Tragic spiral that caused 'reclusive' heiress to $2.7 billion fortune to retreat into the shadows: How Athina Onassis was haunted by childhood grief and humiliating heartbreak - as she slowly steps back into public life

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

She was born into enormous wealth and privilege yet billionaire heiress Athina Onassis - the only surviving member of the 'cursed' Greek shipping dynasty - has spent her life shunning the limelight.
Known for her reclusive tendencies, the French-Greek equestrian, 40, has spent much of her adult life holed up in her heavily fortified mansion in the Campine, an area of outstanding natural beauty on the border between Belgium and the Netherlands.
Unlike other socialites, who often can't resist the multitude of invitations they no doubt receive to lavish soirées and glittering public occasions, Athina has instead poured all her energies into her professional stables near Valkenswaard in Holland.
Because despite her vast inheritance, the granddaughter of Aristotle Onassis – the Greek shipping tycoon who married Jackie Kennedy while in a long-term romance with opera singer Maria Callas - has been a victim of the so-called 'Onassis Curse', suffering tragedy after tragedy.
Athina's mother Christina died of a heart attack brought on by years of eating disorders at the age of 37, when her only child was just three years old.
Fifteen years earlier, Christina's brother Alexander was killed in a plane crash, and their mother, Athina 'Tina' Onassis, died of a drug overdose the following year in 1974. Months later, Aristotle, who never recovered from his heir's death, passed away from bronchial pneumonia.
Athina was also embroiled in romantic woes; her ex-husband was reportedly found in bed with a one-night stand in the $2million home that the heiress bought in Wellington, Florida in 2016. Since then she has only been seen a handful of times.
Her most recent outing came last week as she made her second public appearance in recent times, suggesting she might be turning over a new leaf.
The aristocrat - daughter of French businessman Thierry Roussel and socialite Christina - attended the exclusive Bal d'Été, directed by Sofia Coppola, in Paris on the first Sunday in July.
Her attendance at the exclusive ball comes just four months after Athina stepped into the limelight for the first time in three years at a charity art event hosted by the Amis du Centre Pompidou in France.
For the inaugural Bal d'Étém, which welcomes 300 A-Listers, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Athina put on a stunning display in a flowing red dress with a plunging neckline.
Before entering the black-tie event, Athina posed for photographs with her guest, who sported an equally glamorous look.
The equestrian joined celebrities including Kiera Knightley, Kirsten Dunst, and Anna Wintour at the gala, which strives to lean on its rich and famous guests to raise money for the hosting museum.
In March, Athina was snapped at an art event hosted by the Amis du Centre Pompidou in Paris, where she switched out her golden tresses for chocolate brown strands, which she wore in an elegant blow-dry.
The socialite donned a black lace dress, along with a glitzy sequin blazer and wore a silver jewelled crucifix around her neck. She posed for a picture with Ines de Cominges, the only daughter of Count and Countess Rafael de Cominges of Madrid, and artist Arnaud Cabri-Wiltzer.
Before her appearances this year, Athina, a keen showjumper, was seen in June 2022, when she competed at the Longines Paris Eiffel Jumping show at Champ de Mars.
The heiress - who on her 18th birthday was given access to her late mother's $2.7billion fortune - has stayed firmly out of the spotlight throughout her adult years, choosing to keep her personal life under wraps.
She has only been seen a handful of times following the breakdown of her ten-year marriage to 'Doda' Álvaro de Miranda Neto in 2016.
DailyMail.com learned that 'Doda' Miranda, who was formerly part of Brazil's Olympic showjumping team, was discovered in bed with another woman by his wife's security team.
A well-connected member of the international show jumping circuit told the Mail that Athina's security team busted him 'having sex with another woman'.
'He begged them not to say anything, but one of them went straight to Athina. She immediately packed her bags and went off to Europe,' the source said. 'It was apparently a one-night stand, there was nothing serious going on between them.'
Doda spoke to Brazilian magazine Epoca at the time and said: 'I am really in the midst of a storm. But I will not give up on my love. It won't be easy but I will fight until the end.'
However following their divorce, he has since gone on to marry another woman, journalist Denize Severo, and has welcomed two children.
Athina, then 20, and her ex, aged 32 at the time, were married in front of 1,300 guests in December 2005 in a specially constructed Roman Catholic church at a resort in Sao Paulo.
However, her father was also not among the loved ones invited to the nuptials. Instead, Miranda's father Ricardo led Athina down the aisle.
Thierry fathered a son with Swedish model Gaby Landhage while Christina was pregnant, and the couple split shortly after Athina was born. After Christina's death, Athina went to live with Roussel and Gaby.
But now, Athina is believed to have no contact with her father and has even dropped his last name.
Alexis Mantheakis - the family's former spokesman and then Athina's biographer - told the Irish Times in 2005: 'Athina is the third generation Onassis woman to marry young, and to an older man.
'But, like all fathers, Thierry wants the best for his daughter. He would, for example, have liked her to go to university.
'It's her life, of course, but Thierry isn't very happy at her being so young and living so far away - and, understandably, that has put strain on the relationship.'
For Athina and her ex-husband, tragedy befell the pair well before their marriage broke down.
In 2011, the Mail on Sunday learned that Doda's ex-lover Cibele Dorsa - with whom he had a daughter - hurled herself to her death in the early hours of March 26, from her luxurious seventh-floor flat.
The beautiful but troubled 36-year-old actress and Playboy model left behind suicide notes in which she spoke about the arrangement under which the heiress and Miranda were bringing up her daughter Vivienne and Fernando, her son from a previous relationship.
The boy was born to Cibele during her first marriage, to Brazilian businessman Fernando Oliva Snr.
She agreed to hand over the children to Athina and Doda, but missed the youngsters so unbearably that, she said in one of her last notes, it felt as if 'my heart has been cut out'.
'Cibele decided to do this. It was her decision to allow the children to live with Athina and Doda,' Mr Oliva told The Mail on Sunday. 'Her life was very complicated. She was a working actress, emotional and unstable. With Athina and Doda they have a very simple and healthy lifestyle.'
Mr Mantheakis, a former aide to Athina's father, also said: 'It seems the Onassis curse has struck again. I am sure everyone thought they were taking the best decisions but, according to her last messages, Cibele was despondent that she had given up the children.
'This poor woman saw herself as Athina's rival but she had little to fight her with except her looks. She felt she was no match for this billionaire heiress who was younger and had enormous riches, fame and power.
'The Onassis money caused nothing but problems. I am sure the children will grow up in a good environment but the question is whether anything can make up for the loss of the mother who loved them very much.'
It had been a tough time to endure for Cibele, who was due to marry Brazilian TV presenter, Gilberto Scarpa, that month.
But weeks earlier, he had fallen to his death from the window of her flat in an apparent suicide. Cibele later wrote on Facebook: 'To live without my two children and without the love of my life has wounded my whole self.'
A Brazilian magazine reported that it had received a statement from Doda, saying: 'I don't have to defend myself against criticism by Cibele.
'I have many emails from her, praising me as a father who never failed to give her moral and financial support.'
Meanwhile, Miranda told a Brazilian magazine in 2011 that he and Athina intended to start a family within a few years.
'Athina is still very young,' he said, adding that having a baby would interrupt her budding showjumping career.
'I also have a very busy life,' he said. 'When a baby comes I want to reduce the number of competitions to be more present.'
Athina reportedly became pregnant in 2013 but suffered a miscarriage. Prior to their divorce, Miranda said that Athina spent much of her time looking after Vivienne, his daughter with model Cibele.
But Athina's marriage breakdown is not the first heartbreak she has endured - after tragically losing her mother at the age of three.
In her early childhood, Christina bonded with her daughter and gave Athina her own flock of sheep, complete with a shepherd, when she learned the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep. She also gave her a private zoo.
It was previously reported that Christina had died of a heart attack brought on by years of eating disorders.
Athina was reportedly the richest teenage girl in the world when she inherited her mother's $2.7billion fortune when she turned 18.
However, her fortune has been badly managed over the years, experts say, and she sold Aristotle's private Greek island, Skorpios, to Russian billionaire Ekaterina Rybolovleva in 2013 for an estimated $100million.
Despite being one of the wealthiest families in the world, the Onassis dynasty has famously been plagued by tragedy.
A decade and a half earlier, Christina had lost her entire family in little more than two years. Her 24-year-old brother Alexander was killed in a plane crash in January, 1973, and their mother, also called Athina, died of a drug overdose the following year.
Aristotle, who never recovered from his son's death, then passed away from bronchial pneumonia in March 1975.
Christina had four marriages, none of them lasting over three years. Athina (whose father was Christina's final husband, French pharmaceutical heir Thierry Roussel) was her only child.
Athina is now the only living Onassis grandchild of Aristotle.
Aristotle is the man often credited to accruing the family's wealth by massing one of the world's largest privately-owned shopping fleet; after, despite having an opulent upbringing, losing their wealth in the aftermath of World War I.
But by the early 20s, he made his way to Argentina and found work as a telephone operator with the British United River Plate Telephone Company - while also studying commerce and port-duty administration.
Eventually, he made his fortune with his first shipping company, going onwards and upwards.
But his love life - and reputation - was far from smooth-sailing. Aristotle was 40 when he first married teenage Athina Mary 'Tina' Livanos, 23 years his junior - and the pair had Alexander and Christina.
But the couple's union had deteriorated over the years, plagued by Aristotle's cheating - he famously had a very well known affair with opera singer Maria Callas.
However, it appeared that Aristotle's reputation began to fester far worse beyond infidelity.
In a 2021 biography about Maria's life, drawing on her previously unpublished letters, it was claimed that she was regularly drugged by her violent lover - the Greek shipping tycoon.
'Callas the singer may have had the upper hand in the music world but Maria the woman was a victim of circumstance,' according to biographer Lyndsy Spence, author of Cast A Diva: The Hidden Life Of Maria Callas.
The correspondence with her husband and agent, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, showed that 'she was really so subvervient and obedient to him, and I started to realise that is who she was as a woman', Spence told the Daily Mail at the time.
'She was such a submissive person and that really contrasts with Callas the diva. And when you're that way inclined, of course you attract abusers.'
And that includes Meneghini, Aristotle and even her own parents, added her biographer.
Nobody abused her quite like brutish Aristotle, however,; she claimed. He 'tortured' her emotionally and physically during their relationship before cruelly and infamously dumping her for Jackie Kennedy whom he married in 1968.
From the diaries of a close friend of Maria, Spence has discovered that Aristotle would ply the singer with the powerful hypnotic sedative methaqualone, also known as Mandrax, to which she became addicted along with Nembutal, a barbiturate used as a pre-anaesthetic.
She took it willingly, but with Maria effectively sedated, Aristotle — whose 'depraved' sexual requests shocked even the notorious Paris brothel keeper Madame Claude — was able to sexually abuse the singer in demeaning ways, says her biographer, she wouldn't have permitted if she had been fully conscious.
Spence also claimed that Maria was at the time already suffering from 'mental health issues' as she coped with the twin pressures of her career and ageing.
These were compounded by her discovery that Aristotle was making heavy use of Madame Claude's 'girls' and even had the bedroom at his Paris home decorated like a brothel.