Belle Burden should have known: the more money, the more brutal the divorce | Amy Polacko

Burden’s divorce memoir illustrates how wealth can make things ugly once a marriage implodes 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. “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