Months After Hamptons Tragedy, Widow Contends With a Tangle of Debt
The New York Times
On Instagram, Candice Miller showed the world glittering parties and vacations. When her husband, Brandon Miller, died, he had $33.6 million in debt and just $8,000 in the bank.
Brandon Miller might have been largely unknown if not for “Mama and Tata,” the Instagram account of his wife, Candice Miller. For years, she enticed a following of tens of thousands of voyeurs by sharing copious photos of their vintage-cars-private-planes-deep-sea-yachts lifestyle.
But social media notoriety no longer bears much difference from fame. And so when Mr. Miller, 43, died over the Fourth of July holiday after poisoning himself in the garage of the family’s Hamptons home — amid rumors of indiscriminate spending and staggering debt — a media frenzy followed.
On Reddit, TikTok and Instagram, the question of what had gone wrong became summertime sport. Online sleuths screen-shotted the photo crumbs that were not swept away after Ms. Miller scrapped her account, zooming in to search for fissures in the glamour. News and tabloid publications picked over mortgage filings and public loan records, seeking to understand how the Millers’ extravagant house-of-cards existence had finally toppled.
The public was transfixed, and then it moved on.
But behind the scenes, a different sort of frenzy quickly unfurled as creditors scrambled for repayment, lawsuits were filed and a lavish property — once the site of gilded parties — was hurried to market.
Nearly six months later, Mr. Miller’s widow, lawyers, lenders and courts are still untangling an extraordinary financial mess. As they do, the saga raises fundamental questions about the ease with which someone was able to convert a patina of ornate wealth into millions of dollars in loans.
