Gina Rinehart’s reclusive daughter Bianca has given a candid interview revealing she slept with a hammer under her pillow as a child because she felt so “exposed” by her late grandfather Lang Hancock’s high-profile marriage to his Filipina maid Rose.
Bianca was seven years old when Lang scandalously wed Rose, turning the family home into a tourist destination and leaving its inhabitants terrified.
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“It would have started when Rose came on the scene; we did have to be more security-conscious than most,” Bianca, now 34, told Vogue Australia.
“With tour buses stopping in the front of your house, both in the street and on the water, to point you out, it does make you feel exposed.
“I was concerned at times — I actually used to sleep with a hammer under my mattress.”
Bianca refused to speak about her billionaire mother in the interview — which appears alongside an eight-page fashion photo shoot — but offered some insight into her childhood, which included a stint in a military boarding school in the US.
“I was eight, it was so far from home, you know, it was in Culver, Indiana, so no, it wasn’t one of my favourite experiences,” Bianca said.
Bianca now has a son of her own, Nicholas, born in 2010, with her Russian-born partner Sasha Serebryakov and hope she will be able to give him a better childhood than the one she had.
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“I just focus on my son, that’s all I can do,” she said. “I guess to try to shield him from it. Just focusing on being the best mum that I can be. It’s a very hard situation to be in.”
Bianca and two of her siblings, John and Hope, are currently involved in legal action against their mother over their access to a billion-dollar trust fund set up by Lang.
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