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Cassandra had built the kind of life many women are told to want.
She had a sprawling multimillion-dollar home along the “gold coast” of Connecticut, a manicured lawn, fancy cars and a country club membership, and sent her children to private schools. But when the marriage to her high-earning husband cracked, so did the illusion that their wealth was a good thing.
Instead, it was weaponized against her.
“How could a person like me end up homeless?” she asked. “But that’s exactly what happened. I even ended up on Medicaid and food stamps.”
As tensions escalated in their marriage, police arrested Cassandra’s husband for a domestic incident. But then, she said, he turned the tables against her in their divorce, using a high-powered attorney to file endless motions, including one for custody of their kids. As her legal bills climbed into the hundreds of thousands, Cassandra moved to increasingly smaller apartments, finally ending up on a friend’s couch. Her ex kept their kids after a visit and she didn’t have the hundreds of thousands of dollars it might take to launch a legal custody battle to get them back. That is the brutal math of some wealthy divorces: the spouse with deeper pockets can outspend the other into losing not only a home, but sometimes even access to their own children.
As a divorce coach, I first met Cassandra when she came to me desperate for help. “I haven’t spoken to my children in almost a decade and it’s been devastating,” she told me. “People don’t realize that your wealthy spouse can manipulate divorce court. Plus, my ex told my kids he would take them to Europe and Aspen, and pay for their college, but I had nothing to offer.”
Cassandra, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, is not the exception to high-net-worth dissolutions. She represents the darker side of them. That is what makes Belle Burden’s divorce memoir Strangers so fascinating: it captures the emotional devastation of marital abandonment, but also illustrates how differently wealth can play out once a marriage implodes – even if both parties are independently wealthy, as was the case with Burden, an heiress in her own right.
If you think money makes breakups easier, think again.
Burden had been married for 20 years and had sidelined her own career to raise their children while her husband pursued a career in hedge funds. Together, they maintained luxurious homes in Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard, partly financed through her family’s trusts. Yet before her marriage, she had signed a prenuptial agreement that her lawyer warned against, one that allowed her husband to claim an interest in major assets and limited what she could seek in a divorce.
Burden wrote that, at first, her husband seemed eager simply to leave: “He said, ‘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.’” But he later changed his mind. As negotiations between their attorneys dragged on, Burden feared she could lose both properties. In the end, however, a last-minute settlement allowed her to keep them.
“The more money that’s involved, the more difficult the issues are and the more opportunity for people to use their money, their contacts and their attorney to bludgeon the other side into submission,” said Ronald Bavero, a retired New York divorce lawyer who’s seen it all – including one case where the couple racked up $4m in legal bills.
“It’s absolutely like a war zone,” said Bavero, who practiced for nearly 40 years and wrote An Elephant Doesn’t Marry a Giraffe – Everything I Learned as a Divorce Attorney. “I’ve seen people go into bankruptcy in an attempt to keep up with legal fees and, while I can’t prove [causality], I’ve seen the most bitter cases result in some becoming ill with catastrophic illnesses.”
Bavero said statistically it’s usually the husband using money and wealth to strong-arm the other side into settlement, sometimes instigating a custody battle that sends attorney bills skyrocketing. In a few cases where the wife was the breadwinner, he has seen the reverse.
“It is buyer beware since a significant number of marriages fail,” said Dori-Ellen Feltman, a family law attorney in Westport, Connecticut. “Some women can enjoy a comfortable, even luxurious, lifestyle as a traditional wife, and when you’re in your 30s you don’t even think about the economic imbalance or the possibility of divorce. When things are good, it’s great – but you need to plan for what happens when it isn’t.”
Many of my clients, mainly women and a few men, are affluent and navigating nightmare scenarios. Sometimes one partner has a “scorched-earth” approach and tries to exhaust and defeat their opponent through emergency filings, custody threats, refusal to produce financial documents, false allegations, endless discovery or weaponizing experts. Coercive-controlling spouses often view the divorce process as the next arena to exercise dominance – and they play to win.
So how can one prepare for the long fight ahead?
When a split may be on the horizon, it’s crucial to prepare in silence, gathering key documents and information before it disappears. If a partner prevents another from accessing joint money, that’s financial abuse – and must be addressed legally.
Counterintuitively, “shark attorneys” can perpetuate litigation and drive up costs. A forensic accountant may be needed to track down hidden money or verify income estimates. Each party needs a support team – a therapist, a coach, a financial professional and an attorney – who understand the power imbalance, complicated assets and type of personalities involved. Wealthy, high-conflict personalities can try to wear the opposite side down so they settle for less of the resources, support or custody.
After all I’ve seen, I am convinced that prevention is the best strategy. That means that for the sake of the most vulnerable party – often women – a prenup, or a post-nup when they decide to be a stay-at-home mom, is essential to safeguard wealth in their own name. These agreements can’t address custody, however.
Ultimately, Burden’s book is powerful because it reveals how easily comfort can be confused with security. She wrote: “I could no longer convince myself that he was taking care of me. And I could see that the cost for feeling safe was being controlled. They were two sides of the same coin – protection and control.”
At a recent signing at Bedford Books in tony Bedford, New York, known for its celebrity country estates, women lined up to meet Burden and snap a photo with her. “I hope she makes all women look at marriage differently,” one told me.
I do too. Because if Burden’s story does anything, I hope it wakes women up before divorce does.
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