Belle Burden memoir details bitter divorce and prenup betrayal story

Belle Burden was born into wealth and luxury, but after a painful divorce caused by her husband’s affair, she learned how quickly that security could be taken away.

In her new memoir, “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” Burden writes in detail about the marriage agreement that her lawyer opposed, how her ex-husband threatened to give her only minimal alimony after he gave up custody of their children, and how she managed to get through this painful ordeal while adjusting to her new normal.

The daughter of Carter Burden, a Vanderbilt descendant who founded her own publishing company, and urban planner Amanda Burden, the daughter of socialite Babe Paley, she was independently wealthy when she met the man she would later marry, Henry Davis.

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Davis, whom Burden refers to as “James” in his book, was not in a similar position. Like Burden, he was a lawyer at the time, and his family had money when he grew up, but he wrote: “At some point in the 1970s, his father had a breakdown, was laid off, and stopped working.”

His parents used their savings to cover expenses and they divorced while he was in law school, and he found out he had no money left. Burden said there was a part of the story he never quite heard, that his father left the family for a time “perhaps after an affair,” then returned a few years before his mother filed for divorce.

He stated that he could never understand the details, but that the financial difficulties experienced by his father and the family disturbed him and said, “He told me how much he wanted to be a husband and father. He told me how much he wanted an honorable life.”

He proposed three months after their first kiss, and while they were engaged, they rented an apartment together and split expenses equally. A few months before their wedding in 1999, Burden’s mother reminded her that she needed to prepare a prenup; this was something both he and his brother agreed to contractually in their early twenties.

“All my assets were safe and fully protected in case of divorce, with or without a prenup. I didn’t think I needed it. But I had committed to a prenup,” she wrote.

The original draft sent by the family lawyer said that she and James would keep the assets they brought into the marriage, but in the event of divorce, they would split everything earned during the marriage. She recalled James being “upset” by the idea, saying it made him feel like “a stranger, a threat,” and feeling guilty for asking her to sign it.

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Belle Burden’s book was published earlier this month. (Belle Burden/Instagram)

Just weeks before the wedding, the pressure to sign the prenup increased and James suggested to her that they amend the agreement so that if they divorced, everything earned during the marriage would not be shared, but anything that was in either of their names would be shared. While he was with her, her lawyer called Tom.

“Tom told me this was a bad idea; that it was standard for both James and me to share earnings during marriage,” she wrote. He insisted on doing it James’ way, and eventually Tom agreed. She never told her parents about the change to the standard prenuptial agreement, worried they would “intervene.”

In 2001, they bought a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan; It was “a lot bigger” than he thought he needed, but it was something James liked. To purchase it, he emptied one of his two trusts and listed James as a co-owner, “even though he did not contribute to the purchase.” He said he was happy to do it.

A few years later, he used his second trust to buy a beach house on Martha’s Vineyard. James had gone to look at it on his own and loved it, so he transferred the trust money to her, vacated it completely, and made sure James was listed as a co-owner of the property, just like with the apartment.

They welcomed their first child in 2002, and their second and third children arrived in 2004 and 2007. Burden wrote that James was excited about each of them and took care of their pregnancies, but after their second child was born, he was promoted to president of the investment firm and began to step away from daily parenting duties.

Burden shares three children with her ex-husband. (Belle Burden/Instagram)

“We had made an unspoken bargain: he would always work, and I would always take care of the kids,” he explained. “Sometimes I would get angry about it, usually when I was stressed or one of the kids was sick or upset about something. But most of the time I loved her fierce dedication to her job.”

As her children grew older, she began taking on some pro bono immigration cases, but never returned to paid work. She received a job offer in 2012, but when James brought it up, she immediately rejected the offer, saying she needed to help the kids. At first, she recalled, she felt upset that he had not discussed the matter with her, but the feeling that the family “should have prioritized James’ career” quickly passed, believing he was right. He turned down the offer.

Over the years, Burden said, she and James discussed getting rid of the prenup “because it wasn’t fair anymore” to her: She had used their trust to buy their home, and while she was giving up hers to raise their children, James’s career was also flourishing.

They scheduled a meeting with their lawyers in July 2019 to do just that, but just before the meeting, James suggested they “put the pre-nup issue on the table” and focus on their own will, telling her he wanted to leave everything directly to her rather than in trust for their three children.

Less than a year later she discovered he was having an affair.

Belle Burden is the daughter of Carter Burden, a descendant of the Vanderbilt family and a well-known businessman in his own right, and Amanda Burden, a well-known urban planner. (Horst P. Horst/Conde Nast via Getty Images)

In 2020, as the family spent the first days of COVID-19 quarantine at their Martha’s Vineyard home, they received a voicemail from a man who claimed his wife was having an affair with James. When she confronted James, she confessed everything and the next morning told him she wanted a divorce.

He left home without saying goodbye to the children; Her then-17-year-old son was staying with friends on Long Island, but her 15- and 12-year-old daughters were sleeping while she left.

In a telephone conversation later that day, she said he told her, “I thought I was happy, but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t” and “I feel like a switch has flipped. I’m done.”

He also recalled telling her, “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want that. I don’t want any of it.”

James continued to pay the family’s bills and maintained that he did not want any formal custody of the children, as he believed they were old enough to decide when they wanted to see him.

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As part of her divorce proceedings, Burden noted just how much wealth her soon-to-be ex-husband had amassed over the years until January 2021, when she received documents detailing James’ earnings over the years. She also realized how the amended prenup she had sought against her lawyer’s advice had put her at a disadvantage.

He wrote: “James can now claim his ownership interest in both properties. He can walk away with their assets. Unhindered by me, he can become a partner in a hedge fund where his wealth will grow exponentially.”

Burden is also the grandson of New York socialite Babe Paley. (Getty Images)

His lawyer began preparing a counterclaim; He knew he had little luck with a marriage contract designed this way, but both he and his lawyer felt he had to try. Her stepmother, Susan, warned her that James might be “angry” over the countersuit, and Burden acknowledged that a divorce would be “easier, safer” and that trusting James “would be fair to me in the end.”

Still, she questioned why she should trust him, and admitted that she felt “an almost nihilistic desire to set fire to the remaining structures of my previous life, the security I clung to, the fiction that I could rely on anyone other than myself for protection, the idea that being silent was the only way to be good.”

Six months later, the judge dismissed the counterclaim and put the marriage contract into effect, then set a hearing date to resolve the issue of alimony and community property. Burden wrote that James did not bring up the countersuit in the months after he first filed it, but after it was rejected he was “outraged by it.”

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“He said he would only give me the minimum alimony required by law,” she claimed. “He said I had to face the consequences of my failed counterclaim and the prenup.”

Shortly thereafter, James’ lawyer wrote him a letter, assuming he would want to buy it because of his interest in their two houses. He couldn’t afford it, so he began to accept the idea that he would have to sell them both; That’s when things became “very dark,” he recalled.

He was struggling with the idea of ​​losing the home his children had known all their lives, what his family had left to him, and his own financial security.

“There was no reason for this, given James’s resources, his desire to shed his feathers, and his refusal to provide a home for the children,” he wrote. “I felt like he was playing a game or running a deal, a game he was going to win by a landslide no matter what it took, no matter the impact on me and our kids.”

Finally, an hour before the hearing was to begin, Burden and James reached a settlement of their own. He negotiated terms and she said he “needed to be calm, respectful and grateful” and that he would withdraw the offer entirely if she involved her lawyer or “forced him.”

Burden, seen here with his stepmother Susan and her ex-husband, managed to keep both homes he purchased with their trusts. (Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

He gave up his share of two properties they owned and agreed to provide alimony and pay the children’s medical expenses and school fees. In the meantime, he would keep all the money he earned throughout their marriage.

“I don’t know what ultimately led him to decide to sign,” Burden admitted. “I have a few guesses, but I’ll never know for sure. Maybe he always planned to solve this problem before the trial and give me the house and the apartment. But only after he brought me to my knees.”

He said he tried to let things go when he signed the deal and was mostly successful. These days she doesn’t think about money or the details of the separation, but there are some things about divorce that scare her.

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“There’s a possibility that there’s a timeline, a clock whose ticking I don’t hear,” he wrote. “It’s his wish to scare me while I’m already miserable, lying on the ground.”

“A few weeks after I left, he made it clear that he believed my contributions to his career and our family over twenty years had amounted to nothing.”