From the beginning, Belle Burden’s memoir, Strangers, was the stuff that middle-aged female nightmares are made of. A high-flying woman who had it all—beauty, money, three gorgeous children, and a 20-year marriage to the love of her life—cruelly abandoned with neither warning nor fanfare by the husband she thought she would be with forever. He was cheating; she had no idea. She didn’t even know he was unhappy.
Burden first told her story in a viral New York Times Modern Love essay in 2023; the book-length version, released this year, has been a massive bestseller. No surprise there: Burden, a willowy blonde with a socialite’s pedigree, makes for a compelling cautionary tale about how even the most accomplished and desirable woman can fall victim to a financially abusive adulterer, trapped in a life built on lies. I listened to the audiobook a few months ago and found it riveting, even as I wondered what might be missing from the narrative—if only because when it comes to a memoir of marriage as experienced by one of the spouses, something always is.
Now the answer to that question has arrived, but not, as one might have expected, in the form of a competing tell-all by Burden’s now ex-husband Henry P. Davis. Instead, we got a New Yorker investigation into Burden’s divorce documents that shed light on the financial aspect of her story, revealing that its shocking account of a woman driven to the edge of ruin by her conniving, greedy spouse was, in reality, a great deal more complicated.
The controversy centers largely on two properties purchased by Burden for her family during her marriage: a multimillion-dollar apartment in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood, and a house on a lake on Martha’s Vineyard. (Slumming it, they were not.) In her book, Burden claims that the money for these homes came from two trusts left to her by her parents and grandparents, which she liquidated in their entirety. She also described listing her husband on the deeds out of a naive desire to demonstrate her love and commitment—which he then cruelly leveraged in the divorce, laying claim to his stake in the properties in full knowledge that his wife could not afford to buy him out. It’s only an hour before their trial, having dragged Burden right up to the precipice of humiliating ruin and dangled her over the edge, that her husband suddenly and inexplicably concedes his share in the properties.
The New Yorker’s reporting uncovered multiple discrepancies between this account and reality, including that what Burden described as a “trial” was actually a much lower-stakes proceeding called a “status conference”; no actual trial date had been set. The bigger revelation however was that despite depicting her financial state as dangerously precarious, Burden reported an $800,000 income the year before her divorce—as well as assets in excess of $10 million over which her husband had no claim.
