A few months ago, I read Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, which has become a huge bestseller since its publication earlier this year. I read the book over a weekend, and it’s a simple-yet-devastating story about a very privileged white woman whose husband of 21 years left her abruptly at the start of the pandemic. One morning, she learns that her husband has been having an affair with a much-younger woman, and when she confronts him about it, he announces that he’s leaving. It was like a switch flipped inside of him – at various points over the next year, he’s incredibly cruel and mocking towards Belle, and he seems to not care about their three children whatsoever. He buys a new apartment for himself and turns the spare bedroom into an office. The kids have nowhere to stay if they even wanted to stay with their father.
Throughout the memoir, we also learn a lot about Belle’s finances and how her husband basically asked her to sign away (via a prenup) any claim to any of the money he made during their marriage. Through Belle’s trusts, she paid for their New York apartment and their Martha’s Vineyard home, and Belle and her famous and wealthy relations were the ones paying for the children’s private schools, all while Belle’s husband stockpiled tens of millions of dollars from his job, money which he never contributed to their real estate or their children’s education. All of this while simultaneously demanding that Belle be a stay-at-home mother too. It was sort of mindblowing to see how Belle – a woman from a famous and elite New York family, with access, education, money and privilege – was being financially abused for years without really understanding what was happening. When her ex left her, he fought for their homes as well, even though they were purchased solely with Belle’s trusts.
Well, I’ve been recommending Burden’s memoir to everyone, and I think it should be a must-read for younger women who are marriage-minded. What I didn’t realize until now is that there’s some kind of backlash against Belle for telling her story. There are men and women who believe that a rich white lady can never be sympathetic, or that Belle must be lying about this or that. Well, the New Yorker published what they thought was going to be some kind of “gotcha” story about Belle’s finances. It’s… bizarre. Some highlights:
The prenup: After Davis filed for divorce, Burden writes, she was shocked to discover that he had kept millions of dollars of his income in separate accounts. With much trepidation, she writes, she filed a counterclaim; the claim was dismissed by a judge. Elizabeth Carter, a matrimonial-law professor at Louisiana State University, told me that the couple’s arrangement, in which they kept income separate and shared expenses, is not uncommon. The terms of the prenup might appear more questionable, she said, if one spouse leaves the workforce and loses their only source of income—but this scenario didn’t apply to Burden, who had inherited wealth. “It could be unfair to him if everything she brings in is separate, but he has to give her half of everything he earns,” Carter said.
After 21 years of marriage, did Belle have any right to her husband’s money? Margaret Ryznar, a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in trusts and estates, had a somewhat different view on the prenup. “Our modern idea of marriage is that it’s a partnership, and that would be reflected by dividing his earnings in the divorce,” Ryznar told me. “Presumably she enabled him to make those earnings by taking care of the home, taking care of the children, putting his career first,” whereas Davis had no role in generating Burden’s inheritance.
Burden used her two main trusts to purchase their homes: Burden returns to the matter of the two trusts often in interviews, usually stressing that they had held most of her assets and that she had drained them to buy the two properties. “I had emptied my trusts to purchase our homes,” she writes in the book. Despite the terms of the prenup, Burden decided to place Davis’s name alongside hers on both deeds. (“I thought that was what you did when you were married—share everything,” she writes.) As a result, when Burden and Davis split up, Davis had a fifty-per-cent stake in both homes, and, for a time in their divorce proceedings, he appeared ready to lay claim to his half of each.
Belle’s actual income: It’s evident from the book, however, that Burden did have her own income, because she affirms that she and Davis shared expenses, as agreed to in their prenup. She also maintained a separate American Express account for purchases that she did not want Davis—whom she portrays as controlling and selectively thrifty—to see. Documents filed in the divorce show that, in 2019, Burden reported an income of a little over eight hundred thousand dollars, including a hundred and ninety thousand dollars from the sale of her mother’s house in the Catskills. (A spokesperson for Burden said that her income that year was atypically high. Davis made well into the seven figures in 2019.)
Belle’s multiple trusts: An examination of the prenup may also undercut the sense that Burden’s long-term financial situation was precarious. Davis’s financial disclosure, as of 1999, listed a little more than two hundred thousand dollars in base salary, plus slightly less than that in “marketable securities/cash,” and noted that he was “entitled to profits” in a seven-figure investment fund. Burden’s disclosure, by contrast, tallied her “Total Financial Assets and Interests in Trusts” at approximately sixty-three million dollars. These monies included the two trusts that she eventually tapped to buy property. The majority of it was a forty-five-million-dollar share in a trust created from her late father’s estate, which was, and remains, inaccessible to Burden. (The trust is structured to provide resources for Burden’s stepmother until her death, at which point the remainder of its assets, minus any estate taxes, will go to Burden and her brother, its two beneficiaries.)
Belle’s other incomes: Additionally, Burden had an eight-million-dollar share in a charitable trust and a four-million-dollar interest in wambco, her family’s limited partnership; she had also received a three-hundred-thousand-dollar commission for serving as a trustee of this estate, which included a Hamptons property that sold to the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman for thirty-four million dollars, in 2006, and an eleven-room co-op at 1020 Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that sold for twenty-two million dollars, in 2012. Burden’s statement closes by noting that “Belle has additional potential, contingent, remote or minor interests in a number of other trusts.” The over-all picture is of a person whose long-term financial security appeared guaranteed. In the eventual divorce settlement, Burden is listed as a beneficiary of no fewer than five trusts. Apart from those trusts, Burden’s net-worth statement, filed in December, 2020, showed that she had her own Vanguard account and a six-per-cent stake in wambco; the combined value of the two exceeded ten million dollars. All of these resources would remain Burden’s alone in the divorce.
The actual divorce settlement: In the settlement, in addition to letting go of his half of the properties, Davis gave his ex-wife three million dollars out of an investment he had made in wambco. Burden kept the key to the private Black Point Beach, on Martha’s Vineyard, which Davis purchased for her birthday in 2016, and which was most recently valued at more than four hundred thousand dollars. He also agreed to pay Burden fifty thousand dollars per month in baseline child support until their youngest child—now eighteen—turns twenty-two. This six-hundred-thousand-dollar annual tally does not include a raft of additional itemized expenses for each child until he or she reaches age twenty-two, including private-school tuition and associated school fees, tutoring and test prep, summer camps, extracurricular activities, transportation costs, health insurance, and medical, dental, and orthodontic expenses.
Burden’s statement to the New Yorker: “When I wrote Strangers, I shared my heartache, my mistakes, and my shame. I owned my privilege as plainly as I could, and I respected the privacy of sealed court records. I stand by everything I wrote, including the fear I felt from my ex-husband’s threats, the contributions I made and could make to my family, and what happened to me financially and emotionally in my marriage and divorce. While I didn’t intend it, I am glad that women have taken my story as motivation for insisting on financial transparency in their marriages.”
I don’t get the tone of this New Yorker piece at all, where they’re calling Belle a liar over and over again. She wasn’t lying, it was clear in the book that she and her children were always going to be “okay” financially, but what her ex put her through was traumatic across the board, especially when he began fighting for their real estate. I believe she genuinely thought that she would have to sell her homes, which she paid for. I believe she genuinely thought that the courts would enforce her boneheaded prenup to the point where her ex would not contribute financially to her upkeep or their children’s upkeep after 21 years of marriage. The extent of this “gotcha” seems to be “she had other trusts, which she didn’t have access to!” And “she’s getting tons of money in child support!” Did the New Yorker miss the part where her ex completely blanked on their children and wanted to move on without any of them?
Screencaps courtesy of ABC/GMA.
