She has endured a traumatic two years in London, including an acrimonious £5.5 billion divorce battle and the firebombing of her home.
Now Formula 1 heiress Petra Ecclestone has decided to quit the UK and is selling her £30 million home in the capital to start a new life in Los Angeles.
Petra will take her three children to live in The Manor, the sprawling mansion she bought from the late TV mogul Aaron Spelling in 2011.
The Mail on Sunday also understands that her latest lover, vintage car salesman Sam Palmer, will be going along too. The couple have been dating for five months.
Meanwhile, the Belgravia mansion she shared with former husband James Stunt was put up for sale last week.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, Petra speaks for the first time about life after her bitter divorce and the struggles of being a single mother – albeit an incredibly wealthy one.
The youngest daughter of former F1 tycoon Bernie says: ‘It’s been a bad year. But it’s getting better. Once you have kids, there’s no option but to be strong. You can’t feel sorry for yourself, you just have to do what’s right for them. I thought I wasn’t the type who believed in divorce. I got married thinking I would be with that person for the rest of my life. But things happen for a reason.’
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Petra will take her three children to live in The Manor, the sprawling mansion she bought from the late TV mogul Aaron Spelling in 2011
Details of her six-year marriage were laid bare during a divorce hearing last year, including allegations that gold bullion trader Stunt, 36, was abusive, violent and took overdoses, which he denies.
Petra, 29, was granted full custody of their children, and in January the High Court ruled she was free to emigrate to the US with daughter, Lavinia, five, and twins James and Andrew, who turn three next month.
Last month Petra was stunned when Stunt branded her a ‘horrible human being’ and her father a ‘dwarf’ in a magazine interview.
A source close to Petra said: ‘She is much happier in LA. She lives a much nicer life and has lots of friends over there. She’s really excited to be relocating. In London, she really only has her sister Tamara and her family.
‘She is very tough, but her divorce really took it out of her. Now she’s looking forward to a new start – and looking to go very, very soon.
‘There are a few practical issues to sort out, but when you’re as wealthy as she is these things don’t take long. She and Sam are blissfully happy and are looking to make their future a joyful one.’
The Manor, said to be the largest private home in California, has 123 rooms, including three for wrapping presents. However, in her bid to erase bad memories of her marriage, Petra still has plans to sell the Beverly Hills property. The house – valued at £160 million – has been on the market for a year.
'I didn't believe in divorce': Heiress Petra Ecclestone's first interview since her multibillion-pound break-up
In her first interview since her acrimonious divorce was finalised, PETRA ECCLESTONE opens up about being a single mother, the personal heartache behind her new charity venture and why life isn't panning out quite how she expected
Petra Ecclestone, daughter of former Formula 1 billionaire Bernie, looks every inch the spoilt daddy’s girl as she arrives at the swish Chelsea gym where we’ve arranged to meet in a convoy of black Range Rovers (one for her, one for the bodyguards) with personalised number plates.
She may be in the ‘mum’ uniform of hoodie and leggings, but the former is clearly designer and the latter are edgy PVC. Thick blonde locks tumble over her shoulders and her fingers, decorated with henna tattoos, are enhanced by inch-long nails and stacks of diamonds.
Yet, as soon as she starts talking, I find myself warming to Petra, who comes across as controlled but friendly, with an appealingly dry sense of humour. She’s certainly a far more understated figure than her elder sister Tamara, whose reality show Tamara’s World treated viewers to glimpses of her 57-room mansion containing a three-storey soft-play area, which reportedly cost £50,000, for her four-year-old daughter Sophia.
Being a single mother is hard. there’s no day off. It’s draining
‘I get asked to do that kind of programme all the time, but they’re just not me,’ Petra says. ‘I find the idea quite cheesy.’
At only 29, Petra – now the single mother of Lavinia, five, and two-year-old twins James and Andrew after her divorce from her husband of six years James Stunt – has founded two fashion lines and supported meningitis charities (at 14 she nearly died from viral meningitis).
She has funded cards for new mothers informing them about symptoms, and a campaign to raise awareness among students, who are more vulnerable to the condition. Now she’s throwing herself into a new project: Petra’s Place, a centre that is due to open in July near her London home to provide treatment for young children with autism and other developmental disorders.
It’s to Petra’s credit that she has found time for the centre, given the challenges of the past couple of years. In 2016, her stepmother’s mother was kidnapped and threatened with decapitation in Brazil (she was rescued); her brother-in-law Lee Stunt died of an accidental drug overdose, and her £100 million Chelsea home was attacked with a petrol bomb.
‘That was quite dramatic – things like that normally don’t happen in Chelsea, we’re not in Baghdad,’ Petra says in her soft, mid-Atlantic tones. ‘Luckily we were at our home in Los Angeles because it exploded literally outside my boys’ window.’
Then, last year, news emerged of her acrimonious divorce from entrepreneur James, 36, whom she’d married in a £12 million ceremony in Rome that even Bernie, 87, deemed excessive.
The couple, who had been together since she was 18, split amid allegations of James’s drug-taking and abusive and violent behaviour (which he denies). Bernie had already revealed how during a row his son-in-law had threatened to ‘blow her head off’.
James was ordered by a judge to leave the family home, while Petra was granted sole custody of the children. Since then he has hit back with digs about his ex and her family, calling 5ft 2in Bernie a ‘dwarf’, his ex-wife Slavica ‘Lady Macbeth’ and Petra a ‘C-list celebrity’s daughter’.
The Ecclestones jumped to Petra’s defence, with Bernie saying that he felt ‘sorry for him’. More angrily, Tamara announced ‘unless he stops telling lies about my family, we will have to start telling the truth about him’.
Petra won’t comment on the infighting (and manages to avoid even using her ex’s name during our interview) but her calm aura is one of someone who is relieved to have moved on.
‘It’s been a bad year,’ she says. ‘But it’s getting better. Once you have kids there’s no option but to be strong. You can’t feel sorry for yourself, you just have to do what’s right for them.’
Since late last year Petra has been photographed with Sam Palmer, a vintage car dealer who is friends with 33-year-old Tamara’s husband Jay Rutland.
‘It’s very early-on dating,’ she says. ‘The whole thing is quite strange because my life didn’t pan out the way I expected it to. I thought I wasn’t the type who believed in divorce. I go to church and I got married thinking I would be with that person for the rest of my life. But things happen for a reason and, whatever that reason is, I’ve now got my three kids.’
It’s easy to roll your eyes when one of the wealthiest women on the planet tells you how exhausting her children are, but there’s no doubt that Petra is a hands-on mother.
She only employed a nanny – whom she prefers to call ‘an extra pair of hands; I don’t like the idea of nannies, I’m too much of a control freak’ – after the twins were born eight weeks premature ‘and were in hospital a lot’.
‘Being a single mother is hard,’ she continues. ‘There’s no day off. You can’t take your eyes off them – it’s draining. Things like going on holiday are tough. Last week we were in Dubai and I had a nanny, but it’s not the same. You’re not a family.’
Tamara was also there. ‘Yes, but she was preoccupied with Sophia, so she wasn’t much help,’ Petra laughs.
She’s up with the children every morning at 6am, does the school and nursery run, then – after meetings and possibly exercise – returns to nursery for a noon pick-up. ‘Basically I’m a chauffeur,’ she smiles ruefully. At night, she says, ‘I’ve got into a rut of collapsing and watching TV in bed. I have to force myself to go out. When I actually do it I feel great.’
In that spirit, she’s putting her all into Petra’s Place. ‘My mum says, “You don’t have time to be dealing with this,” but when you have kids you’re in such a bubble, and I feel I want to use my brain to focus on something else. I want the kids to be proud of me, to know that their grandad was really successful but that their mum made a difference.’
The idea for the centre came to her from her experiences with Lavinia, who was slow to start talking. ‘It was so hard. She was three and I’d never heard her say “Mama” – that’s heartbreaking,’ she says.
At the time, Petra and James were living in Los Angeles in their 123-room house The Manor, which they bought for £61 million in 2011. ‘We saw several speech therapists, so we had some intervention before Lavinia reached the age of two. At that point we had to move back to London, where I was shocked at how few services they had for families. I’m lucky I can pay for the best doctors but even then they didn’t really offer that much support.’
Eventually Lavinia was diagnosed with global developmental delay, the term used for children who take longer than their peers to reach certain developmental milestones. ‘She’s doing OK. She has had to learn how to position her tongue when she talks. It’s so hard with parenting; it’s like a competition with other people saying, “My child can talk better, or read more.”’
Wanting more children to be able to access such help, Petra approached various doctors about setting up a centre. Did they not dismiss her as a ditsy heiress? ‘No, they were excited. It’s so hard here even to get a diagnosis for autism at a young age and while you’re on the waiting list you’re missing a crucial window.’
Indeed, the centre – funded largely by her charity, The Petra Ecclestone Foundation – boasts an impressive advisory team, headed by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research Centre.
Each year it hopes to cater for 96 children aged between 18 months and four years, 80 per cent of whom will be selected by Petra’s local council, Kensington and Chelsea, the remainder being private patients. The plan is to roll out a group of centres nationwide.
