Vanderbilt heiress Belle Burden nearly lost everything in her divorce, and she now says she feels it’s because her ex-husband simply wanted to “win” their split.
Burden, a former corporate lawyer turned author, wrote extensively about the breakdown of her marriage to hedge fund executive Henry Davis in her memoir, “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” and in a new conversation with Billy Bush, she admitted just how far Davis went to emerge triumphant from their divorce.
“I think that sometimes, or often in divorce, it becomes like a desire to win,” she told Bush during a recent episode of his “Hot Mics” podcast. “And I think he wanted to win this, which is to leave with the most money possible.”
As Burden explained in her book, she quit working relatively early in her marriage to take care of the three children she had with Davis. She also used her trust funds to purchase their homes — a large apartment in New York City as well as a vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard.
She put Davis’ name on the homes when she purchased them, and before the wedding, she agreed to a change he fought for in the prenup that meant that, in case of divorce, anything they owned in both their names would be split evenly while anything they owned separately, like his bank accounts, wouldn’t be divided.
“I think he knew that I cared about my homes so much, and keeping these places intact and that the threat of losing them made me willing to… you know, I was in a position where I had to give up pretty much everything else,” she told Bush.
She added that she didn’t know if he felt any “peer pressure” or guilt about potentially making her have to sell the homes — she’d emptied both of her trust funds to purchase them, and since she focused on raising their children while he built his highly successful career in finance, she couldn’t afford to buy him out — but she said she’s “really relieved that I could have that stability.”
“I had to really kind of thread the needle to get myself there,” she admitted.
Burden’s decision to share the story of her acrimonious divorce began with an essay she wrote for The New York Times’ Modern Love column, titled “Was I Married to a Stranger?” There, she detailed what happened: in March 2020, she and Davis, as well as their two youngest children, were quarantining in their Martha’s Vineyard home when she got a call from a man who told her that his wife was having an affair with her husband.
When she confronted Davis, he was apologetic at first, but by the next morning, he’d turned into a man she said she didn’t recognize. He told her he wanted a divorce, and he left.
“Something broke in me,” she recalled him telling her at one point in “Strangers.” “It was me and not you, you did nothing wrong.”
In addition to walking away from the marriage, Davis also walked away from their children. When he got a place of his own, it was a two-bedroom apartment. He kept one bedroom for himself and turned the other into a home office.
She told Bush that she doesn’t think he ever felt any regret for his decisions, saying, “I think he just went from being a husband and father to being something else, and he was not going to look back and feel sad about it.”
In multiple interviews, as well as in “Strangers,” Burden explained that Davis felt like “a switch flipped” in him. But one throughline she’s always presented was his apparent desire to maintain his wealth.
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In a recent episode of the “Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones” podcast, she admitted that she gave up financial control to Davis in their marriage, and that she didn’t realize until the divorce proceedings that he’d amassed “at least eight figures of wealth” over the years.
Davis, Burden said, grew up in a family that struggled with money, and “he was pretty much programmed from long before the time he met me to really protect himself financially.” She added, “I think that when he earned money, like when he got a bonus, there was no part of him that was ever going to put it into a joint name.”
She regularly met with a financial advisor to go over her credit card bills, because he stressed the importance of being careful with money. She wrote in her memoir that she put purchases like birthday presents for the children and clothes for herself on her personal credit card that he didn’t monitor, and her family paid school tuition and made college funds for the kids, while he spent money on things like “a dozen rare Rolex watches, several motorcycles, rare coins, custom suits from Zegna, a small vintage boat that had been used in ‘Live and Let Die,’ and expensive red wine, hundreds of bottles.”
Throughout their marriage, as he continued getting more successful, she said they spoke about changing the prenup because 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 Davis 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. She was “touched,” and agreed.
Less than a year later, she learned of his affair. In 2021, in the thick of their divorce proceedings, she received the documents that showed her just how much money Davis had made throughout their marriage — money that, thanks to the tweak to their prenup he insisted on, she had no claim to.
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 Davis might get “angry” over the counterclaim, and Burden wrote that “it would be easier, safer” to let the divorce play out and to trust he “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.”
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. Davis, 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.”
“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, Davis’ lawyer wrote her a letter, assuming that she’d want to buy Davis 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.
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“There was no reason for it, given [Davis’] 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 in October 2021, Burden and Davis 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.”
