When your marriage is no longer ‘awesome-o’, and your house cannot be described as a ‘Casa Bonita’, what do you do? If you’re Trey Parker, co-creator of South Park, you file for divorce, ask for joint custody, and enforce your South Park prenup.
Fishsticks
According to documents obtained by TMZ, Trey Parker recently filed for divorce from his wife, Bookie Parker, a former exotic dancer. The parties were married in 2014, and Trey lists their date of separation as February 28, 2019.
Trey filed the divorce petition in Los Angeles, and they had one daughter together before getting married. Their daughter may have worked on the show, voicing the character Ike, Kyle’s adopted Canadian brother.
Parker, who also co-created Broadway Smash “The Book of Mormon” with long-time creative partner Matt Stone, was previously married to Emma Sugiyama. The couple divorced after two years of marriage.
Parker, 49, asks for his daughter’s legal and physical joint custody. He is also seeking to terminate spousal support on the basis of the couple’s prenuptial agreement.
Lucky for Trey, he reportedly has a prenuptial agreement. These days, the prenup has become more important than ever. People are marrying when they are older, and more people are better informed about the implications of marriage.
And for people like Trey Parker, they are marrying a second time. Like Trey, more people marrying a second time look to have a prenuptial agreements prepared.
Florida Prenuptial Agreements
Prenuptial agreements aren’t just for wealthy Hollywood people like Trey Parker, entering second marriages, they are important for any couple planning to marry. I have written extensively on prenuptial agreements.
A prenup can help keep your non-marital property yours. The property you brought into the marriage is yours – mostly. But over time it is common for people to start mixing things up. Inheritance funds get deposited into joint accounts; properties get transferred into joint names…and all for good reason.
Unfortunately, tracing commingled property is expensive, and hard to prove. But, if you put it in writing at the beginning, you might be able to avoid this task, and save some money down the road.
Prenuptial agreements also help you to change the law. For example, right now in Florida, there were two bills recently introduced at the Legislature, and an ongoing debate, about alimony. When you go to court, a judge has to follow state law regarding alimony.
However, through prenuptial agreements you can modify Florida’s legal standards for awarding alimony, you can terminate it outright in many instances, in addition to modifying what the current law says about the amount of support and the duration of the alimony period.
Second Marriages
This is a second marriage for Trey. For second marriages, a prenup is an especially good idea. What some clients don’t realize is that going through a second, third, or fourth divorce can be more complicated than first-time divorces.
In multiple divorces, couples are older, and have less time to make up for losses. Also, couples are competing for dwindling resources. Child-support, alimony, and dividing up of the retirement accounts may still be pending, and there can be little left to divide in a second divorce.
Some can simply state what assets each party has brought into the marriage, and what assets each party will take away if the marriage ends. Or, if there is a disparity in incomes, you can add to the contract how much the lower-income spouse will receive.
Imaginationland
As noted in the article, Trey is asking the court to enforce the prenuptial agreement he signed with Boogie Parker enforced. Trey has a net worth estimated to be $500,000,000 from his ventures as the co-creator of South Park and play The Book of Mormon among others.
Trey’s first marriage to This is also Parker’s second marriage after previously being married from 2006 to 2008.
The New York Daily News article is here.
Image attribution Gage Skidmore