Her Billionaire Husband Replaced Her — Then She Walked Away With $200 Million

Her billionaire husband left her for another woman. But Anne Hendricks Bass did not disappear. Born into a respected Indianapolis family, Anne married Texas oil heir Sid Richardson Bass at just 23 and entered one of America’s most powerful fortunes. Over the next two decades, she became a major presence in the worlds of art, ballet, philanthropy, Fort Worth society, and New York’s elite. Then, in the 1980s, everything changed. Sid Bass became involved with socialite Mercedes Kellogg, bringing Anne’s 21-year marriage to an extraordinary end. The divorce settlement was reported to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, leaving Anne with immense wealth, valuable property, major investments, and an extraordinary art collection. But the divorce was only the beginning of her second act. Anne remained deeply involved with the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, supported museums and cultural institutions, preserved remarkable gardens and estates, and later helped Cambodian dancer Sokvannara Sar pursue a career in Western ballet — a journey she documented in Dancing Across Borders. Her life would also take a darker turn. In 2007, Anne and her longtime partner Julian Lethbridge were terrorized during a shocking home invasion at her Connecticut estate. Yet even that ordeal failed to define her final years. When Anne Bass died in 2020, she left behind far more than the remains of a billionaire divorce. Her extraordinary collection of Monet, Rothko, Degas and other masters would later reveal just how valuable the cultural world she had assembled had become. In this documentary, we uncover the remarkable story of Anne Hendricks Bass — the woman whose billionaire husband replaced her, who walked away with an enormous fortune, and who transformed wealth, humiliation and independence into a cultural legacy of her own. Her husband inherited an empire of money. Anne Bass built an empire of taste. #AnneBass #BassFamily #OldMoney #NewYorkSociety #EmpireBloodlines