All posts tagged: heiress

The Mansion, the Heiress, the Jewel Heist, and Me: A Bel-Air Fairytale

The Mansion, the Heiress, the Jewel Heist, and Me: A Bel-Air Fairytale

Published by Sam Flores

Carla was just a toddler when Arnold moved the family from Chicago to Bel-Air, after his friend, dam and pioneering California highway builder Lynn Atkinson, defaulted on a personal loan from Kirkeby he’d taken to finish the dream home Atkinson had built for his wife. Now, the Kirkebys would live in the elaborate estate. Carla says her mother wasn’t thrilled about inhabiting the swanky home now known as “the Beverly Hillibillies house.” Carlotta felt the house was too big and extravagant. (Even though the home had been built for her, Atkinson’s wife had expressed a similar sentiment.) Nevertheless, the Kirkebys settled in and hired a nine-person staff, six of whom lived in the house. Carla says she wanted to learn to cook, but their chef—a 6-foot-tall Dane named Ida who served the family for over 40 years—barred her from the kitchen. Carla’s childhood reads like a transient fairytale. Though they were based in LA, her family also flitted between homes in Florida, New York, and Cuba, where Arnold owned the Hotel Nacional, which hosted the …

Karyna Shuliak was Jeffrey Epstein’s last partner and main heiress. She won’t benefit from his will

Karyna Shuliak was Jeffrey Epstein’s last partner and main heiress. She won’t benefit from his will

Published by Sam Flores

Karyna Shuliak and Jeffrey Epstein in New York, April 2014. BILLY FARRELL/BFA/SHUTTERSTOCK/SIPA/LE MONDE A loyal companion of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, Karyna Shuliak was the last person to speak to him on the phone shortly before his suicide in prison on August 10, 2019. Close to the disgraced financier, to whom she was simultaneously a lover, manager and dependent, she appears as his main beneficiary in the will he wrote in his cell before his death. According to that document, Shuliak was supposed to inherit $100 million (€85 million) and the criminal’s properties: his Manhattan townhouse, his apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris, his private islands, his ranch in New Mexico, as well as a 32-carat ring purchased for $1.2 million. Despite this lavish inheritance, the 36-year-old, who currently lives in New York, will not see a penny, as American and French authorities have decided to freeze the estate to allocate it to a victims’ compensation fund. It all began in 2009. Shuliak, then a 20-year-old student of dental medicine at Minsk University, started corresponding …

By appearing with a royal heiress, Jordan Bardella risks blurring his image

By appearing with a royal heiress, Jordan Bardella risks blurring his image

Published by Sam Flores

Jordan Bardella at the Grand-Palais during the bicentennial of ‘Le Figaro’ newspaper, Paris, January 13, 2026. JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP What game is Jordan Bardella playing? Why did he appear alongside the Italian heiress of a “royal” family, among the wealthiest of the international jet set, during a party that brought together Paris’s elite on Tuesday, January 13, at the Grand Palais? What message did the president of France’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party intend to send by leaving an event under the glare of cameras with Maria Carolina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies? Bardella claims to be the voice “of a forgotten people” and the “authentic spokesperson for a France despised by the elites,” yet in appearing in public with the heiress to a fortune worth several hundred million euros – at a time when angry farmers are descending upon Paris –his choice has not gone unnoticed. The closeness between the two even made the front page of Italian daily newspaper’s La Repubblica‘s website on Friday. Under the blue-hued nave of the Grand Palais, among …