Margaret Ryznar, a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in trusts and estates, had a somewhat different view on the prenup. “Our modern idea of marriage is that it’s a partnership, and that would be reflected by dividing his earnings in the divorce,” Ryznar told me. “Presumably she enabled him to make those earnings by taking care of the home, taking care of the children, putting his career first,” whereas Davis had no role in generating Burden’s inheritance.
On the podcast “Lipstick on the Rim,” Burden remarked that she had “inherited wealth, shall we say, on both sides—it wasn’t a ton of money.” Her “primary assets,” she explains in “Strangers,” “were held in two trusts.” Burden used the funds in one of these trusts, “in their entirety,” she writes, to purchase the apartment in Tribeca. According to publicly available records, Burden bought the apartment for just under four million dollars, with a million-dollar mortgage, in 2002. “My last trust,” she writes, was put toward the Martha’s Vineyard house. The assets in this trust, she explains, “matched the purchase price exactly, minus a small mortgage.” She paid $5.4 million for the house; the “small mortgage” was, in fact, for three million dollars, according to publicly available records.
Burden returns to the matter of the two trusts often in interviews, usually stressing that they had held most of her assets and that she had drained them to buy the two properties. “I had emptied my trusts to purchase our homes,” she writes in the book. Despite the terms of the prenup, Burden decided to place Davis’s name alongside hers on both deeds. (“I thought that was what you did when you were married—share everything,” she writes.) As a result, when Burden and Davis split up, Davis had a fifty-per-cent stake in both homes, and, for a time in their divorce proceedings, he appeared ready to lay claim to his half of each.
The prospect of losing these homes is an integral plot point in “Strangers.” “I could not afford to buy James out of either home. I would have to sell both,” Burden writes. “My children were going to lose the house they loved, the center of our life as a family, and the apartment where they lived, in addition to managing the emotional toll of their father leaving. I was going to lose what my grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them too. I was going to lose my financial security.” This period—the weeks after the judge dismissed Burden’s counterclaim, when she felt herself slipping into financial quicksand—is the emotional nadir of “Strangers.” “I fell into a deep well of despair and shame,” she writes, adding, “It was the same paralysis I’d felt in the first weeks after James left, but it felt much darker.”
Burden’s interviewers have lingered over this episode as well. “You had to worry about your finances, about losing your home,” Summers said to Burden. “Walk me through how you found yourself in such a precarious financial position.” The podcaster Haley Sacks, of “Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones,” told her audience that “Belle was forced to confront the most terrifying financial reality. . . . She was standing on a trap door with basically no cord to pull.”
During Burden’s “Lipstick on the Rim” appearance, one of the hosts, Molly Sims, explained that, at the time of the divorce, Burden had “no income coming in for her family, and she has to give up half of both homes, and if you don’t pay off the other, they’re gonna make you sell.”
“Yes, exactly,” Burden replied. “And then he had amassed a fortune but it was in his name alone.”
“And he gave you none of that,” Sims said.
“I—no, he gave me none of that. He gives me child support, but I have nothing from that.”
“After twenty years,” Sims said, “he gave you nothing.”
It’s evident from the book, however, that Burden did have her own income, because she affirms that she and Davis shared expenses, as agreed to in their prenup. She also maintained a separate American Express account for purchases that she did not want Davis—whom she portrays as controlling and selectively thrifty—to see. Documents filed in the divorce show that, in 2019, Burden reported an income of a little over eight hundred thousand dollars, including a hundred and ninety thousand dollars from the sale of her mother’s house in the Catskills. (A spokesperson for Burden said that her income that year was atypically high. Davis made well into the seven figures in 2019.)
