by Mark Bulliet
New York Post
June 13, 2006
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On the surface, the two sisters had everything: a glamorous globetrotting mother and a wealthy stepfather who was heir to a great publishing empire.
But they shared a dark secret about their Social Register mom, Leila Hadley Luce, and their stepfather, Henry Luce III, namesake son of Time magazine’s founder.
It was a secret that drove them apart – and then brought them together after three decades.
Both sisters allege they were repeatedly molested as children by their soused and sadistic stepfather, who “feasted and devoured upon children” while their mother failed to stop him.
They’re also saying their mother molested them.
Younger sister Caroline Nicholson, 47, was the first to make the bombshell accusations.
Three years ago, she filed a $15 million suit in Manhattan Supreme Court, charging that the pattern of sexual abuse she suffered as a girl was repeating itself: Her teenage daughter had become her 81-year-old multimillionaire mother’s latest victim.
In a deposition, Nicholson alleged, “By the age of 12 or 13, I would be called into their bedrooms to admire Hank’s naked body . . . On another occasion, I was asked to get into bed between them after they had just had sex. They were both naked.”
Nicholson’s 17-year-old daughter, in her deposition, said her grandmother “would massage my body in ways that made me feel uncomfortable.
“She would ask me to undress in front of her, she would undress in front of me. She would continuously make comments on my body and talk about my body and nudity and sex.”
One of Nicholson’s molestation accusations against her mother was thrown out by the judge in the civil case because the statute of limitations had expired. But the judge allowed an accusation that Leila Hadley Luce had molested the teenage granddaughter to go forward.
Nicholson’s charges have now received chilling and surprising reinforcement.
Her long-estranged sister, Victoria Barlow, 52, has stepped out of the shadows after nearly 30 years to say that her sister is telling the truth. She said in a legal deposition that she, too, was molested by their mother and now-deceased stepfather, who together made their childhood “a daily hell.”
Barlow, who ran away from home at age 15, said she will gladly testify on her niece’s behalf if the case goes to trial.
“When the lawsuit came out, and I realized that [my sister] had finally broken with our mother, that’s when, I think, the beginning of our friendship started,” Barlow said in the deposition.
She has given her younger sister reams of letters their mother wrote in the 1970s for use as evidence. In one, which Nicholson’s lawyer, John Aretakis, called “a smoking gun,” their mother told Barlow how a drunken Henry Luce climbed into bed with Nicholson when she was 13.
“I did point out to him that climbing into bed with Caroline when he was stark naked wasn’t exactly the best thing to do,” Leila Hadley Luce wrote in an undated letter circa 1974.
Leila Hadley Luce, asked about the letter during her deposition, said, “Well, if I wrote it, I wrote it . . . I never saw him do that.”
She claimed Henry’s sex-assault attempt took place when she had left young Nicholson in his care, and she admitted she never confronted him about it.
She explained, “When I got back from Spain or Portugal, whatever it was, Caroline said, ‘Oh, Mummy, it was terrible, Hank got drunk and he tried to get into bed with me naked.’
“I said, ‘Oh, my God! What did you do?’
“She said, ‘I pushed him away.’ I said, ‘That’s fine.’”
Leila Hadley Luce noted, “Hank was my darling friend, he was my lover. I adored him and I wasn’t going to cause problems with him. I didn’t know if it was true or not . . . I was not going to go attacking Hank about it because I really didn’t know what was true.”
Luce, who married Leila Hadley in 1990 after a love affair in the early ’70s, died on Sept. 8, 2005, at the age of 80. He denied the sex-abuse charges and passed away before he could be deposed in the case.
Nicholson said she had no idea her sister shared her childhood nightmare until they reconnected.
“Victoria’s abuse was at a stage when I was very, very young, and I didn’t know it was going on,” she said.
“And then Victoria left home and then I suffered similar abuses . . .
“Then, all of a sudden, I began to see the patterns of her behavior repeating themselves on my daughter,” Nicholson, who now lives in England, told The Post.
The sisters’ charges are “balderdash,” said their mother, author of the 1997 book “A Journey With Elsa Cloud,” about her daughter Barlow, and namesake of a professorship in Tibetan studies at Columbia University endowed by the $1 billion Luce Foundation.
In Leila Hadley Luce’s deposition, she said Nicholson is “cuckoo . . . and lazy and doesn’t want to work” and Barlow is “like her father, who was paranoid schizophrenic.” She also claimed Nicholson is “money mad.”
Through her lawyer, she declined to comment for this story.
Aretakis, who made his name representing hundreds of alleged victims of Catholic priests, said, “They’re both highly intelligent and both telling the truth, and their stories add up.”
In another letter, novelist Tom Hyman, who was Leila Hadley Luce’s colleague at The Saturday Evening Post in the 1970s, wrote Barlow about her mother’s low-key reaction to an attempt to rape her when she was 14. The alleged attacker was supposedly a colleague at the magazine.
“Leila mentioned to me that [he] . . . had been a guest one weekend and tried to get in bed with you,” Hyman wrote. “Instead of being outraged by his behavior and throwing him out, Leila seemed to think it amusing.”
Hyman also wrote that he once stumbled upon Leila Hadley Luce sleeping naked with both of her daughters, then ages 8 and 13, sprawled on her chest.
“Leila also once mentioned in an offhand way having fooled around with [a male relative] in what sounded suspiciously like inappropriate behavior,” Hyman noted.
In an affidavit, David Arnold, the assistant director of Manhattan’s tony Dalton School in the mid-’70s, recounted how a teenage Nicholson showed up at the school alone and asked to be admitted as a junior. Despite a spotty academic record, he enrolled her and became her adviser.
He recalled “a boyfriend of her mother’s who loomed much larger in Caroline’s life than what she had bargained for.”
Arnold also said Nicholson told him about Luce “repeatedly ‘coming on’” to her “at any hour, day or night.”