Scottish Woman Wins Lottery and Family Falls Apart
When you think about winning the lottery, it’s usually with visions of happiness and low stress that comes to mind. But that isn’t the case for Scottish winner Gillian Bayford, 43. Bayford has gone on record saying how winning The National Lottery was the reason her family fell apart.
The windfall was won with her ex-boyfriend Adrian, a 45-year-old man now residing in England with his girlfriend, Sam Burbidge, who is younger than him by 17 years. They are planning to get married and have since opened their own music store in Cambridge. Adrian and Gillian split up just 15 months after winning the jackpot together.
With a win of £148million, Bayford, 43, was able to hand out a lot of cash to her family members. The mother of two children gave her father, Ian McCulloch, her mother, Brenda, and her brother, Colin, £20million in cash. She claims she has not spoken to any of them in the past year.
Bayford says that she thought winning that large amount of money would help to make everyone happy and financially secure. Instead, she claims, her closest relatives ended up being very greedy and demanding. She states that even though she gave them huge amounts of money, they always wanted more. Bayford also claims she continuously bailed her family out of debt, even after giving them millions.
When Bayford was growing up in Carnoustie, Angus, she says her dad was constantly causing their family to go into debt with all of his attempts at businesses that ultimately failed. Ian, 71, and his wife Brenda, 66 were living in a caravan with little money when Bayford hit the jackpot on EuroMillions. She is the second biggest winner in the jackpot’s history.
The first thing she said she paid off after she won was the debt of £700,000 that her brother and father had built up. She then gave her mother, father and brother the staggering gift of £20million. Ian and Brenda are now residing in an apartment that cost £275,000 in a luxury housing development and are driving an Audi S8. Her brother, Colin, purchased his own £288,000 house, complete with five bedrooms, and owns two Audis. Bayford claims he then married his girlfriend without even bothering to tell her.
The brother and father team built up many companies after being given the money but ultimately closed them up. Bayford claims that people have actually threatened to burn down their family home because of the disrespect they had brought to their village. She says that just nine months after receiving the first chunk of money, her brother asked for more. Her dad insisted that she was responsible for supporting her brother for the rest of his life since she was worth millions. But when a paper ran an article about her that her parents didn’t like, they disowned her, and will now have nothing to do with her kids.
When reached for comment, her family denies the allegations, saying Gillian has already given them too much, and that they do want to see the kids. They say they want no more money from her.
