Fallout

Dan Brown Private Divorce Goes Public: Alleged Affairs, Holland, and a Nearly Half a Million Dollar Horse

The couple quietly divorced in 2019. A year later, things got a little louder.
Image may contain Audience Human Crowd Person Coat Suit Clothing Overcoat Apparel Speech and Indoors
By Christopher Polk/Getty Images.

Often divorce is a mystery. The couple only knows the true reasons for it. Sometimes, though, one of them is an internationally famous author of The Da Vinci Code and the other is his former wife suing him for spending marital assets on his affairs and not owning up to projects coming down the pipeline, unfurling their split in front of the world. In that case, divorce is a mystery thriller.

The Boston Globe first reported that Blythe Brown is suing her ex-husband, Dan Brown, on Tuesday. The lawsuit is over their divorce agreement from 2019, and namely accuses the author of “misrepresenting” their wealth in a sworn financial affidavit, plus emotional distress.

Legalese can make anything sound dry, and that’s the case here: The details that Blythe shares in the lawsuit are more juicy than “misrepresenting wealth” can convey. The short of it is this: Blockbuster author of Catholic intrigue allegedly has affair with wife’s horse trainer and “siphoning” off marital assets to buy her a Friesian, the Fabio of horses. But of course the short of it is not everything. And the everything is a lot.

“The relationship between Blythe and Dan was based on mutual trust, respect, and honesty—or so she believed,” the lawsuit reads. “As it turns out, for the last several years of their marriage, Dan engaged in a systematic pattern of deception and lies.”

The crux of the suit is the claim that Brown told Blythe that he didn’t have any new projects in the works during the divorce proceedings. But at some point she discovered that he actually was working on projects, one of which is an NBCUniversal series called Langdon. Blythe maintains that she had a hand in Brown’s wildly successful work since their marriage in 1997, including influence on the The Da Vinci Code, which Brown has long acknowledged in dedications and in interviews. Langdon is based on novels that they “created together,” she said.

“Dan stands to make millions from these projects, which is undoubtedly why he hid them from Blythe,” the lawsuit states, and her attorney told the Globe that she “agreed to a quiet divorce last year from her longtime husband Dan Brown. Only afterward did she learn that, for years, he had been deceiving her. Blythe asks that her ex-husband be held accountable for his dishonesty.”

(Brown told the People in a statement, “As part of the settlement agreement we reached, all of our assets as of that date were listed in writing. That document became part of the signed decree when we divorced in 2019. I swore to the truthfulness of what was contained on that list, and I stand by that financial statement today. We were very fortunate that we equally were blessed with very substantial assets with which to move forward after that.”)

According to the lawsuit, he also secretly used their money to buy gifts for women with whom he had affairs, diminishing their shared wealth. Allegedly there were many: A horse trainer from Holland that his wife had hired, a “hairdresser” in New Hampshire, a “politician” in Anguilla where the couple has a vacation home, and, less creatively, a personal trainer.

The suit claims that Blythe discovered in 2019, that is, after their divorce, that Brown had “secretly siphoned funds from their marital assets, at least in part to finance his activities with his mistresses, including…a young horse trainer who lived in Holland.” The story the lawsuit lays out is wild: Blythe brought the Friesian horse specialist and dressage rider to the U.S. to train one of couple’s horses in 2013. The affair began while the trainer was recuperating from shoulder surgery in their home. He bought her a horse! A prize-winning one! It cost $345,000 and was named “LimiTed Edition”! He added a new car and a two-horse transport truck, and threw in some home renos on her apartment in Holland, allegedly.

When Blythe recently confronted Brown about the wire transfers, he responded, “I’ve done bad things with a lot of people,” she claims.

Blythe told the Globe that the lawsuit “is about standing up for myself and asserting my self-worth. I have continually tried to absorb the shocking truth withheld during our divorce that Dan had been leading a double life for years during our marriage, all while coming home to me.”

She added, “I trusted this man for decades as my life’s love. We worked so hard together, struggling to build something meaningful… I don’t recognize the man that Dan has become. It is time to reveal his deceit and betrayal. After so much pain, it is time for truth. It is time to right these wrongs.”

For his part, Brown said in a statement to the Globe, “On the day that Blythe and I married, I never remotely thought that we eventually would grow so far apart.”

And to think, in a 2004 profile, The Guardian called the author’s habits “not exactly a riot of hedonism.”

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair

— Author Uzodinma Iweala on White Signs at Black Protests
— “George Floyd Was Killed in My Neighborhood
— 15 Years After Katrina, a Second Storm—Coronavirus—Hits New Orleans
— How Meghan Markle Decided to Finally Speak Out About George Floyd
— Nikkita Oliver on Seattle’s Extraordinary Protests and What Comes Next
— Where J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia Comes From
— From the Archive: The Origin of “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s Ballad Against Racism

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.