A Double Dose of Privilege: The Coma at Clarendon Court — Ep. 1 | MK Confidential

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Megyn Kelly** (1:06)
Clarendon Court is one of the grandest houses on one of the grandest streets in America. The mansion's wrought iron gates form the backdrop of Grace Kelly's final movie before she retires to become the Princess of Monaco. A beautiful, wealthy, high-class woman marrying into aristocracy, a kind of modern fairy tale.
In 1980, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion belongs to a real life, beautiful, wealthy, high-class woman and her aristocrat husband. But behind those wrought iron gates and gold inlaid doors, the real tale is grim.
It is the morning of December 21st. The winter sun shines on the sandstone walls of Clarendon Court, an oceanfront property exposed to the bitter wind off the water.
Inside, a 49-year-old woman lies unconscious on the cold marble floor of her bathroom. She liked to sleep in a cold room, and the night before, she had asked for her windows to be left open to the Atlantic. With the windchill well below zero, the room turned frigid. By morning, she has gone ice-cold to the touch. Her body temperature falls into the low 80s. Her heart stops. The paramedics bring her back, but only part of the way.
Martha von Bülow, the woman everyone calls Sunny, falls into a coma. She will never regain consciousness. This would be a private tragedy, if not for an eerie wrinkle. This exact scene has happened before. One year earlier, almost to the day, in the same house, in the same wing, the same woman was found unconscious on the same floor.
That time, a doctor reached her in time. That time she woke up. One woman, two Christmases, two comas, and in between them, a husband, a devoted maid, a locked closet, and a small black bag that the state of Rhode Island will one day hold up in a courtroom and call the weapon. The man at the center of it is Sunny's husband, a Danish-born aristocrat named Claus von Bülow.
Twice, a jury will be asked whether he tried to murder his wife. Twice, the jury will be shown nearly the same evidence. This is the story of a case that ended and then ended again.
I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential.
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To understand how two medical emergencies one year apart become allegations of attempted murder, we have to start with the marriage. From the beginning, it is a match of opposites. Claus von Bülow is not born an aristocrat. He is not even born a Bülow. He comes into the world as Claus Borberg in Copenhagen in the summer of 1926 His father, Sven Borberg, is a Danish playwright and drama critic, a clever, cultured man whose sympathy for Nazi Germany will destroy his life and reputation. He admires the Germans, and he goes on admiring them after they occupied Denmark in 1940 He dines, as his son will one day put it, with the wrong people. In Claus' own words, years later, his father, quote, gave a good name to a bad cause. When the war ends, the reckoning comes. Sven Borberg is tried as a Nazi collaborator and convicted. The conviction is later overturned on appeal, but the name Borberg, once perfectly respectable, has become an embarrassment, so Claus escapes it. He takes the name of his mother's father, Fritz Bülow, a former Danish Minister of Justice, a name that stands for precisely the respectability his father's name has lost. Then there's the Vaughan. It comes later, and how it got there has fascinated people ever since. To much of the press, it is an embellishment, a whisper of old German nobility attached to a borrowed name by a man assembling himself for the world. Claus tells it differently. He says the Bülows are entitled to the Vaughan by blood, and that it was Sunny who wanted her second husband to carry one. Sunny's former in-laws, the Von Auerbergs, say he has no right to it at all. What no one disputes is the effect. By the time he reaches the drawing rooms of London and New York, the aristocrat is, at least in part, a work of his own composition.