If space is the final frontier, it was only a matter of time for divorce to get there. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorities is investigating divorce fraud: whether an astronaut going through a divorce improperly accessed her wife’s bank account while orbiting Earth on the International Space Station.
This is kind of scary for Halloween. Market Watch has an interesting article about a husband who paid off his wife’s student loans during their very short marriage, and his wife thanked him by filing for divorce after a mere 24 months of marriage. Was the husband the victim of divorce fraud, and tricked into paying off his wife’s student loans?
As the Market Watch article reports: “[b]efore I married my wife two years ago, she had huge amounts of debt to her name, including large amounts of student loans. After we married, we diligently almost paid everything off, helped by my salary being three times that of my wife.”
She recently asked for a divorce, saying she was taking the house and my retirement. My question is: Does the fact we paid off her debts she held before get spread evenly? Had I not paid all of her debts our net worth would be near the same with a better outcome for me.
We’ve only been married a few years, and frankly I can’t help feeling taken advantage of. The only advice I can find discusses whose responsibility the student loans would be, but now it just seems that she got me to pay all of her debts, and got some new stuff, while I threw away years of my life.
Please tell me there’s hope.
Is there hope for Market Watch’s husband?
I’ve written about student loans in the past. Florida is an equitable distribution state. The initial premise behind an equitable distribution of marital assets and liabilities – such as student loans – is equal distribution.
However, when proper justification is shown, a family court judge may make an unequal distribution. The burden is difficult. A distribution of marital debts, whether equal or unequal, must be supported by factual findings and based on substantial competent evidence. The rationale for the distribution also has to be disclosed by the judge.
As a general proposition, student loan debt incurred during the marriage is a marital liability. So, in the absence of findings supporting the unequal distribution of a student loan debt, marital student loan debts must be equitably distributed between the parties.
The fact that the husband will not receive any benefit from his ex-wife’s education because of the divorce is not a factor to be considered when allocating a marital debt for student loans.
In sum, absent some other justification for an unequal distribution, controlling case law in Florida will usually prohibit a family court judge from awarding student loan debt incurred during the marriage solely to one party or the other.
As Market Watch reports, divorce after two years is a tough break, “especially given all the help you gave your wife with her student debt. That’s a particularly unusual kind of debt, in that it’s virtually impossible to discharge.”
The article concludes by noting that “[t]he best thing you have going for you right now is your honest intentions going into this marriage and your (good) behavior throughout. Having examined all the details, the judge may not be able to say the same thing about your wife.
The Market Watch article is here.
According to a recent survey, 46% of divorced women reported their divorce brought unexpected financial problems. What are some of the divorce surprises you can run into if you find yourself in family court?
In the study, 1,785 adult women were surveyed across three stages: those with divorce “on the horizon,” those in the midst of divorce, and those who described themselves as “divorced and determined.”
Slightly related, I recently wrote about dirty divorce tricks which were in the news. These tricks should serve as a warning, not as a “how-to course”, because they can seriously backfire. A couple of common tricks to watch out for include:
These tricks are not the kind of divorce surprises reported in the survey though. The above tricks are the result of planning to harm the other side.
The surprises from the survey are very different. The divorce surprises have nothing to do with fraud, or the other side failing to disclose assets. So what are they?
In general, the study found that many women find themselves in a financially vulnerable position post-divorce due to a lack of financial knowledge and planning. The study claims a solution is twofold:
The Forbes article is here.
The Hill reports that a Texas couple may divorce to save money in order to pay for their daughter’s rising health-care costs. There are times when people have divorced “on paper” to save money, but is this a good reason and does it work?
Can you divorce to save money? Jake and Maria Grey may try. They told NBC’s “Today” that Brighton, the older of their two daughters, has Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, a developmental disability that requires 24/7 care.
“We shouldn’t have to make that sacrifice to get our child Medicaid!”
They said they spend thousands of dollars annually out of pocket, even though Jake Grey has private health insurance. The couple added that they are considering divorcing to save money so that Maria Grey can qualify for Medicaid as a single, unemployed mother.
I’ve actually written about a similar issue, namely: divorcing to save money on taxes by avoiding the marriage penalty tax. Back when the 2012 American Taxpayer Relief Act was passed, it raised taxes on couples making more than $450,000, and individuals making more than $400,000. As it turns out, some couples found out they could save over $25,000 a year if they divorced.
Think about that for a second. If you could save over $25,000 a year in taxes, you could take a couple’s trip to Italy, ski Deer Valley, put a little cash away for college, and still have some mad money to spend just by divorcing and turning your marriage into a long-term relationship.
There are a lot of risks though, known and unknown to divorcing on paper but staying together. I would encourage anyone considering a “divorce on paper” to think about a few things:
Most people who marry do so forever, and with the sincere intention of honoring their vows. Is the money worth it?
Jake Grey’s $40,000 salary is too much for the family to receive Medicaid, and Maria Grey said they are No. 60,000 on the list to receive state assistance.
It’s drowning us to try to keep up with her medical expenses. We’ve done everything we can do to try to keep her afloat, and we’re going to reach a point where we can’t do it and we won’t have another option. We don’t know what to do.
The Hill article is here.
“Martin” actress,Tisha Campbell-Martin, is accusing her estranged husband of hiding money during their divorce proceedings. Hiding money, especially when you are going through a divorce raises all kinds of concerns . . . for both parties. What are some of the consequences?
Campbell-Martin filed legal documents in court – which were obtained by TMZ – claiming her husband Duane Martin was hiding and misappropriating money while they were married.
It’s unclear how much money she thinks he was hiding from her or what specific remedies she is seeking.
In Florida divorce, judgments and marital settlement agreements can be set aside on various grounds, including fraud. Divorce fraud has become very common, and I’ve written on the subject before.
One of the areas ripe with fraud is hiding money in a divorce. In certain cases, Florida allows you to challenge and vacate or modify a marital settlement agreement if the agreement was based on things like fraud, deceit, duress, coercion, misrepresentation, overreaching.
Additionally, Florida courts have allowed challenges to agreements where the marital settlement agreement makes unfair or unreasonable provision for the challenging party given the circumstances of the case.
Judgments may also be overturned because of fraud and fraud on the court. The thinking is that cheaters should not be allowed to prosper, and it has long been central to our legal system.
Florida rules of court expressly allow you to get some relief from a judgment if it was the product of fraud, misrepresentation, or other misconduct of an adverse party.
Courts have available to them all kinds of sanctions, in a wide variety of shapes, attempting to encompass the virtually limitless ways people in divorce manage to misbehave.
According to the article, actress Tisha Campbell-Martin is asking a judge to take legal action against her husband for hiding money during the divorce. She originally filed for divorce in February, after 20 years of marriage.
The couple separated in December of 2016. She is seeking alimony from her husband, and allegedly wants to block the court’s ability to award him spousal support. What are some of the remedies the judge in Campbell-Martin’s case can consider?
If you lie during the divorce process, during your deposition for example, in order to hide assets, you may have committed perjury – which is a crime. Also, if your lies are discovered by your spouse, your spouse’s attorney, or a judge, you may face severe sanctions.
Similarly, if you don’t properly report your assets on your financial affidavit or fail to disclose financial information to your spouse during a divorce, a court can order you to do so. If you defy the court when it, for example, orders you to share account balances and the location of money, you can be held in contempt of court.
The TMZ article is here.
An English ex-husband has ‘come under fire’ after he admitted to burning down his marital home out of anger over his divorce. This sad event raises the issue of waste in divorce, and how courts can order an unequal property division when assets are destroyed.
According to the Mirror, Paul Duffy appeared at Leicester Magistrates’ Court to admit to a charge of arson at his home in England. Emergency services were called to a ferocious blaze at his address in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
The house is almost completely destroyed due to arson. An investigation into the blaze found 27 individual seats of fire, two jerry cans and evidence of flammable substances and petrol.
The fire caused an explosion at the property and the house next door was damaged, although no-one was inside the address. Duffy left, but later returned to the scene, where he gave himself up to police officers and was arrested.
In interview he made a full and frank admission of his role in starting the fire.
In Florida divorces, courts distribute the marital assets and liabilities between the parties every day. Judges have to start with the premise that the distribution should be equal. But is there a way ‘to fight fire with fire’ if a spouse destroys marital property?
In Florida, courts are allowed to distribute property unequally if there is a justification for an unequal distribution. I’ve written about this concept of waste, and other aspects of property division before.
One of the relevant factors courts look to is whether one of the parties intentionally dissipated, wasted, depleted, or destroyed any of the marital assets after the filing of the petition or within 2 years prior to the filing of the petition.
There are many examples, besides arson, of spouses dissipating or wasting assets. Other instances of people ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’ include spending money buying a girlfriend jewelry or lingerie, gambling losses, and drug usage.
Some people get ‘fired up’ over their divorce, and would rather lose the money outright than split it with their spouses. Where this kind of marital misconduct results in a waste of marital assets, it can serve as a basis for unequal division of marital property.
‘Burning down the house’, one of the largest assets in a marriage, would be a good reason to justify an unequal distribution of the property in divorce. It’s Florida’s way of saying: ‘if you play with fire you’re gonna get burnt.’
According to reports in England, the husband had left the area after starting the fire but later returned to the scene, where he gave himself up to police officers and was arrested.
The house was not insured. The house was ruled to be unsafe and had to be demolished later that day. The husband is now facing jail. Clearly, the husband has jumped ‘out of the frying pan into the fire.’
The Mirror article is here.
In a divorce fraud case from England, Neil Rattue was married for 15 years before he was found to have forged his divorce decree, and illegally married another woman. Do his two ‘wives’ file for divorce, or, like rats leaving a sinking ship, annul their marriages?
Rattue invented a sickness, claiming he had “terminal cancer” to keep his double life hidden from both ‘wives”. The court in the UK heard a victim statement from his first wife, read out by the prosecutor, who said she felt like her husband had ‘stolen her life’ from her.
Why did he not ask me years ago for a divorce or when he met his new wife? Instead he was leading a double life. I have spent the last 19 years living with my mum as he left me with no other option. I am paying for this both mentally and emotionally. He has stolen my life from me.
Though he stopped seeing his first wife in 2001, he dutifully continued to call her daily for 17 years to ask how she was and discuss their debts, which she was paying off.
A court previously heard his first wife had paid off £30,000 of debt, from credit cards and loans taken out with Rattue, but still had a staggering £37,500 to be paid.
What if this took place in Florida? I’ve written about divorce and annulment in Florida before. Florida does not have a statute authorizing annulments. The decision to divorce or annul a marriage will depend on certain facts.
Annulment has a history beginning in England, and if King Henry VIII had been able to secure an annulment from the Pope, England might have remained a Catholic country. Today, annulment may best be known for rescuing Britney Spears from an ill-advised alcohol-related Las Vegas “bender.”
Because Florida is one of the handful of states that has no annulment statute, annulments in Florida are purely a question of common law, decided pursuant to the inherent equitable powers of the circuit court.
The historical common law “impediments” to marriage traditionally fell into two general categories: lack of consent and lack of capacity. This is substantially still the case law in Florida.
Lack of consent would include, for example, people who are related within certain degrees, and minors without parental consent.
Lack of capacity, is exactly the situation the Rattue wives are in. Lack of capacity includes marriages involving fraud, mental illness, sham marriages, and shotgun weddings.
While none of the “marriage” statutes in Florida specifically address purported marriages between one person and another person who is already legally married to a third party, bigamy is, of course, a crime. Bigamy raises the question: do you divorce or annul the marriage?
Whether to divorce or annul will depend on the legality of the marriages. Given that Rattue was never legal divorced, he forged his divorce decree, his second marriage would not likely be recognized in Florida.
This is not only a surprise for the first wife but can be devastating for the second wife. But, it also means his second wife would have to file for an annulment. His first wife, who was legally married, could file for divorce.
According to the report:
The matter was not heard by a family court judge hearing whether to divorce or annul the marriage(s), but in criminal court. Judge Richard Parkes QC said Rattue had been ‘cowardly’ and ‘deceitful’ in maintaining his marriage to his first wife, despite having started a new marriage and raising children without his first wife even knowing.
Salisbury Crown Court, Wiltshire, heard how Rattue had met his first wife in Wiltshire in 1980 and they were married three years later. Rattue, who often worked away, then met his second wife while traveling.
The pair, who married on October 3, 1998, lived together in York, North Yorkshire, having two children together. Prosecutor Phillip Warren said Rattue had taken a friend’s divorce certificate without him knowing, before using it to forge his own.
Eighteen months ago, he would still phone me at work every day where he would ask me how I was. He still made me pay off all the money. He said we have got to stay married for the purpose of the loan and I believed him. Little did I know, it was because he had already forged our divorce certificate. This has been a prison sentence since 2001 when he left and stole my life from me.
The Mirror article is here.
There are many ways for spouses to commit divorce fraud, especially during the proceeding. A Texas man was just found guilty of forging his wife’s signature on divorce papers — while giving himself a small break on support, and adding a couple weeks to summer visitation. What can be done about divorce fraud?
According to reports, her husband, Brian Kimmell, had been staying at her residence when in October he went to court, without her, to file the divorce papers.
Although the 10-year marriage had ended in separation, they maintained a civil relationship for their son and she believed he had traveled up from San Diego – where the Navy had stationed him – in order to attend their son’s football game.
About eight months before Brian Kimmell allegedly forged his documents — social media posts showed that he had gotten married to another woman even though he was still married to her.
The unsigned divorce papers had Brian paying $1,000 a month in child support. In the forged copy the amount was reduced to about $700.They had agreed to him taking their son for a month each summer, but in the forged documents he had their son for a couple weeks more.
When Cassie Kimmell heard that the case had stalled, she said she called a Navy official and Naval Criminal Investigative Services agents met with Port Orchard police investigators and turned over handwriting samples from Brian Kimmell.
The samples were sent to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab and were analyzed by a handwriting expert who wrote in reports that it was “highly probable” that the signature on the divorce document was not made by Cassie Kimmel, and that Brian Kimmell “probably” signed it instead.
In Florida divorce papers, such as judgments and marital settlement agreements can be set aside on various grounds, including fraud. Divorce fraud has become very common, and I’ve written on the subject before.
In certain cases, Florida allows you to challenge and vacate or modify a marital settlement agreement if the agreement was based on things like fraud, deceit, duress, coercion, misrepresentation, overreaching.
Additionally, Florida courts have allowed challenges to agreements where the marital settlement agreement makes unfair or unreasonable provision for the challenging party given the circumstances of the case.
Judgments are another area of fraud, especially in light of the Texas divorce fraud case. The thinking is that cheaters should not be allowed to prosper, and it has long been central to our legal system.
Florida rules of court expressly allow you to get some relief from a judgment if it was the product of fraud (whether intrinsic or extrinsic), misrepresentation, or other misconduct of an adverse party.
Extrinsic fraud is conduct which prevents you from presenting your case. This is usually done by keeping you away from court; falsely promising a compromise; ignorance by an adversary about the existence of the suit or the acts of the plaintiff; fraudulent representation of a party without his consent and connivance in his defeat; and so on.
Intrinsic fraud, on the other hand, is fraudulent conduct within a case and pertains to the issues in the case. For example, false testimony in a proceeding is intrinsic fraud.
Courts have available to them all kinds of sanctions, in a wide variety of shapes, attempting to encompass the virtually limitless ways people in divorce manage to misbehave.
After the divorce was reversed, and then completed again with Cassie Kimmell’s actual signature, Brian Kimmell received no visitation with their son and has to pay $1,300 a month.
He also was tagged with about $32,000 of additional payments to Cassie Kimmell, which comes on top of paying legal fees for the second divorce and the criminal case.
Reached through an attorney, Brian Kimmell wrote in an email to the Kitsap Sun that his career had ended and he lost his rights to see and speak to his son despite having to continue to pay child support.
All this and I still don’t even know what for. I never used to think something like this could really happen to a person. Needless to say, my eyes have been opened.
On March 1, Brian Kimmell pleaded guilty to the first-degree perjury charge and was sentenced to six months of home detention, which he was authorized to serve at his residence in Texas.
The King5 article is here.
As if divorce wasn’t bad enough, the FBI warns the most common targets of dating scams are divorced women over 40. Women are courted online, and after weeks of intimacy, money is missing. This post contains a few post-divorce tips to protect yourself
According to an Atlantic magazine article, scams are abundant, and Derek Alldred seems to have scammed at least a dozen women out of about $1 million since 2010.
He used different names and occupations, but the identities he took on always had an element of financial prestige or manly valor: decorated veteran, surgeon, air marshal, investment banker.
Con artists have long known that a uniform bolsters an illusion, and Derek was fond of dressing up in scrubs and military fatigues. He tended to look for women in their 40s or 50s, preferably divorced, preferably with a couple of kids and a dog or two.
The age of the internet, with its infinitude of strangers and swiftly evolving social mores, has also been good for con men. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which tracks internet-facilitated criminal activity, received nearly 300,000 complaints in 2016.
Of those scams, more than 14,500 were for relationship fraud, a number that has more than doubled since 2011.
I’ve written about practical tips after your divorce before. Consider that once the lawyers, are gone, who is there to guide you on the many questions? There are some immediate steps to take to ensure your hard-fought interests are protected – and your financial documents reflect your new marital status.
Once your divorce is final – meaning a final judgment is entered – you should review and revise, if necessary, the following legal and estate planning documents:
What can happen if you don’t?
One example is common. If your ex-spouse remains the beneficiary of your life insurance policy and you pass away, the proceeds will go to your ex-spouse instead your children.
The opposite can also be true. In Florida, the plain language of the documents controls. To the extent your or your former spouse claimed a right to remain as the beneficiary under a life insurance policy – as a condition of the dissolution of marriage – your rights can be waived.
The FBI warns that in many scams, women are courted online by men who claim to be deployed in Afghanistan or tending an offshore oil rig in Qatar. After weeks or months of intimate emails, texts, and phone calls, the putative boyfriend will urgently need money to replace a broken laptop or buy a plane ticket home.
According to the Justice Department, only 15% of fraud victims report the crimes to law enforcement, largely due to shame, guilt, embarrassment, and disbelief:
You feel really crappy about yourself,” Missi told me, then slipped into a tone that sounded like the mean voice that lives inside her head: “I’m a stupid woman; I’m a dumb, dumb, dumbass.
One excellent way to dispel yourself of any con-man fantasies, however, is to spend some time with the people they’ve hurt. Their victims are negotiating ruined credit scores and calls from collection agencies.
Several were so flattened by the experience, they’ve had old medical problems flare up or have struggled to go back to work.
The Atlantic magazine article is here.
By The Law Offices of Ronald H. Kauffman of Ronald H. Kauffman, P.A. posted in Divorce on Monday, June 8, 2015.
People question their divorce agreements, suspecting their spouse lied. Two ex-wives in London are not just questioning, they’re taking their suspicions to the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court. What happens in Florida when one spouse suspects fraud?
As the Guardian reports:
Charles Sharland and Bhadresh Gohil are accused of concealing the value of their assets. Their former spouses are seeking to reopen financial negotiations on the grounds that the courts were provided with fraudulent evidence.
The hearing, before seven justices at the supreme court in Westminster, London, will assess whether non-disclosure entitles a claimant to reinstate a concluded divorce trial.
The applications by Alison Sharland and Varsha Gohil, both represented by the law firm Irwin Mitchell, have been joined for the justices to examine the impact of fraud on matrimonial disputes.
Sharland had accepted more than £10m in cash and properties from her ex-husband in the settlement but it later emerged that the shares in his company were worth considerably more than previously revealed. One estimate put the firm’s value at $1bn (£656m).
Gohil had accepted £270,000 plus a car in her divorce settlement in 2004. But it later became clear that her husband, who was tried and jailed for fraud and money-laundering sums of up to £37m, had not given the court accurate information about his finances
“Both cases raise serious issues about how the courts should handle cases where information shared with the court and used to agree a divorce settlement is later found to be false or incomplete.”
I’ve written about fraud in family law before. In Florida, it’s possible to overturn a final judgment based on fraud. But it’s not as simple as merely proving fraud.
That’s because there are different types of fraud. For example, did your husband lie to you about where the courthouse was, or did you lie to him about whether he was the father of your child?
Courts also feel pressure to make final judgments final. Claims of fraud therefore need a trial to explan the facts and circumstances. It is rare for a court to determine the presence or absence of fraud without a trial or some kind of evidentiary hearing.
Allegations of fraud involve the intent of the alleged wrongdoer, and require judges to evaluate the credibility of witnesses and the evidence. If you suspect there was fraud in your case, you will want to consult with a board certified expert marital and family attorney.
For the Guardian article click here.