Society heiress reveals heartbreaking impact of her divorce on daughter, 12, due to ex-husband’s ice-cold move

Society heiress Flobelle ‘Belle’ Fairbanks Burden once savored a picture-perfect life with her multi-millionaire husband and their three children. 

This was until her financier spouse, Henry Davis, revealed he was having an affair with a younger woman and dumped her on the spot.

In the acrimonious months that followed their shock split, Davis made an ice-cold move to completely remove himself from their children’s lives.

The 60-year-old multi-millionaire bought a two-bedroom apartment in New York City – a home much too small to host his three offspring.

Burden, an old-money NYC lawyer hailing from the Vanderbilt dynasty, said this deeply affected their youngest daughter, aged 12, who longed for her own room in his new house. 

‘She was sending him links on Pottery Barn for her room,’ Burden, 56, said during a recent appearance on Lipstick on the Rim podcast. 

But she said Davis insisted he was ‘done with that stage of his life’, including parenting a child and tending to her homework and dinners. 

‘That’s been the hardest part of this, and the most lasting part,’ Burden said. 

Adding insult to injury, Davis also turned his one spare bedroom into a home office.  

While the podcast hosts were stunned, Burden assured them the move was ‘not a circumstance where he moved across the country and had a whole new family.’

‘He lives blocks away from us. He keeps in touch with the kids. He’s very kind and sweet with them,’ the heiress said. 

‘But he was very clear that he was not going to do the day-to-day, apply to college, all that kind of thing. And that really was like a switch going off,’ she added.

Burden previously wrote in her memoir that Davis had long been ‘career-focused,’ while she devoted herself to raising their children.

Though he didn’t handle most of the parenting, she said the financier stayed involved, regularly taking the kids out on trips. 

But she wrote that shortly after the split, Davis told her: ‘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.’

Assuming this was a mistake, she asked her lawyer to draft a 50-50 custody agreement, but Davis returned it, stripping away his time and vacations, according to Burden. 

‘He included only dinner on Thursday nights,’ she wrote.

Burden said she believes her ex-husband thought he was being ‘selfless’ by not formalizing custody, arguing the kids were old enough to choose when to see him.

Lipstick on the Rim podcast host Molly Sims asked how the heiress’s children were coping with the upheaval, and she said they’re doing ‘amazing.’ 

‘They are amazing because they love him, and they’re protective of him, and they’re actually very good now at reaching out to him to do things that are comfortable for him, like going to a hockey game or something like that,’ she said.

‘For me as a mother, I think the biggest challenge for me is to acknowledge their reality, to say “this is what’s happening, this is unusual, that you do not live with your dad.”

‘So I would say to my 12-year-old, “Your dad, I don’t know why, but he can’t create a home for you right now. And that has to do with him, and that’s not you.”‘