In the modern Gilded Age of New York, where Instagram is awash in unrestrained displays of wealth, Brandon and Candice Miller were royalty.
At their 10th wedding anniversary “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party, they celebrated with a few dozen friends in the backyard of their 5,500-square-foot vacation home in the Hamptons.
Beautiful women in gowns watched with their handsome husbands as the couple renewed their vows near a swimming pool strewed with peonies and rose petals beneath a canopy of lights.
It was a grand public display of their perfect life and marriage. Candice Miller told a lifestyle blogger who wrote about the party that her husband’s speech “made me cry by the end with his authentic, raw emotion and romantic words.”
It all culminated in the kind of envy-inducing images anticipated by the roughly 80,000 followers of “Mama and Tata,” Candice Miller’s popular Instagram feed, which featured a near-constant stream of photographs and videos of her glittering life.
The Midsummer Night party was in 2019. Five years later, the glamorous image that Candice Miller cultivated and promoted has disappeared, replaced with heartbreak, anger and a mountain of once-secret debt.
Her husband is gone. The home they so ostentatiously lived in, saddled by several mortgages, is not truly their own. Lawsuits from creditors, business bankruptcies, botched investments and even a repossessed boat — called Miller Time — indicate that the wealth needed to maintain their lifestyle had evaporated, if it ever truly existed.
Brandon Miller, 43, died July 3 at a Southampton hospital. A suicide note indicated he had killed himself while his wife and children were on vacation on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, according to a Suffolk County law enforcement official. He said Brandon Miller wrote that a business deal he had hoped would ease the family’s financial strain had collapsed.
His family was stunned. When Candice Miller was contacted for comment, a family spokesperson said she and the children were overwhelmed by grief. “Candice is devastated by the loss of her soulmate, and her two young daughters’ lives are forever impacted by the loss of their beloved daddy,” he said.
The Millers’ downfall has become the focus of obsessive talk in the Hamptons and among internet sleuths who have scoured Candice Miller’s social media presence for clues to what went wrong.
This account of the family’s rise and fall is drawn from property records, legal filings and interviews with those who knew and worked with Brandon Miller. Because of the sensitivity of the subject, few agreed to be cited by name.
That Miller’s death occurred in the Hamptons during the height of the social season almost certainly has added to the intrigue, said Neil J. Young, a historian who is writing a book about the Hamptons. Here, the only thing as fascinating as opulent wealth is its sudden disintegration.
“This place is predicated, for a certain set, on showing off,” Young said. “It’s the homes one has, the things one does out here — from the restaurants to the workouts to the parties. But it’s a place where one can get overextended really quickly, where a house of cards can suddenly collapse.”
A chasm separated the Millers’ shimmering public lives and painful private reality. But their fall is also a source of very real grief — a story about trying to have it all and what happens when you cannot.
“What people aren’t discussing in all of this is the loss of my little brother, someone I have loved unconditionally,” Miller’s sister, Maurley Miller, said in a statement after being contacted by The New York Times. “I have a hole in my heart that will never be filled. I am completely devastated.”