Five years ago this magazine published a feature about the glamorous lives of Atlanta couple Danielle and Glen Rollins. They were young, blond, and beautiful; Boxwood, their five-acre Regency-style estate in Buckhead, was “the house everyone in Atlanta dreamed about,” according to T&C. Glen was unusual: The third-generation inheritor of an industrial fortune (pesticide giant Rollins Inc., the $6 billion parent company of Orkin), he also had a bona fide track record as a businessman. He, his father Gary, and his uncle Randall ran the publicly owned extermination behemoth, with Glen as president and chief operations officer of Orkin. No other member of Glen’s generation worked for the family business. He was the golden boy and lived in appropriately high style, as the reader saw.

Around the time the story was published I got to know the vivacious Danielle, who was writing a coffee-table book on entertaining. We met at a dinner party in New York hosted by mutual friends, after which I imagined she returned to her dreamlike existence as Glen’s wife.

FRANCESCO LAGNESE

Around the time the story was published I got to know the vivacious Danielle, who was writing a coffee-table book on entertaining. We met at a dinner party in New York hosted by mutual friends, after which I imagined she returned to her dreamlike existence as Glen’s wife.

Most of my clients get divorced and that’s it, we’re done. [But] most of my clients are not like the Rollinses.

Around the time the story was published I got to know the vivacious Danielle, who was writing a coffee-table book on entertaining. We met at a dinner party in New York hosted by mutual friends, after which I imagined she returned to her dreamlike existence as Glen’s wife.

But earlier this year Danielle reached out to me on Facebook. She and Glen had split up. No longer living at Boxwood, she had temporarily moved into a house owned by her hairdresser while she struggled through arbitration following a vicious divorce that felt to her like “something out of John Grisham.”

I was not immediately convinced. After all, how much sympathy could either member of this once resplendent couple deserve? But one Sunday evening I found time to look at the deposition of Danielle’s former mother-in-law, Ruthie. It made for uncomfortable reading.

Ruthie had disapproved of Danielle, the daughter of a Dallas electrical engineer and a special education teacher, from the get-go. “I just did not feel they were the right match,” she testified. Danielle “had a pretty complexion,” but before her wedding to Glen, Ruthie offered to pay for a chin lift and a stay at a weight loss camp in Switzerland. Why? Ruthie claims it was “manipulation” by Danielle, who wanted the procedures; Danielle says it was part of her mother-in-law’s campaign to reshape and control her. In any case, according to Danielle, more mother-in-law-funded surgery—to her breasts, stomach, and legs—was to follow over the years. In her deposition Ruthie was also asked whether she had bought much of the decor at Boxwood, from rugs and chandeliers to the services of her longtime decorator, Gordon Little. “I don’t recall,” she responded. “You would have to check with my CPA.”

Exterior modifications weren’t the only changes the family sought to impose, Danielle says. Four times a year every member of the Rollins clan gathered in Atlanta on a Saturday for a compulsory meeting, and there was also an annual weekendlong retreat (usually at a resort such as WaterColor, on the Gulf Coast) at which paid lecturers drilled them in the pitfalls of inherited wealth. Glen’s grandfather the late O. Wayne Rollins had come from a modest farming background and was an apostle of solid, simple values. His sons Gary and Randall structured their children’s trust funds to deter entitled behavior, stipulating that distributions be received only by those engaged in “serious pursuits that are meaningful, respectable, and worthwhile.”

But this, apparently, did not go far enough. In 2010, according to Glen, Gary and Randall proposed amending the trust funds to include a program of credit checks, drug tests, and surveillance by private investigators.

Glen balked. For years, it turns out, he had been having extramarital affairs, including with prostitutes, as he would later admit in the divorce proceedings. He and Danielle sweated it out in therapy, with Glen receiving treatment for sex addiction. (He tells me he is fully recovered.) However, at a Rollins retreat on Amelia Island in 2010, around the time he was being asked to submit to intrusive inspections of his private life, Glen made an unpleasant discovery: Despite having devoted his entire career to Rollins Inc., he had been passed over for a key leadership position in a huge family foundation in favor of an older cousin. Eventually he and his siblings decided to sue the trustees, including his father and uncle, for breach of fiduciary duties related to the trust funds that his grandfather had created for the benefit of Glen and the other grandchildren.

“It wasn’t just for our sake,” Glen says. “We wanted to protect our children from having to live under draconian terms.”

It was in response to his intention to sue, Danielle says, that she strove to make the Boxwood spread, with its across-the- fold images of a koi pond and satin-lined living rooms, as fairy tale–like as possible. “I wanted Glen to see what he had,” she says, so he wouldn’t launch a family civil war.

It wasn’t enough. In September 2010, while T&C readers were still enjoying pictures of domestic bliss at the Rollins manor, Glen filed suit against his father and uncle, who immediately fired him from Orkin. His three siblings stood with him, his five cousins against. His mother swiftly made her choice, filing for divorce from Gary after 45 years of marriage. Glen’s suit is expected to roll through the courts for years.

At home Glen and Danielle fought more bitterly than ever, and in 2012 she too filed for divorce. She subsequently found herself, she says, without a single credit card or bank account she could control, nor any stock or other assets. Under pressure she signed an agreement she now regrets; it provided little that won’t be eaten up by legal bills, which is why she reached out to me. (Glen’s attorney disputes her account.) Her lawyer, Jeffrey Melcher, told me, “Most of my clients get divorced and that’s it, we’re done.” But, he added, “most of my clients are not like the Rollinses.”

So there you have it: the dark side of taking a company public and also attempting to pass it on within the family. One sympathizes with both sides. Nobody wants children to grow up spoiled so they dissipate hard-earned money, but trusts can be destructive to their beneficiaries even when the terms are less authoritarian than the ones Glen and his siblings recoiled at. Meanwhile, Rollins Inc. steams along like a juggernaut.

Gary and Randall, whatever one thinks of the family drama, have been remarkable stewards of the company. So there are no easy conclusions, except possibly this: Bill Gates, who says he wants to leave his kids pretty much nothing when he dies, may be on to something.