Belle Burden was born into a life of wealth and luxury, but after a painful divorce brought on by her husband’s affair, she learned just how quickly that security could be taken away.
In her new memoir, “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” Burden writes in detail about the prenup her lawyer advised against, how her former husband threatened to only give her the bare minimum in child support after giving up custody of their children and how she managed to navigate the painful ordeal while adjusting to her new normal.
As the daughter of Carter Burden, a descendant of the Vanderbilts who built his own broadcasting company, and Amanda Burden, an urban planner who was the daughter of socialite Babe Paley, Belle was independently wealthy when she met Henry Davis, the man she would marry.
Davis, who Burden refers to in her book as “James,” wasn’t in a similar position. He was a lawyer at the time, as was Burden, and his family did have money when he was growing up, but, she wrote, “At some point in the 1970s, his father had a breakdown, was laid off, and stopped working.”
His parents used savings to cover costs, and when he was in law school, they divorced, and he learned there was no money left. Burden said there was one part of the story she never heard fully about his father abandoning the family for a time, “maybe after an affair,” before coming back for a number of years before his mother filed for divorce.
While she could never figure out the details, she said the matter of his father and the family’s financial struggles stuck with him.
“He told me how much he wanted to be a husband and father,” Burden said. “He told me how much he wanted an honorable life.”
Three months after their first kiss, he proposed, and, during their engagement, they rented an apartment together and split costs equally. A few months before their 1999 wedding, Burden’s mother reminded her she needed to get a prenup written up, something both she and her brother had contractually agreed to in their early 20s.
“All of my assets were in trust, entirely protected in case of divorce, whether we had a prenup or not. I didn’t think I needed it. But I had committed to having one,” she wrote.
In the original draft her family lawyer sent, she and James would each keep the assets they brought into the marriage but would split everything earned during the course of the marriage in case of divorce. She recalled James being “upset” by the idea, telling her it made him feel “like an outsider, a threat,” and she felt guilty for asking him to sign it.
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Just weeks before the wedding, the pressure to sign the prenup increased, and James suggested to her that they tweak the agreement so that anything earned during the marriage would not be split if they divorced, but that anything in both of their names would. With him at her side, she called her lawyer, Tom.
“Tom told me it was a bad idea; it was standard to share in what was earned during a marriage, both by James and by me,” she wrote. She insisted on doing it James’ way, and finally Tom agreed. She never told her family about the change to the standard prenuptial agreement, worried they would “intervene.”
In 2001, they bought a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, something that was “much bigger” than she thought they needed, but that James loved. She emptied one of her two trusts to purchase it and listed James as a joint owner, “even though he had not contributed to the purchase.” She said she was happy to do it.
A few years later, she used her second trust to purchase a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard. James had gone to look at it alone, and he’d loved it, so she wired him the funds from the trust, emptying it completely, and, as with the apartment, she made sure James was listed as a joint owner of the property.
In 2002, they welcomed their first child, with their second and third coming in 2004 and 2007. Burden wrote that James was excited about each and involved with her pregnancies, but after their second child was born, he was promoted to president at his investment firm and began pulling away from daily parenting duties.
“We had made an unspoken bargain: he would work all the time and I would take care of the kids all the time,” she explained. “I resented this sometimes, usually when I was stressed, when one of the kids was sick, or when they were melting down over something. But most of the time, I liked his fervent commitment to his work.”
As her children got older, she began taking on some pro bono immigration cases but never went back to paid work. She did receive a job offer in 2012, but James dismissed it immediately when she brought it up, telling her she needed to be available for the kids. At first, she recalled being upset that he didn’t even discuss it with her, but the feeling passed quickly, believing he was right, that the family “needed to prioritize James’ career.” She turned down the offer.
Burden said, as the years went by, she and James discussed getting rid of their prenup “since it was no longer fair” to her. She’d used her trusts to purchase their homes, and his career had flourished while she gave hers up to raise their children.
In July 2019, they had a meeting scheduled with their lawyer to do just that, but James suggested just before the meeting that they “table” the prenup issue and focus on their wills, telling her that he wanted to leave everything to her directly instead of in trusts for their three children.
Less than a year later, she discovered he was having an affair.
It was in 2020, when the family was spending the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in their Martha’s Vineyard home, that she received a voicemail from a man who claimed his wife was having an affair with James. When she confronted James, he admitted everything, and the next morning, he told her he wanted a divorce.
He left the home without saying goodbye to the children. Her son, who was 17 at the time, was staying on Long Island with friends, but their daughters, who were 15 and 12, were sleeping when he left.
In a phone 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.”
She also recalled him telling her, “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”
James continued paying the family’s bills, and he maintained that he didn’t want any official custody of the children, believing they were old enough to decide when they wanted to see him.
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It wasn’t until January 2021, when, as part of the divorce proceedings, Burden received documents detailing James’ earnings over the years, that she realized just how much wealth her soon-to-be ex-husband had accrued over the years. She also realized how their altered prenup, the one she wanted against her lawyer’s advice, put her at a disadvantage.
She wrote, “Now James could claim his ownership stake in both properties. He could walk away with his assets. He could become a partner at a hedge fund, where his wealth would increase exponentially, unencumbered by me.”
Her lawyer began preparing a counterclaim. She knew she didn’t have much of a shot with the prenup designed the way it was, but she and her lawyer both felt she had to try. Her stepmother, Susan, warned her that James might get “angry” over the counterclaim, and Burden admitted that “it would be easier, safer” to let the divorce play out and to trust James “would be fair to me in the end.”
Still, she questioned why she should trust him and admitted to feeling “an almost nihilistic desire to set flame to the remaining structures of my former life, to the very safety I clung to, to the fiction that I could depend on anyone other than myself for protection, to the idea that being quiet was the only way to be good.”
Six months later, a judge dismissed the counterclaim and enforced the prenup, then set a trial date to resolve the issue of child support and their joint property. James, Burden wrote, hadn’t brought up her counterclaim in the months after she initially filed it, but after it was dismissed, he was “inflamed by it.”
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“He said he would give me only the minimum child support required by law,” she claimed. “He said I would have to face the consequences of the prenup, of my failed counterclaim.”
Soon after, James’ lawyer wrote her a letter, assuming that she’d want to buy James out of his interest in their two homes. She couldn’t afford that, so she began coming to terms with the idea that she’d have to sell both. It was then, she recalled, that things became “very dark.”
She grappled with the idea of her children losing the homes they’d known all their lives and with losing what her family had left to her, as well as her own financial security.
“There was no reason for it, given James’s resources, given his desire to shed, given his refusal to make a home for the kids,” she wrote. “It felt like he was playing a game, or running a deal, one he was going to win at all costs, by a wide margin, regardless of the impact on me and our children.”
In the end, an hour before their trial was to begin, Burden and James reached a settlement on their own. He negotiated the terms, and she said that she “had to be calm, deferential, grateful,” and that if she got her lawyer involved or “pushed him,” he would withdraw the offer altogether.
He gave up his interest in the two properties they owned and agreed to child support and to pay the children’s medical expenses and school tuition. Meanwhile, he’d keep all the money he’d earned throughout their marriage.
“I don’t know what finally made him decide to settle,” Burden admitted. “I have several guesses, but I will never know for sure. Maybe he always planned to resolve it before trial, to give me the house and the apartment. But only after he brought me to my knees.”
She said when she signed the agreement, she tried to let everything go and that she’s been mostly successful. These days, she doesn’t think about the money or the details of the split, but there are some things about the divorce that chill her.
“It is the possibility that there was a timetable, a clock I didn’t hear ticking,” she wrote. “It is his willingness to make me afraid when I was already devastated, already on the floor.
“It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family, over twenty years, amounted to nothing.”
