Wealth Derangement Syndrome Comes For Belle Burden

In The New Yorker, an argument of insidious intent against Belle's memoir

Belle Burden is the author of the best-selling memoir Strangers about her husband’s sudden and brutal abandonment of her and their children after twenty plus years of what Belle thought was a happy marriage. ¹

Belle was born into a prominent family that had been wealthy for many generations. Part of the book’s appeal is an authentic look inside that world.

The greater appeal, however, is Belle’s effort to come to grips with her self-blame, as in how could I have been so stupid and careless to miss all the signs? And how could I have squandered my financial security?

Strangers debuted in January. I read it that month and admired Belle’s authentic voice. As well, I could relate to Belle’s being born into generational wealth. I wrote a post about the book, focusing on the very relatable torture of hindsight bias.²

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker published an attempted “gotcha” article by Jessica Winter on Belle’s book.³

Winter obtained some of the sealed legal documents⁴ surrounding Belle’s divorce and concludes that Belle misled her readers when she claimed to have felt financial precarity.

To bolster her accusation, Winter uses selective items from the court documents without sufficient context. The most pertinent example is Belle’s listing in a 1999 document of her interests in various trusts totaling $63 million, the majority of which was and is highly contingent. Winter does not sufficiently caveat the $63 million number, a sum that she must have known would stick in her readers’ minds. More on this later.

Winter also uses excerpts from Belle’s various post-publication interviews to “catch” Belle in exaggerating her financial desperation. But in those excerpts Winter mostly quotes Belle’s interviewers, not Belle. ⁵

There’s a clear thru-line of disdain in Winter’s article for Belle and for Belle’s distress over her finances. But since this is an article in The New Yorker, there are enough equivocations for plausible deniability. ⁶

Toward the end of her article, Winter throws in a quote from acclaimed memoirist Mary Karr about memoir being “not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.”

I’m unsure if Winter is condemning or excusing Belle for writing a “corrupt memoir,” but either way she’s hiding behind Mary Karr’s quote to insinuate that Belle’s memoir is corrupt.

Then there are the last lines of Winter’s article:

“[Belle’s] long-term financial security, as opposed to her emotional security, was never at risk. It might be difficult for anyone in her position to separate one from the other.”

When Winter refers to “[Belle’s] position,” does she mean her generational wealth, her distress over her divorce, or the combination of the two? Is Winter suggesting that Belle as a wealthy person could not separate her anguish over her husband’s betrayal from her financial fears?

Winter’s ending is the type of writing that seems clever; but its very cleverness obscures its clarity.

Correcting the record

Belle Burden does not need me to defend her from her critics. Her book speaks for itself and so does its phenomenal and deserved popularity.

That said, Winter, as well as writers in other publications that are less equivocal and less editorially careful (more on them later), seem to lack an understanding that money matters can be emotionally painful even to those with generational wealth. They also do not seem to understand how to write about someone’s contingent interest in a trust.

Since I understand both these issues, I feel compelled to correct the record.

Fear of squandering

Those of us born with tremendous privilege feel some measure of guilt. We know some people will resent us for it, although we had no agency in choosing our parents. We also feel that whatever we may accomplish in life has an asterisk attached to it.

We’ve had advantages that few have had and it’s impossible to separate ourselves from those advantages. It’s who we are.

But the biggest fear is to squander our advantages and in doing so disrespect the people who gave them to us. We fear that those alive and somehow even those who are dead will be bitterly disappointed in us if we waste their gifts.

As an inheritor, I’ve wrestled with all these feelings and know them quite well. You know them well too if you’ve been reading my essays for some time!

Belle felt she had squandered

In Strangers, Belle indicts herself severely for failing to protect her fortune from her husband. She had signed a prenup against her lawyer’s advice. It held that she had no rights to her husband’s earnings.

After they were married, she exhausted the two trusts she had access to in order to buy their two homes. Even though she’d paid 100% of the cost, she shared ownership of the two homes with her husband 50/50.

Belle entrusted her husband to handle their financial affairs. So, when the divorce came, her ignorance exacerbated her uncertainty, distress, and fear about what would happen to her and her children financially.

As the divorce proceedings unfolded and her husband played “hardball,” Belle realized she did not have the money to buy out her husband’s 50% share in their homes. She’d have to sell both.

She “fell into a deep well of despair and shame.”

She writes:

“I was going to lose what my grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them…I was going to lose my financial security.”

From the POV of people unfamiliar with the built-in fears of generational wealth-holders, Belle’s comment about losing her financial security will seem odd. No matter what, she was going to net many millions of dollars from her 50% share in the two homes. ⁷

But everything is relative, and so a sudden negative change in fortune, or just the threat of one, can seem like a financial earthquake. Even to someone very wealthy.

My mother as a case study

Like Belle Burden, my mother never had a good handle on her own finances. They were overseen by her father or her husband (my dad). Large sums in the millions were ethereal to my mother. She could only relate to smaller, everyday sums.

In late 2008, when oil prices plunged, my mother was told by our wealth management firm that her income from her oil and gas interests would also plunge. My mother objectively had nothing to worry about financially as she had many other assets and no debt. Yet she gathered up her jewelry, intending to sell it for a pittance to a store on Madison Avenue.

I tried to reassure my mother about her finances and convince her not to go through with the sale. I knew she was getting ripped off, and that the money she’d receive was not going to make a difference to her. ⁸

She didn’t care. If her oil and gas income could suddenly be disrupted, how could she depend on her other assets? The money from the jewelry was real to her. So was her panic.

My mother’s feelings were similar to Belle Burden’s who writes of her own financial panic:

“But my fear had made me myopic again, only able to see what I would lose.”

Show me the person who has always acted with perfect rationality about their financial situation, and who, having reached a certain level of financial security and a certain standard of living, has never feared a status decline. You can’t, and Jessica Winter of The New Yorker can’t, because that person does not exist.

Belle’s trust

In 1996, Belle’s father Carter died. The great shock of his death at age 54 was followed by the shock of discovering that his estate had $40 million of debt collateralized by all his assets. As Belle describes it, her father spent money like “he had an endless supply,” and so her father and her stepmother were living “a life on the edge of potential ruin.” If their debts were called in, they’d lose everything.

In her article, Jessica Winter does not mention the perilous state of Belle’s father’s financial situation at the time of his death in 1996. Instead, Winter makes a huge deal of Belle’s disclosure a few years later, in 1999, of her interest in a trust that her father set up for the lifetime benefit of her stepmother.

Winter reports that in 1999 the value of Belle’s share of that trust was listed as $45 million, the majority of her “net worth” of $63 million in 1999. There’s not much that’s clear about this trust. We don’t know what the assets were in 1999, how they were valued, or how they related to her father Carter Burden’s finances at the time. We also don’t know what’s in the trust today, 25 years later. ⁹

In fact, in 2019, Belle’s lawyer told Belle that her stepmother “could no longer pay the kids’ school tuition; her assets were too depleted.”

That’s a quote from Strangers.

It seems likely that the stepmother’s depleted assets would include the trust. That seems like a crucial piece of information in assessing the current value of a trust valued at $45 million twenty years earlier. But Winter omits this from her article.

Winter admits that the trust “was, and remains, inaccessible to Burden” and that Belle will only have access to her share of the trust after her stepmother dies. We don’t know the terms governing Belle’s future access to the trust, what’s in it today, or whether the terms of the trust can be changed.

Nor should it be any of our business.

It seems irresponsible for Winter to highlight the 1999 listing of Belle’s share in the trust as a key item proving that Belle misrepresented her financial situation at the time of her divorce in 2022. Or as proof that Belle exaggerated her feelings of distress over her finances at that time.

The Belle-bashing bandwagon

After Winter’s article appeared, other writers for publications like the Washington Post seized the opportunity to jump on the Belle-bashing bandwagon, further distorting the $63 million number used by Winter. ¹⁰

I came across quite a few writers on Substack doing exactly that, including Kat Rosenfield, writing for The Free Press. Her first article about Strangers was titled Belle Burden’s Fans Don’t Care If She Lied.

If Jessica Winter’s weapon was an icepick, then Kat Rosenfield happily wielded a hatchet.

When I challenged Kat about whether Belle had a $63 million net worth as Kat claimed, Kat responded by saying that she was “just reporting the news!” as if The New Yorker article was dispositive. My full exchange with Kat is in the footnote. ¹¹

It’s like the children’s game of telephone. The New Yorker publishes a long and insidiously critical piece on Strangers with much of the information sourced from sealed documents that may have been selectively used to make an anti-Belle case. Then, less prominent publications quote selectively from and distort what The New Yorker published to make foolish assertions. Then, some readers of these less prominent publications end up thinking that Belle is a rich, lying grifter.

Wealth Derangement Syndrome

I wrote a post in April 2025 called Wealth Derangement Syndrome, available below, in which I noted how convenient and widespread it is to think that anyone who is wealthy must be awful. To have Wealth Derangement Syndrome is to judge someone’s character solely by the quantity of their bank account.

This syndrome is glaringly apparent in modern storytelling about the wealthy. Rich people must be portrayed with one or more of the following tropes: wicked, miserable in their marriages, awful parents, or shamefully outlandish spenders.

I’m still searching for modern exceptions in the fictional realm. In most non-fiction stories the wealthy are usually portrayed negatively. Sometimes that’s deserved because it’s based on their behavior; sometimes it’s undeserved because they’re targeted and criticized only because they’re rich.

Such is the case with The New Yorker’s deceptive article about Belle Burden and her memoir. Jessica Winter’s attempted takedown is squarely, and sadly, part of Wealth Derangement Syndrome, which has entered the current mainstream of our culture.

Belle Burden was born rich and now she continues to be rich. What right does she have to complain about anything? She’s not a person. She’s a rich person.

Question for the comments: Hating on the rich seems to me to be an ineffective, if not self-defeating, strategy for addressing the problem of extreme inequality. What say you?

1. Strangers by Belle Burden.

2.

3. What’s Missing from Belle Burden’s Strangers: One of the biggest books of the year weaves a tale of financial peril—but a review of court documents complicates the narrative.

Jessica Winter; The New Yorker; May 23, 2026.

Likely paywalled.

4. Winter obtained

“Court documents pertaining to Burden’s marriage and divorce, including her prenuptial agreement and her divorce settlement…”

I tried to obtain the documents but I was told by a legal firm specializing in legal document retrieval that in New York State, divorce documents are strictly sealed and are only available to the divorcing parties or their attorneys.

So, it seems likely that the documents Winter obtained were selected and given to her either by Belle’s ex-husband Henry Davis or his attorneys or someone friendly to Davis. Or perhaps Winter had some other way of accessing the sealed documents that’s beyond my imagination.

5. An example from Winter’s article of how Winter uses the words, not of Belle, but of an interviewer of Belle, to insinuate that Belle was overstating her financial precarity:

“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’.”

6. For example, Winter acknowledges that Strangers

“is a poignant account of how the end of a relationship can cast everything that came before it into shadow and uncertainty.”

7. As it turned out, Belle’s husband eventually relented from playing “hardball,” and behaved properly to Belle in a financial sense. He gave up his share of their two homes and provided support commensurate with his means and Belle’s previous lifestyle.

8. I ended up buying the jewelry so that it would at least stay in the family.

9. I believe the difference between the $63 million and $45 million numbers was mostly Belle’s interests in other trusts, including the two she exhausted to buy the two family homes.

10. The Washington Post; June 5th Clare McHugh; Her hit divorce memoir wasn't entirely truthful. Maybe it doesn’t matter. “[Belle’s] wealth totals over $60 million.” Note the present tense.

11. The exchange below was in response to Kat’s second article about Belle Burden which, among other things she repeats the canard of a $63 million net worth and calls Strangers “slop.”

From Kat’s article:

“I’ll just say that most of us, when told to imagine a woman on the precipice of financial ruin, do not picture an heiress with a six-figure income and a $63 million net worth.”

David in response to Kat : She did NOT have a net worth of $63 mm. That’s like saying each of my three kids have a net worth that includes one-third of all my wife and my assets, ignoring when we might die and ignoring estate taxes. And all the while not knowing the details of trusts, which can be very funky. You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

Kat in response to David: Per the New Yorker, at the time of her marriage, “Burden’s disclosure... tallied her ‘Total Financial Assets and Interests in Trusts’ at approximately sixty-three million dollars.” I suggest you take your quibble up with them, I’m just reporting the news!

David: No, you and the New Yorker writer are taking “Interests in Trusts” as equivalent to readily available money and it clearly is not since her access to it depends on someone’s death and after that we don’t know what restrictions there may be. It’s bad reporting all around, Kat.

Kat did not provide a further response.