The summer before the pandemic, Candice and Brandon Miller renewed their vows in the backyard of their Water Mill estate. It was their 10th wedding anniversary; the theme was A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
While Brandon posed for photos with the stylist Rachel Zoe, Candice danced around the pool in a strapless Scaasi gown with a ruffled neckline. In matching pink chiffon dresses, their young daughters decorated the tables and served drinks—along with the teams from Sag Harbor Florist, Decco by Party Up Productions, and Simply Perfect Events. For the next 24 hours, the affair dominated the social-media accounts of New York’s upwardly mobile millennials.
Ever since 2016, with the launch of her blog, Mama & Tata, Candice and Brandon had broadcast themselves as the sort of rich people that even rich people love to hate. She described Mama & Tata as “an insider’s guide to what every mom needs in NYC,” such as a concierge tailor. But to many it looked more like just an opportunity for Candice to promote her friends’ businesses and post flattering selfies.
She was determined to share the secrets of their stylish lifestyle with an Internet audience which, back then, didn’t really know who she was. (There were rumors that, at the beginning, @mamaandtata had bought some of its followers.) Some observers suspected she may have been inspired by her cousin’s wife Arielle Charnas, the well-known influencer behind the account Something Navy.
The fairy tale ended last week, when Brandon died at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. He was 43 years old. Candice and the girls were away in Europe on a weeks-long vacation when, according to a source who knows the family, first responders were summoned to the Miller home by a carbon-monoxide alarm; he had allegedly attempted suicide in the garage. (The cause of death has not been officially released.) Brandon was hospitalized for several days before he died, on July 3; he lived long enough to say good-bye to his wife and daughters, and was buried at the New Montefiore Cemetery, in West Babylon. (Miller did not respond to Air Mail’s requests for comment.)
What went so horribly wrong? How could a golden couple blessed with every advantage end up mired in a mess worthy of a Theodore Dreiser novel? According to someone in Candice’s social circle, it had everything to do with money. “Brandon made a bad real-estate investment, and he had borrowed from his friends to keep everything afloat,” she alleges. “People were starting to turn on them.”
The Lush Life
From the beginning, the Millers looked almost too good to be true. She was photogenic and social; he was wealthy and ambitious. Native New Yorkers, they grew up together on the Upper East Side and on the eastern tip of Long Island, where their families had homes down the street from one another. After attending the University of Michigan and Brown University, respectively, Candice and Brandon started dating in their 20s, marrying in 2009 at the Metropolitan Club. She wore Oscar de la Renta and vintage Alexander McQueen, and they danced to Ray LaMontagne’s “Hold You in My Arms.” They lived in a $9.2 million loft down the street from Taylor Swift in Tribeca before moving to a $47,000-a-month rental on Park Avenue.
Brandon was the principal at Real Estate Equities Corporation, a firm founded in 1978 by his late father, the shopping-center developer Michael Miller. The Millers specialized in commercial and residential projects in New York City, including 985 Park Avenue, a newly constructed condominium; 156 Prince Street, a residential rental building; and 1228 Madison Avenue, consisting of 13 full-floor apartments designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects.
One of R.E.E.C.’s most recent projects, a nine-story, 61,000-square-foot office-and-retail building at One St. Mark’s Place, has been complicated. After purchasing the site for $150 million in 2017, it was plagued by delays and financing issues, and before long R.E.E.C. was facing foreclosure on the project. In 2022 the company received a $70 million loan from Parkview Financial to refinance the existing land loan as well as previous financing for the project. Construction on the nine-story building, designed by Morris Adjmi Architects, appears to be nearing completion.
Candice Miller and her husband, Brandon, broadcast themselves as the sort of rich people that even rich people love to hate.
In the past two years, Brandon was the subject of several lawsuits. According to the New York Post, on April 19 he was sued by Interior Marketing Group for allegedly refusing to pay for rental furnishings that totaled $102,730. Last May, another suit claimed that he owed more than $55,000 in docking fees to a marina in the Hamptons. In 2022 he (along with his mother and sister) were sued by TD Bank, accused of making fraudulent transfers to prevent the institution from collecting $2.1 million from his mother. Meanwhile, in February, news outlets reported that the real-estate investor Brandon Charnas, the husband of Candice’s cousin Arielle Charnas, was under investigation for insider trading. (According to public filings, a judge overturned the S.E.C.’s request to compel him to testify, and the S.E.C. did not pursue a case.)
Candice’s content dump forged ahead. She continued posting photos of her boat, her parties, and her short-lived clothing line, Black Iris, and told The New York Times all about the $800 Aida Bicaj facials she gets twice a month. In 2019, Ivanka Trump moved into Arte Surfside, a Miami building in which the Millers and the Charnases were also living at the time, and friends say that Candice, Trump, and their families spent a lot of time together during the pandemic.
In June, after the school year ended, Candice and her daughters flew to Europe, traveling through Italy and Spain, documenting every gelato scoop on Instagram, while Brandon stayed in Water Mill. According to a woman in the Millers’ social circle, Candice grew concerned that Brandon was sounding depressed, so she sent her mother over to check on him, “but apparently he seemed fine,” the source says.
Yet Candice’s Instagram account began to hint at trouble in paradise. One follower noticed that her posts from Europe included mentions of her “Eat, Pray, Love summer,” a reference to Elizabeth Gilbert’s post-breakup memoir. A rumor is also floating around the Upper East Side that Candice was not able to cover a recent bill from a European hotel. “She courted the limelight, but it seemed like she was running on financial fumes,” says the source.
“Just plain existing in 2024 in Manhattan and the Hamptons with two kids and two houses is an astoundingly expensive proposition,” says Holly Peterson, an author and journalist who nails the social anthropology of this world, because she grew up in the middle of it. “It’s important to understand that the pressure is not just about showing up in Gucci fur slides—it’s just being able to to crack the nut of the cost of living.”
The story of Brandon and Candice Miller is now being covered much farther and wider than social media. “Their whole life was built on a lie,” says an acquaintance of the Miller family. “Power is an aphrodisiac.... and I think that’s the truth of most of these marriages out here.”
Those who search Instagram for @mamaandtata will discover that the user can no longer be found.
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast
