Barbara Baekeland had a complex and allegedly incestuous relationship with her son, Antony Baekeland, who was gay or bisexual. Baekeland attempted to "fix" her son by hiring prostitutes to have sex with him. After this failed, while the pair were living in Majorca in the summer of 1968 following Barbara and Brooks's divorce, Barbara was alleged to have raped her son.
During his young adulthood, Antony displayed increasingly regular signs of schizophrenia with paranoid tendencies, and his erratic behavior caused concern among family friends. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia; however, his father initially refused to allow him to be treated by psychiatrists, a profession he believed to be "amoral".