she actually had a lot of different men that she dated during this time and she just kind of had this free life with lots of flirtations and partying. But at the same time, like they, she was, she was this man's mistress and just hung around for years and years and years until they finally married after the death of his first wife. Cornelia did receive an annual alimony payment from George Bakeland of $3,000 per year, which today is around $73,000. Um, and while it may seem lush, it was not without a cost because Cornelia Bakeland had disgraced herself and her husband, George. And so she was stripped of custody of her children. Brooks and his sister Cornelia and their other siblings grew up not alongside their mother, who they they were allowed to see on a regular basis and they did still love, but no, they were raised primarily in their father's home. He was the full-time caretaker, whatever that would have looked like with a man like George Bakeland. Um, brutal, totalitarian, a complete nightmare is what it sounds like. It is perhaps this turbulent upbringing that brought something together between Brooks and Barbara after their meeting in 1943. There was also, of course, the partying and the sex, which became the biggest component of the time the two spent together. They were inseparable. Brooks Bakelin, the handsome and eligible party boy, hardly made an appearance without a champagne bottle and Barbara Daly on his arm. The two were a handsome match. People liked seeing them together, and they seemed to have all the same inclinations as far as partying and spending their time in a passing of hedonistic pleasure. Those who saw them together probably thought of them as oil and water, though, in a way, the ones who were like who were intimately familiar with what was really going on. Um, or maybe the ones who really knew them probably saw them more as something kind of more explosive, like potassium and water, you know, creating this like when they got together, it was big and it was like, it was, it was bad. It was big and bad, a violent flash when the two came together in the fullness of their personalities. Sometime around 1944 to 1945, however, the seams began coming apart on the relationship. What had begun as a fun romp through the halls of high society had turned into something of a battle. Brooks grew distant as he saw more and more of Barbara and her unpredictable moods. Their drunken screaming matches were no secret, nor were her rude outbursts, which, despite the treatment of Dr. Kennedy, did not seem to be getting better with time. This no doubt set off a panic in Barbara. Now in her mid-twenties, Barbara had been around long enough to see the pattern repeating. It was JJ Astor all over again, a year-long escapade, a blur of parties and sex, followed by the inevitable drop. Barbara no doubt became panicked as the prospect, uh, and she kind of like made a last desperate effort to preserve the last chance she thought she would ever get at becoming the lady of the manor. According to the accounts of Brooks that he would give later, sometime around 1944, 1945, as their relationship was disintegrating, Barbara came to him distraught. They had had another fight and he had decided to call it quits once and for all. He couldn't handle Barbara anymore, but she had a secret to reveal. Barbara told Brooks at this time that she was pregnant. He couldn't leave her in the lurch unless he wanted to become the villain of the year in all the high society papers. The threat was clear. Barbara Daly wasn't the type to go quietly, and she certainly wasn't going to go quietly when she was carrying the heir to an illustrious family name and fortune. Brooks Bakelin made the only decision he felt that he could, and he and Barbara flew to California where they had a hush-hush wedding before Jets heading back to the East Coast and the safety of New York City. There, Brooks anxiously awaited the arrival of his first son, but that son never came. And that's because the pregnancy story, per Brooks' own recollection years later, had been a lie. Barbara had never been pregnant that year, but she had been desperate to keep Brooks Bakeland by her side. Barbara Daly and her mother Nene by association had finally achieved what they had always wanted: snagging a rich heir. And it was all set in stone. The papers were signed, the ink was already dried. By the time Brooks found out, again, allegedly, according to Brooks and friends who knew them at the time, he was done. That was it. It seemed like Barbara was finally going to get everything she wanted in life, the fairy tale ending she had always deserved in her mind. But Brooks Bakeland, as it turns out, wasn't quite ready to ride off into the sunset quite yet. No matter if Barbara was lying about pregnancies or not. As the war on the continent wound down, Barbara settled into her life as a socialite wife in a cushy Upper East Side apartment. She and Brooks became the center of the post-war party world, often hosting lavish dinner parties that included guests like Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, William Styron, and a host of the pair's society pals, which, interestingly enough, to this day, most of the people who were associated with them have distanced themselves as much as possible and gotten their names wiped out of stuff as much as possible because of how bad things are about to get. The relationship between Barbara and Brooks was sour from the minute they got back to New York. The two were both notorious drinkers, and Brooks was a man who had an aversion to anything resembling hard work. He flaunted himself around New York City as a writer, but he never produced any writings and he had little to show for his alleged artistic accomplishments by the end of his life. His true pleasure in life was not creating so much as it was finding every ounce of physical and material pleasure that he could. Which in itself is not a sin, but when you do it at the cost of others, it's not good, right? The young Bakeland heir spent most of his free time drinking and partying, and when he wasn't drinking, he kept the company of other women, a pattern that seemed common in this family. Barbara was said to be just as troublesome and challenging in the relationship. She drank just as heavily, and her outbursts at their social events became a regular feature. Guests regularly talked about how explosively rude she could be. That's like the big thing when people talk about her, people who knew her, they're like, yeah, she would get drunk and then she would get really, really rude and really, really nasty, and it was totally unpredictable. And they also knew how Barbara would collapse into bouts of dark and sinking depression. Outside of that, Barbara was said to be just as winton about her sexual affairs as Brooks was with his. Both partners carried on in multiple extramarital escapades, leaving behind swaths of lovers behind them. It was a turbulent home and a turbulent relationship, but still the party went on. How could it not? The war was over, they were rich, and those in the circles around the Bakeland family had made even bigger fortunes in the war racket and the ensuing fallout with Germany and Japan. But the party was, inevitably, forced to a slow in 1946 when finally Barbara Daly Bakeland did indeed fall pregnant. For real this time. On August 28, 1946, Barbara gave birth to what she hoped would be one of the future heirs of the Bakeline Empire and the savior of her relationship to Brooks. The child was named Anthony Sakari Bakeland. It was a moment that would change the world of the Bakeland and Daly families forever. Anthony Bakeland would be the only child of Barbara Daly, and as such, he became the center of her eye. She doted on the child, and he was given the best of the best with no spared expense. Barbara had herself photographed with little Anthony, who the family dotingly called Tony, and posed herself as the perfect mother every chance she could get, lovingly embracing this perfect ideal child that she had given birth to. And if you want to see pictures of that again, I wish I could show them to you here. I can't, you can see them on Patreon. As with everything else, Barbara Daly did, she put on the show and she performed the song and dance of a society mother to the best of her ability. Tony was given every opportunity and was never far from the watchful eye of his mother, though he was raised by a series of nannies. Brooks, it seemed, carried on much as his father had, keeping his distance and focusing more on his endless parade of parties and lovers and antics than anything else. He indulged Himself with more drink and more women, while little Tony grew up in a whirlwind of social events and a sea of privileged faces. The family did well enough together in New York City, but by the 1950s, the growing wave of McCarthyism became an uncomfortable reality that left a bad taste in the mouth of the social elites who, frankly, were just like, ew, I don't, ew. Um, many of them fled to Europe just to hang out and just not be bothered by what was going on, um, where the reveal rebuilding continent uh was again becoming a holiday calendar for the social elites. In 1954, keeping their New York City home open, Brooks and Barbara arranged a rotating series of luxurious retreats in London, Paris, Zermont, Copte on Tibes, and Italy. The family became the most expensive sort of nomads, cycling through their various luxury villas and apartments according to the social calendar of the season. Tony, who was eight by this time, grew up in a whirlwind of parties and wealth-stacked getaways. The lifestyles of Barbara and Brooks were uncompromisingly extravagant, and little Tony was there in the center of it all as both an object and a tool for Barbara to show off her sense of achievement. It is possible that Barbara thought that giving her husband Brooks an air would bring him back into the fold with her, but it didn't. Even after Tony's birth, the cracks in the relationship began to widen. Barbara, just as her mother had, became even more emotionally volatile after the birth of her only child. She became easily agitated and leaned even more into the alcohol and possibly drugs that were free-flowing in her social inhabited, like the social circles that she inhabited. Like these people, they were prescribed all kinds of crazy medications that we wouldn't be prescribed to these days. They had access to all kinds of drugs that weren't illegal yet. Like there, there's just no telling, right? Brooks carried on again as he always had. He swirled across the continent with his new family in tow, and he produced nothing riding-wise of any note. He published nothing, but he did leave a trail of lovers, most of them much younger than him in his wake. By 1960, the family had done enough moving around and decided to settle themselves at one of their homes in Paris. The scars of the war was were still fading, but Paris had done much to recover and rebuild itself as a center of culture and society. That's what drew the Bakeland family there when they arrived in 1960, and that is where they decided to put down roots. When they got to Paris, Barbara and Brooks were met by the same powerful faces and names they had moved among for years, as well as some interesting new ones. Settling back into their same old routine of drunk and socializing, the Bakelands soon found themselves fraternizing regularly with the who's who of European power and money. One such figure was Sir Pearson John Dixon, the English ambassador to France in 1960, who also had a luxurious home provided for him by the government of Paris. Pearson moved among the social sect of Paris with his family, which included his two daughters, Jennifer and Corina. Somewhere along the line, it seems, Brooks Bakeland also made the acquaintance of the diplomat's daughters, and before long, a romance was struck up. Rumors began to not so much swirl as drop like bombs that Brooks was in love with and seeing Pearson's youngest daughter, who was 15 years younger than Brooks Bakeland. Again, it set off a bomb on the social scene. Boldly, though, Brooks did not back down from the claims. This is one of the crazier things. And I guess this is kind of Brooks, uh, Brooks Bakeland was known for having this saying of, I have fuck you money. And it was, he was the one that invented that saying, as it were. He popularized it and it had come from his grandmother, who had a saying that she used to say, the the the plastic, the plastic guy's wife, which was our money alleviates us from the consequences of our mistakes, right? So it looks like at this point, Brooks, when he's being accused by society and his wife of having this affair with his diplomat's daughter, it seems that he decided to just hold on to that because he did not back down. He didn't wait for Barbara to confront him. All right. He actually went to her, confronted her, and took the fight directly to Barbara himself. Sometime in 1960, per his own admission, Brooks told Barbara that the rumors were true. He was in love with another woman and he wanted a divorce. The Bakelin home turned into a frenzy of devastation immediately. Barbara Daly refused to accept the news in any shape or form. It didn't matter to her if Brooks was in love with another woman. If she wasn't gonna be Mrs. Brooks Bakelin, then nobody was gonna be Mrs. Brooks Bakelin. She was the mother of his son, and she wasn't gonna allow everything that she had worked for to be taken from her so lightly by someone else. So things spiraled. Tony watched all of this. He watched his parents' marriage disintegrating, and then he presumably watched as in 1960, his mother attempted to take her own life. We don't know the exact circumstances of the event. We do not know if Barbara swallowed pills, if she cut her wrists, or if she tried some other means of leaving the earthly plane. What we do know is that her plan worked. Brooks was so horrified by Barbara's attempt that he immediately canceled his request for divorce and ended his romance with the diplomat's daughter. Barbara, it seemed, had been telling the truth when she declared she couldn't and wouldn't live without him. The marriage carried on, but really it sounds like in name only. Brooks Bakelin became distant, often wandering off on his own for months at a time, leaving his wife and son to comfort one another at home in Paris or London or New York or Italy. The life the family led was a lavish one, yes, but as the years went on, it became a more and more isolated one. With Brooks often away at his games with other women and other friends, Barbara became even more volatile than she had been before, and that's frickin' saying something. She kept a close circle of friends, but her drinking and outbursts made her a difficult dinner guest to deal with. We'll just put it that way. Her youth and her popularity fading behind her, Barbara did what many society mothers do. She focused in on the one thing she sensed she still had control of. Her one and only son, Tony. Now, I'm going to need to warn you here. Uh, everything from this point on in the story is gruesomely, stomach-churningly horrible. It is grotesque. It's probably one of the worst stories you're gonna hear this week, if not this year, if you don't already know it. And sadly, everything that I'm about to read to you was reported by people who knew Barbara, who were inside of this, and who consider this to be true. Now, with all of that, trigger warning, okay, major trigger warning. Uh, if you have a lot of sexual trauma in your past or you have a lot of trauma tied to your family and being LGBTQ, uh, this is gonna be bad. So the story up to now has been very sad, right? And very messy. Um, but now it's gonna get brutal and it's gonna get horrible and awful and downright criminal. Okay, so don't say you weren't warned. Okay. Okay, all right, let's finish this story. So by the 1960s, Barbara and her well-to-do husband Brooks were all but estranged. He had dropped demands for divorce to avoid the scandal of a suicidal wife, but Brooks Bakeland was still carrying on much as he always had, rowing through his cycles of wealthy party boy antics without so much as a care in the world. This left Barbara on her own, to her own devices, which was always a dangerous thing. I mean, yeah, sure. She carried on affairs of her own, but trapped in a loveless and estranged marriage, there was nothing she could really do unless she was willing to give up her claim to the Bakelight family fortune, essentially. And that was something Barbara just was not gonna do. She had that name, she had that money, she was not gonna let it go. She was, I think, in my personal opinion, very addicted to the power of being among the elites, quote unquote elites, as it were. Um, you'll see in a minute why that that is not a word we should use with them. Um uh and she was Barbara was Barbara Daly was gonna hold on to that at any cost. She wanted that power, right? And the, you know, we saw it with the suicide attempt. She was willing to die for it. So with a dwindling social circle and a husband who didn't want her attentions, Barbara focused in on Tony. Sometime in the 1960s, when Tony was getting into his teenage years, Barbara became obsessed with his sexuality. Stories differ here. According to Brooks, Tony told them sometime after his 16th birthday that he was gay or bisexual. It's not really clear which, but it was clear that the news was devastating to the two conservative parents, quote unquote conservative, right? Because we see their antics, but they're like, they're very much Republican. All these people are Republican, they all give money to like the GOP behind the scenes, da-da-da-da-da-da, all that, all that kind of stuff. Um, they were they were devastated by it. Other sources claim Tony never revealed anything like that to his parents, but still, somewhere along the line, Barbara Daly became obsessed with the idea that her son was gay or bisexual. It became the center of her entire focus. She woke up thinking about it. She went to bed thinking about it, she chatted about it endlessly to friends. She would talk about this to the few friends she had left. And she made claims to her boyfriends that she also kept around town. In 1967, when Tony was around 20 years old, he set out, as many wealthy kids do, right? To enjoy his own time in the ritzy social circles of the old world sect. He traveled the world partying and making friends with the next generation of bankers, children, and trust fund babies. A gap year, as it were. Along the way, that same year, 1967, Tony met Australian social cruiser Jake Cooper. The two became immediate friends, and it wasn't long until they were all but inseparable. Rumors swirled, swirled about the pair, because if you haven't caught on yet, this these society types, they love to gossip. They love some rumors. Um, so rumors started going about Jake Cooper and Tony. Um, much like they had about, you know, parents. Anyway, but Tony was far enough away from home that the rumors had some time, right? They didn't quite reach the prime years of his domineering mother or his lackadaisical father, not quite yet. Stashed away from his parents and in the company of his new friend, Tony was introduced to psychedelics for the first time, allegedly, in 1967, after he and Jake went to Morocco on the search for the best high that they could find. It was allegedly this trip to Morocco that finally tipped off the maternal authority back home. When Barbara heard that her son was gallivanting around Morocco with a psychedelic pusher that was alleged to be gay or bisexual, she demanded that her son Tony return home immediately. It was a forceful order, and it was an order that Tony wasn't able to resist for long. Soon he was on a plane and heading back home to mother in New York City, who was fending off rumors that her son had spent her last year, his last year, tripping balls and having sexual escapades with a young Australian man. Cooper, to the end of his days, denied the rumors that he and Tony Bakeland had a sexual relationship, but the story persisted. Again, these high society circles just accepted it as a factual thing. In shame, Tony folded back into Barbara's control, who was now completely and totally obsessed, obsessed with what she called, she called, and I quote, curing her son of gayness. Direct quote. Absolutely freaking horrible. Just awful. And in it's, oh my God, it's about to get so much worse. Now, I know what you're probably thinking. You probably think that Barbara then subjected, um, you know, because she was this, we're talking about a woman who had been through electro-convulsive therapy with a Nazi, essentially, right? A eugenicist. Um, you you're probably thinking, oh, right, so she has a gay son, she doesn't want him to be gay. She probably put him through some kind of horrible things, right? Because we all know what was going on in like asylums in the 1960s, right? Mental asylums. And we know the kind of horrific things that people of not even people without mental health issues, people who were thought to be gay, got subjected to, right? This is not, this is not um secret knowledge. Um, that's probably what you think happened. You probably think that Barbara Daly put her son Tony into some kind of conversion therapy, nightmare that you're probably pretty familiar with. And I guess, kind of in a way, you could call what happens next conversion therapy. Um, but I think most people would probably call it uh sexual abuse because Barbara, now possessed by the fixation of curing her son from homosexuality, started bringing home sex workers and forcing her son to engage with him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh these encounters were not optional. Let me stress that. Let me say that one more time. Not optional. She would bring home sex workers and force her son to have sex with him. The women and Tony were forced to have sex together while Barbara allegedly watched them. Okay. You see, you see where this is going now? This happened numerous times, according to Barbara herself, who freely told people about this. She freely, she she told people, she told her friends that she was forcing her son to have sex with sex workers. Tony, she claimed, would stop being gay if he was just shown how to get the right pleasures out of a woman's body. I'm not even kidding you. This is like so demented. It's just insane. She was telling people that he just hadn't figured it out yet. He just, he just needed to find the right girl to teach him. That right girl, according to Barbara Daly, ended up being a young French woman named Sylvie. Now, Sylvie seemed like a pretty safe bet. She was relatively young, but she had already been married and she already had two children. And she already knew what it meant to move herself around America's elites. Barbara knew she could control Sylvie, so she set up Tony with this girl because it seemed ideal. Even if Sylvie couldn't cure him, she'd at least know how to keep her mouth shut about his proclivities. At first, it seemed as though the plan was going to work. Tony and Sylvie actually did hit it off. They really did, which is why I think some people say he was probably bisexual and not actually gay, which either one, it's fine. Um, but he and Sylvie did actually seem to get along. And he ended up bringing her home to introduce her to his mother and father as his official girlfriend. Sylvie, the French woman, though, it seems, was not a loyal woman. She was not a loyal woman. Uh, not to Tony, and certainly not to Barbara. Because shortly after being introduced to Tony's parents at as his like official love interest, this is the woman I'm gonna pursue. Maybe I'm even gonna marry her. Uh, Sylvie started having sex with Tony's father. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yes, that Tony's father. Yeah, the guy that she was dating. Uh Brooks, Brooks Bakelin, you know, the one that's married to Barbara still. He's been estranged and off with other women. Yeah, he actually starts having a sexual relationship with Sylvie. Yet another scandal obviously erupts around the Bakelin family. Brooks carries on his love affair with Sylvie openly after everyone falls out, finds out about it. His son's girlfriend, he's openly flaunting her, saying, This is mine now. Uh, and he starts living with her apart from his wife and son. He takes her around the world with him. He's proudly showing off the young mother of two on his arm. They become inseparable, much as he and Barbara had been so many years before. There was nothing Barbara could do about it. In 1968, Brooks demanded a divorce from Barbara. Consequences be damned. He wasn't gonna back down this time, even if she tried to kill herself. And somehow, Barbara managed to weather the storm. She didn't. She gave Brooks his divorce that year, and her once beloved husband ran off into the sunset with his son's former girlfriend, who he did later marry. By 1969, Barbara Bakeland was truly a single woman again. She was Barbara Daly again, for the first time in more than 20 years, and entirely against her will. Her mental health declined exponentially, and she focused all of the energies that she had left into the one piece of her marriage that she had left, her son Tony. Tony, now single again, just like his mother, became the center of all of Barbara Daly's ire and suspicions. He was still gay or at least bisexual, Barbara reckoned. And if she was going to be a good mother to him, she had to find a way to cure him. Barbara forced Tony into more sexual encounters with prostitutes, but still, she was convinced that her son was gay. So, in a last-ditch effort to what Barbara claims was to cure her son, she started having sex with him instead. Yes, you heard that correctly. According to all of Barbara Daly's biographers, who spoke extensively with those who knew Barbara Daly, uh, she spoke candidly about her incestual encounters with her son. Uh, the other women hadn't known what to do with him, she claimed. That was the story. The prostitutes just didn't know what they were doing. She was the only one who knew how to do this. Uh, so she, as Tony's mother, uh was the only one who could teach him how to get sexual pleasure out of a woman. It is um unimaginable. It's an unimaginable horror. Like it's one of the worst things. When I read this, I thought maybe I don't do this episode, but I think it's very, very important in the context of who we're talking about. Um, but the whole story is made even more unimaginable by how candidly Barbara talked about sexually abusing her now 23-year-old son. And it is, right? It's sexual abuse. Even um one of Barbara's ex-boyfriends, I know people are going, well, that that's just a rumor. That's just a rumor. That's never really been confirmed. Look, even one of Barbara's boyfriends from the time came forward and said, Well, yeah, she did tell everybody that. She did. She did tell everybody she was sleeping with her son, and she did tell everyone about these really graphic encounters. But I don't know if it was true. Maybe she just liked shocking people. And you really have to stop and like think to yourself, um, I don't know. Like, what mother tells stories about having sex with her 23-year-old son? Like it's a good thing. You know what I mean? Um, and the way events are about to unfold, um, I think the truth is in that. Okay, so let's let's just see what you think. If you think this rumor was real based on what comes next. In the years after Barbara began bragging about her incestuous encounters with her son, Tony's mental health began to visibly and substantially erode. Those who knew him, who encountered him, who were friends with him, said he became more and more withdrawn and detached from reality as his mother continued to ply her clutches over him. By 1970, people inside Barbara and Tony's social circles said he was exhibiting signs of paranoia and schizophrenia, both of which appeared to be escalating. It was clear to every person that met Tony that he was clearly very, very much in need of very serious help. But Brooks Bakeland, Tony's estranged father, who had run off with his son's own girlfriend, refused to allow him to get any medical treatment. After all, he claimed, they were from a prestigious family. They couldn't have his only son marked as a nutcase. They couldn't weather any more scandal. Tony became entirely reliant on his mother and entrenched in her world by her own design. She kept Tony beside her at all times, rarely making an appearance that the increasingly sick young man couldn't appear at with her. He was like an accessory, a safety blanket, I guess is how, like, is kind of how I see it. And it was clear that Barbara was never gonna let her son go, cured or not. In 1972, while the pair were walking down a plush London street, Tony did the unthinkable and tried to push his mother into oncoming traffic. The only thing that saved Barbara was the last-minute intervention of a concerned onlooker. It was a terrifying ordeal and one that landed Tony in a short psychiatric hospital stay by order of the English police. In psychiatric care, Tony was evaluated by multiple psychiatric professionals, all of which declared he was extremely sick, extremely dangerous to his mother, and potentially to other people. One psychologist who interviewed Tony even went so far as to warn Barbara personally that Tony was very likely to commit grave harm or injury on her or someone else, but primarily her. She was the primary focus. Wonder why. Barbara, who had always lived with the same devil may care attitude that so many of her wealth and privilege do, ignored the warnings completely and brought her son home to their luxurious Chelsea flat a few months later. It was during that time, a few months later, that Tony proved every warning the psychologist had given his mother to be true, and I think probably proves that all the abuse that Barbara said she was inflicting on him was also probably true. In November of that same year, 1972, just a few months after Tony had attempted to shove his mother, Barbara Daly, into traffic, the two got into an argument. According to Tony, in a letter that he would write years later, his mother ran into her bedroom and tried to lock the door, but he followed her. Barbara fled from Tony, who said he fell out of touch, like he was flickering in and out of reality. And Barbara ran into the kitchen, at which point Tony, following her again, grabbed a knife from the kitchen table and drove it straight through his mother's heart. Authorities would later claim that Barbara Daly died instantly, but Tony would claim that his mother, who refused to look at him as she died, had not. It had taken a few minutes. Once it was clear that Barbara's reign of terror over his life was at an end, Tony Bakeland calmly walked to the phone and ordered Chinese takeout from his local favorite. He was sitting calmly at the kitchen table, feet away from his mother's dead body, eating his meal when the police burst into the Chelsea apartment and found him. It was a gruesome scene and an even more gruesome story that the authorities in the UK struggled to make sense of. Scotland Yard quickly got involved trying to unravel the mystery of how a man with a name like Bakeland could commit such a heinous crime. The family swiftly put their cash behind this wayward son and hired an expert defense team that claimed. Tony had been mentally incompetent at the time of the murders. The arguments were a success. They worked because they were correct. Tony was dealing with severe paranoid schizophrenia, which had no doubt not been helped by the years of abuse and neglect experienced at the hands of his mother and father. Tony went to trial in England that year and was sentenced not to prison but to Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital for a total of eight years. It was no doubt a harrying experience, a harrowing experience, but some of the professionals at the hospital decided that Tony was in a safe enough state to be released to his grandmother, Nene, Barbara's mother, in New York City eight years later. Tony Bakelin flew home to the United States and moved into his grandmother's house in 1980 with only a slight air of media attention. It seemed that this tragic story had once and all come to an end, though many could still not make sense of Barbara's violent and seemingly tragic death. They didn't know what had been going on behind those closed doors in the Ivory Tower. The story, however, took an even more tragic turn just six days after Tony Bakelin's return to the U.S. In July 1980, Tony Bakelin attacked his grandmother Nene just as he had attacked his mother. Using a kitchen knife, Tony stabbed the 87-year-old woman eight times in the chest and abdomen, wounding her grievously. Tony was immediately arrested and sent not to a psychiatric facility, but to Rikers, where he received none of the softer treatment that he had received in the UK. Nene Daly, unlike her daughter, survived the stabbing of her grandson Tony. Tony, however, had no intention of surviving this final chapter of his journey. On March 20th, 1981, Tony Bakeland was scheduled for a hearing in relation to the attempted murder of his grandmother, Nene. The guards collected him from his cell and began transport to the courthouse, but were soon alerted that the trial was delayed and they would have to return Tony to a holding cell. The guards put Tony in that holding cell while they waited for the delay to be resolved. Thirty-six minutes later, he was dead with a plastic bag wrapped around his face. It was the tragic end to a tragic story, devastating from start to finish. After his death, Tony Bakelin was cremated by Rikers and his ashes were claimed by his grandmother Nene, the woman he had attacked and tried to kill the year previously. The Bakeland family was silent in their grief, much as they had been around the endless scandals that surrounded Barbara and Brooks throughout their twisted marriage. And that is pretty much the story of Barbara Daly and her son Tony Bakeland. I told you it's grim. But I think it's also important for a lot of reasons. I do actually think it's important. It's not like it is actually quite serious because most of us, when we see the lives of these rich and famous people, especially people who still cling to like the wealth of Taylor Swift, is like this, it's it's part of prosperity gospel. It's kind of a form of like ignorance, but like this idea that if someone's rich, someone's famous, that's it. Life is easy, nothing ever goes wrong for them. It's all good, they're good. We see those people in their ivory towers as this like ultimate dream to be aspired to. I mean, after all, for most of us, in reality, the majority of us listening to this who are like working class people, you give us $380 million, and yeah, we would be able to solve pretty much most, if not every single problem we ever had, even if that was just like extensive therapy, right? Like we would boop, we would be able to live really smooth lives. Or so we think, right? It's really kind of all an illusion. A mirage like that hides the darker and more sinister reality of that living in that ivory ivory tower. And that reality, as much as Brooks Bakelin's grandmother declared all those long years ago, right? When she said, our money as people of power and prestige and wealth, our money frees us from the consequences of our mistakes, which basically means you can just do whatever you want. And there is no consequences if you're someone with money. Okay. Um, Barbara Daly and all the wealthy and powerful people she surrounded herself with were seemingly possessed by an inability to grow up and an inability to change for the better. They wandered into the same quagmires of sex, addiction, trauma, and abuse over and over and over again because their money gave them freedom from any consequences. You don't need to grow up when a name and a checkbook can wipe all missteps off the map, right? There was literally never a physical or material cost to the damages they did to one another or even to their son, right? When it comes to Barbara Daly and Brooks Bakeland. And the Bakeland family won't have been unique in this, right? They're not like they're just so, this is so crazy rare. It's not, it's not. When you start digging into this, you see all the divorces, the flipping, the flopping, the bed crawling, the, you know, illegitimate kids. Like these people are an absolute mess. This is how the wealthiest sects move, free from consequence and free to act and react in any way they see fit in any one moment in time. And behind closed doors, they don't have to control themselves, as we saw in the blatant behaviors of Barbara and Brooks, right? People like this get to do whatever they want and they leave trails of bodies in their wake, not just in these companies that they exploit and the labor that they exploit, but in their own children. Like they're they're quite happy to allow their own offspring to be casualties, if it means getting them what they want, what they need, or creating the illusion. What happened to Tony is a true tragedy. Like, in every sense of the word, that little boy had a horrific life from start to finish. Despite having the kind of wealth and access and privilege that most of us can literally only dream of, his reality was constantly warped by what seems to be an endless abuse, neglect, and literal outright molestation and incest. Because I have a hard time believing that Barbara just suddenly started sleeping with her son in his 20s. You know what I mean? Like there's usually a grooming process at the very least that leads to that. What Barbara did to her son, which I certainly believe that she did, I, when you look at how it ended, him stabbing her through the heart, like him having such severe struggles with mental illness, which knows like schizophrenia is not caused by trauma, but it's not helped by it. It's not helped by living in an environment where you have someone molesting you, right? Okay. It's it's this is already the darkness, was already well established in the daily family mind. We know that they had, much like in my own family, this kind of purse of mental health, that was already in there. But like being abused, a lifetime of being abused, being neglected, that didn't help Tony's mental health, did it? It aggravated Tony's mental and emotional struggles. The refusal of his parents to get him appropriate care when they had the means to do so speaks volumes about who they were. They did not give a shit about that kid. They did not give a shit. They were happy. They were happy to make scandals if it was about them sleeping with some fucking 15, 16, 17-year-old, but they were not gonna have a scandal when it came to getting their son mental health care, right? They they just were not gonna do it. And that's that's who they were. As to the claims of Barbara's incest of Tony, you know what? At the end of the day, there's still people who are like, well, I don't know, even though her boyfriends confirmed that she was telling people this. It doesn't even really matter, honestly, if she did or did not have sex with him, because she was absolutely, and this is true, she was telling people that she was in graphic detail. She was telling people that she was having sex with her son, which, if nothing else, belies a truly fucked up mind, like truly fucked. Because who in the hell would tell people that they are having sex with their son? Who would tell that story? There's nothing funny about it, it's not entertaining, it's not even shocking. That's like you should go to prison, right? Like police should have been called, which you know, no one seemed to have done. It's demented. Even if the action never happened, if the action of incest never happened, it still shows how twisted Barbara Daly had really become inside of her gilded cage. And the fact that she felt comfortable telling this to other people, and other people seemingly just took it in stride and didn't report anything to the authorities. Um, that tells you exactly what kind of environment these wealthy perverts like rock and roll in. This, this obviously, by the time we get to the 1960s and 70s when she allegedly starts molesting and incesting her own son, um, she's telling people, and they're just like, yeah, so it must have been a common thing. It must have been common enough that no one, you know, no one stopped, like stepped in to stop it. So, like, truly, truly horrific. All in all, Barbara Daly appears to have become a victim of her own creation in a way, a monster of her own creation. And in that, there is almost a sense of justice. Um, almost. But in the rubble still remains Tony, the real victim of it all and failed by everyone around him. People who had the means to save him and chose not to. And that's who the Uber wealthy really are. That's who the upper crust have always been. Empathy-lacking psychopaths who move through the world focused only on the obsession of their wallets and their genitals. They care about nothing but the power that gives them access to hedonism at any cost. And the ultimate cost, well, let's just ask Barbara Daly about what that ultimate cost is, right? Just, oh, oh my God, skin crawling. Skin crawling, awful from start to finish, any way you look at it, and a revelation about those who claim to be morally and ethically superior to those of us down here in the trenches. I mean, pull off the top of any of these illustrious families, by the way, any of them. You all the families who are tied into this, you should have seen the map I had to create to like do all this. Unbelievable. These families were all doing the same shit. They all had crazy, insane sexual scandals going on inside them and around them. They're just like a festival of predators, liars, cheats, abusers, neglectors, just raising up the next generation of psychopaths ready to subjugate at any cost to keep the privacy of the perversions. And that's it. That is all for this episode. What did you think? Have you ever heard the story of Barbara Daly before? Did you know about Tony Bakelin and the Bakelite Family Fortune? Again, deeply dark, disturbing, troubling story, and it's one that sticks in the in the craw, man, as it were. Um, let me know what you thought about this episode and what you thought about this story. And if you want to know more, you can check out the book Savage Grace by Natalie Robbins and Stephen M. L. Aaronson, which is where I got a lot of these details from. There's also a movie version of the story, but I can't bring myself to watch that. But if you are looking for a Grim Watch this weekend, uh it's out there. It came out in 2007, also called Savage Grace, and it's got Eddie Redmane and Julianne Moore in it. But yeah, really scandalous stuff, really awful stuff. Um, if you want to get more of Hollywood's most twisted secrets and scandals, head over to patreon.com slash scandalqueens, where I'm about to release a pretty big bombshell discovery that I made about one of the Kardashian family's closest friends. It blew my mind, and I'm sure it will blow yours too. Um, so head over there if you want to get that. If you want to get early episodes, bonus episodes, and lots of Scandal Queen goodness. If you want to get more of a psychological perspective, head over to thereally be johnson.substack.com where I release weekly essays, guides, and articles on life, relationships, mental health, and narcissism. And for everything else, make sure you're following me on all of the social media platforms TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. You can find me there at the ReallyBe Johnson. It's the same on everything. Um, and you can follow me there, like on TikTok and Instagram, especially. I do like little short analysis, funny clips, or even updates about the show. And if you loved this episode, please, please, please think about leaving me a quick five-star review on Apple and Spotify. It just helps the other weirdos find me and it helps them deconstruct this narcissistic cult of celebrity, this narcissistic celebrity spell we've been under. And uh helps helps us kind of all deconstruct that together. And um, yeah, that's it. That's it for today. Thank you again for listening, and I hope you'll join me next week for what I believe is one of the biggest discoveries of my career so far. Uh, you won't want to miss it because I think it's gonna blow your socks off. So until then, keep your secrets closed and the receipts closer. Stay scandalous, Queens. Bye bye.