Society heiress reveals heartbreaking impact of her divorce on daughter, 12, after ex-husband’s ice-cold move

Socialite heiress Flobelle ‘Belle’ Fairbanks Burden was once enjoying the perfect life with her multimillionaire husband and three children.

That was until her husband, financier Henry Davis, announced that he was having an affair with a younger woman and left her.

In the acrimonious months that followed their shock split, Davis made a glacial move to completely distance herself from her children’s lives.

The 60-year-old multimillionaire bought a two-bedroom apartment in New York; This house was too small to accommodate their three children.

Burden, an old-money New York lawyer from the Vanderbilt dynasty, said it deeply affected their youngest daughter, who is 12 and longs for her own room in her new home.

“She was sending him links to Pottery Barn,” Burden, 56, said on a recent show. Lipstick on the Rim podcast.

But Davis said she insisted that “that phase of her life,” which included parenting a child and taking care of homework and dinners, was over.

‘This was the hardest and most enduring part of the job,’ Burden said.

Adding insult to injury, Davis also converted the spare bedroom into a home office.

Burden explained that her two children were not immediately affected by the separation, but her 12-year-old did miss a room in Davis’ new apartment in New York.

Socialite heiress Burden and her husband of 20 years, 60-year-old Henry Davis, abruptly separated after he revealed he was having an affair with a younger woman.

While the podcast hosts were stunned, Burden reassured them that the move ‘wasn’t a situation where he moved across the country and had a whole new family.’

‘He lives a few blocks from us. He continues his communication with the children. “He’s so kind and sweet to them,” the heiress said.

‘But he made it very clear that he wasn’t going to do day jobs, apply to university and things like that. “And it really was like a switch turning off,” he added.

Burden had previously written in his memoirs that Davis had long been “career-oriented” and devoted herself to raising her children.

While he didn’t take on most of the parenting duties himself, he said the financier stayed involved and took the kids on outings regularly.

But soon after the split, she wrote, Davis told her: ‘You can have the house and the apartment. You can get custody of the children. I don’t want this. ‘I don’t want any of it.’

Assuming it was a mistake, she asked her lawyer to draft a 50-50 custody agreement, but Davis returned it, taking away her time and holidays, according to Burden.

‘Only included dinner on Thursday nights,’ he wrote.

The burden of daughter Georgia Davis, who celebrated her 21st birthday last month

The 56-year-old man lives with his son Finn in his $4.7 million Martha’s Vineyard vacation home

Burden unboxes new memoir detailing how her husband’s secret affair was uncovered

When Davis got out, he allowed Burden to keep both his NYC apartments and his Martha’s Vineyard mansion (file photo of the latter area)

Burden argued that she believed her ex-husband thought he was being “selfless” by not formalizing custody and that the children were old enough to choose when to see him.

Lipstick on the Rim podcast host Molly Sims asked how the heiress’s children were coping with the turmoil and said they were doing “wonderfully.”

‘They’re great because they love him and they protect him and they’re actually very good about reaching out to him now to do things that are comfortable for him like going to a hockey game or something like that,’ she said.

‘I think the biggest challenge for me as a mother is to accept their reality, to say, ‘This is what is happening, this is unusual, you’re not living with your father.’

‘So I would say to my 12-year-old: ‘Your father, I don’t know why, but he can’t provide you with a home right now. This has something to do with it, and it’s not you.”