The Left’s New Rule About Human Suffering

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Do people who are really, ridiculously rich deserve our sympathy?

Radical progressives think the answer is no if the murder victim is a healthcare CEO. Certain mainstream journalists believe the same about at least one millionaire socialite who owns keys to a private beach on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. 

In case you haven’t seen it, the latest “author telling lies” controversy revolves around Belle Burden, a New York City heiress who wrote a memoir detailing the breakup of her marriage. 

“Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” started out as a Modern Love column and eventually was turned into a full-length memoir that went viral. Book clubs and avid readers were drawn by the schadenfreude of a rich, beautiful woman being abandoned by her husband of two decades for reasons that are still frustratingly unclear. 

Yes, he had an affair and got caught. As Burden’s memoir explained, her husband “James” (really hedge fund executive Henry Davis) calmly explained to her in the aftermath of getting caught that rather than trying counseling or finding a path back to trust, he was unhappy with the marriage and wanted out. 

The book was highly praised until it wasn’t. The New Yorker published an exposé at the end of May titled “What’s Missing From Belle Burden’s ‘Strangers,’” laying bare some of the details the author reportedly fudged about her financial situation. 

While Burden expressed alarm at the prospect of losing multiple properties after blindly trusting her husband and adding his name to the deeds without protecting the generational wealth her family had built, the publication noted with disdain that Burden would have remained super rich no matter what. Journalist Jessica Winter accused the socialite of overexaggerating the severity of the situation and, crucially, of not being anywhere near poor enough post-divorce. 

“No reasonable person would demand that she provide a forensic accounting of her finances in the memoir. Yet its impression of candor may suffer in light of what Burden leaves out of the narrative,” Winter wrote. She later concluded, “[Burden’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.”

The fine details of Burden’s tax returns aren’t even the point here. What’s very revealing is how quickly the online discourse changed from sympathy for a woman who had her entire life blown up overnight to scorn for someone who didn’t tell the whole truth about how much money she had. “Belle Burden’s Memoir Made Me Feel Poor,” one Substack writer titled her reaction piece. 

It led to questions like, are rich people allowed to be sad? Are they allowed to mourn the loss of their life partners if they still have a lot of money left when that person leaves them? 

Burden said in a statement to the New Yorker: “When I wrote ‘Strangers,’ I shared my heartache, my mistakes, and my shame. I owned my privilege as plainly as I could, and I respected the privacy of sealed court records. I stand by everything I wrote, including the fear I felt from my ex-husband’s threats, the contributions I made and could make to my family, and what happened to me financially and emotionally in my marriage and divorce,” she said to the New Yorker. “While I didn’t intend it, I am glad that women have taken my story as motivation for insisting on financial transparency in their marriages.”

I’ll admit, as someone who does not boast Vanderbilts in my lineage and who has never owned a vacation home, I found it a little jarring when I read “Strangers” earlier this year. But the moments that stuck out to me most had nothing to do with money. Burden shares three children with her ex-husband, and, according to her, he didn’t fight for custody at all. Instead, he allegedly told her, “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t. You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids.”

According to her book, her husband said, “I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”

Rejection of his wife is bad enough. But a man rejecting his children and, according to her, seeming happy enough seeing them infrequently in the coming weeks and months, is an absolute tragedy. I try to imagine being in a similar situation and would almost certainly feel more heartbroken about my husband abandoning our children than I would about him rejecting me. 

Sympathy for any aspect of Burden’s messy divorce is hard to come by after the New Yorker journalist tore her story to shreds. There are multiple think pieces and exposés that essentially say we shouldn’t care anymore because she lied about the finances. Burden was never in danger of ending up homeless, they argue, so we shouldn’t care about her memoir anymore at all.

While the financial fallout of her divorce does feature prominently in the memoir, the more pressing issue Burden focuses on is trying to glean an explanation from her ex. She asks why he left her alone when she expected to grow old with him. Why did he abandon what she believed to be a stable, loving relationship in favor of something else? 

“This was not just an affair. This was not just a rejection of me,” Burden wrote in the book. “He was abandoning all of it, and all of us.”

Anyone who has actually read the book can see this woman’s pain laid bare. Meanwhile, the whole conversation has changed to figuring out how much Burden has in her multiple trusts. As if having millions of dollars makes the sacred covenant of marriage dispensable. 

“I don’t know if he made the decision to leave suddenly after being caught, or if he’d carefully planned his exit for years,” she wrote. “I don’t know what role the pandemic played. I don’t know how much of it was about money. I don’t know how much of it was about me.”

“I don’t know why he left. I don’t think I ever will,” Burden added.

Memoirs in general should be taken with a grain of salt. They are one person’s perspective on a situation and shouldn’t be read as non-fiction. They sit somewhere in between — not totally true, but not untrue. Burden added a disclaimer, saying the book “recounts events as accurately as I can remember them.” Memoirs are meant to be entertaining, and they are always deeply personal and emotionally vulnerable. Would it kill us to show a little grace to the person writing them? 

And then there’s the question of whether any journalists would have dug into this woman’s tax returns if she were poor or even middle class. Maybe they would have. But it does seem that any exaggerations or half-truths would have been reported less gleefully if Burden had fewer commas in her bank account.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve decided that grief only counts if it happens to the right people. A husband can abandon his wife, reject his children, blow up a family, and leave emotional devastation in his wake. But if the woman left behind still has money in the bank, we’re told not to feel sorry for her.

The question isn’t whether Belle Burden is rich or if she really lost everything when her husband left. It’s whether we’re allowed to have sympathy for rich women when they, like the rest of us, often do face tragedy.