Letter from a Reader 6.4.26
Did The New Yorker magazine get played by a leaker hoping to sink the movie of Belle Burden's bestselling 'Strangers' with Gwyneth Paltrow?
A few years ago, the first female grandmaster in chess sued Netflix for $5 million. She claimed that the streaming platform had defamed her in “The Queen’s Gambit” by saying she had never faced a man in a match when had she competed against many. Netflix tried to have her lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that the series was fictional. But a federal court ruled that viewers might still see the comment as true, and the platform settled with her.
You have to wonder how many millions Belle Burden’s ex-husband might sue for if Netflix goes ahead with a planned movie of her bestselling Strangers with Gwyneth Paltrow. Burden’s memoir casts the father of her three children as a feckless cheater who walked out on her, early in the pandemic, without warning or apology. She calls him “James” in the book and doesn’t name the hedge fund he runs.
But Burden’s devices masked his identify about as well as Bart Simpson’s red vampire costume hid his in a Halloween episode of “The Simpsons.” Journalists promptly outed Burden’s former husband as Henry P. Davis, now president of Arden Asset Management, and trolls have slammed him online as a “cad,” “jerk,” and “narcissist.” A lot of it makes Davis sound like the last person you’d want to manage your money, no matter how good the returns on his funds might be.
A recent New Yorker story by Jessica Winter gave a fuller picture of Davis when it revealed some of what Strangers had left out of its account of his 20-year-marriage to a descendant of the shipping-and-railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt and a founder of Standard Oil. Winter unearthed a prenup and divorce settlement that showed that Burden had $63 million in trusts and other assets she didn’t mention in her memoir and might have provided some comfort amid the injustices she saw her husband as having inflicted. But by the time her story came out, Davis’ reputation had clearly taken a hit online and on TV shows on which she discussed her ex-husband.
All of this makes you wonder: Is the movie adaptation of Strangers dead? And was killing the film a goal of whoever leaked the couple’s prenup and divorce settlement to The New Yorker, if it was leaked and not found by other means by the magazine? In other words, did a venerable magazine get played?