John Paul Getty III

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John Paul Getty III. (Born November 4, 1956 in Los Angeles ; † February 5, 2011 in Stokenchurch , United Kingdom ) was a son of the US billionaire John Paul Getty II . He became known in 1973 as the victim of a spectacular kidnapping in Italy.

Life

John Paul Getty III. was born as the first son of Sir John Paul Getty II (1932-2003) and his first wife Gail Harris. He spent his childhood in Rome , where his father ran the Italian branch of the Getty oil company empire. After the separation of his parents, he grew up without a father figure and led a dissolute life with alcohol consumption and parties, which led to numerous expulsions from school.

kidnapping

On July 10, 1973, at the age of 16, he was kidnapped in Piazza Farnese in Rome by members of the 'Ndrangheta . Then his mother received a note on which John Paul Getty III. "Please don't let them kill me" had written. The grandfather, Jean Paul Getty , initially refused to pay the $ 17 million ransom demanded initially because he suspected a kidnapping staged by the grandson. He later said, "I have 14 grandchildren, and if I pay a penny ransom, I'll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren." to the Roman newspaper Il Messagero . The kidnappers threatened to release JPG III "piece by piece" if the ransom was not paid. Now his grandfather agreed to pay at least $ 2.89 million in ransom. Of this, he loaned around USD 800,000 to his son, who as an employee in his father's company had no major fortune other than his salary, and received interest from him at 4%. The kidnap victim was finally released by his kidnappers on December 15, 1973, in a very emaciated state after more than five months of imprisonment along the motorway between Rome and Naples. He was in pain from the infected wound that was left when his ear was cut off. His kidnappers had treated him with penicillin , but the high dose caused an allergy in Getty. When he called his grandfather at his mansion in England to say thank you, he refused to take his grandson's call.

2017, the movie was all the money in the world of Ridley Scott , who takes care of the kidnapping and where Charlie Plummer plays the role of John Paul Getty. In the television series Trust by Danny Boyle from 2018 Getty is from Harris Dickinson shown.

Marriage and drug use

About a year after his release, JPG III married his German girlfriend, the journalist Gisela Martine Zacher (née Schmidt) , who was six years older than him. Their son Balthazar , born in 1975, emerged from the marriage. Gisela brought her daughter Anna, who was born in Berlin in 1972 , and the daughter of the German actor Rolf Zacher , who thus became John Paul Getty's stepdaughter. Due to the young age at marriage, his grandfather withdrew all financial support (although JPG III still had an income from the Sarah C. Getty Trust). The couple later moved to Los Angeles, where it was revealed that the kidnapping had left its mark on JPG III. He suffered from paranoid persecution and took refuge in alcohol and drug use. J. Paul Getty died in 1976, leaving an estimated net worth of $ 2 billion to $ 4 billion. In his will he decreed that his grandson JPG III should not be given control of the company empire. In 1977 JPG III had the missing ear reconstructed in several plastic operations. In 1993, Gisela Getty was divorced.

stroke

In 1981 he suffered a stroke from a drug cocktail of Valium , methadone and alcohol and has been paralyzed and almost blind since then. His father eventually refused to pay for more than $ 10,000 a month in medical care but was sentenced in a Los Angeles trial. After that, John Paul Getty III lived. as a complete nursing case in a house in Beverly Hills , which, according to Timothy Leary, was "simply a high-tech hospital disguised as a [ordinary] house". He later moved to Ireland, where he and other members of the Getty family acquired Irish citizenship under the investment for passports law. There he lived with his mother and the medical support staff at Gurthalougha House, a Victorian country estate near Lough Derg in County Tipperary . He later moved to the former father's, exclusively furnished Wormsley House in Stokenchurch , where he died of multiple organ failure . Until his death in 2011, he was cared for by his son Balthazar.

Acting activity

In 1980/81 he played with his wife Gisela in Wim Wenders ' film Der Stand der Dinge with.

Filmography

literature

  • Gisela Getty, Jutta Winkelmann , Jamal Tuschik: The twins. Or trying to kiss money and mind. weissbooks, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-940888-01-3 (as paperback: Heyne, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-453-40678-0 , autobiographical novel by the twins Gisela and Jutta (* 1949), in which also includes facts about John Paul Getty III).
  • Gisela Getty, Jutta Winkelmann: The Twins , Blumenbar, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-936738-72-8 (German and English).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Paul Getty III - Telegraph. telegraph.co.uk, accessed June 15, 2015 .
  2. ↑ 'Golden Hippie': J. Paul Getty III dead at 54 , msn.com . February 8, 2011.  Retrieved February 8, 2011
  3. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung, page 10, “The thing with the ear”, February 9, 2011
  4. ↑ a b c d e Obituaries: John Paul Getty III. Daily Telegraph, February 9, 2011, accessed February 9, 2011 .
  5. ↑ Bruce Weber: J. Paul Getty III, 54, Dies; Had Ear Cut Off by Captors. nytimes.com, February 7, 2011, accessed June 15, 2015 .
  6. ↑ ITALY: Catching the Kidnapers , Time . January 28, 1974.  Retrieved February 8, 2011
  7. ↑ Article on the death report on news.at

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Getty, John Paul III
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Getty, John Paul III.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American billionaire, kidnap victim
DATE OF BIRTH 4th November 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH los Angeles
DATE OF DEATH February 5, 2011
Place of death Stokenchurch