University of Arizona men’s basketball coach Lute Olson’s five month divorce battle is getting uglier. It was reported today that Olson has been ordered to appear in the Pima County, Arizona court on May 7th to explain why he transferred money from a joint account into his individual account one day after he filed for divorce from wife Christine Olson in December. Both husband and wife were apparently prohibited from withdrawing or transferring funds pending resolution of the divorce case. The transfer was reportedly made because athletic shoe and apparel maker Nike deposited Olson’s endorsement money directly into the joint account. Olson earns a reported $500,000 a year from Nike in addition to his university salary. Arizona is a community property state, which means that all marital assets are divided equally between both spouses. Non-marital or separate assets are generally awarded to the original owner of the property (and not split between the spouses).

The Olson divorce has been fairly public and high-profile, especially in Arizona. The couple’s attorneys are regularly quoted in the newspapers. They have argued over the scheduling of depositions and the subpoenaing of financial records. Olson is also challenging the validity of a postnuptial agreement (the media keeps mistakenly referring to it as a “prenuptial agreement“) the couple signed on an airplane on their way to Mexico for a honeymoon, two days after they were married. Christine Olson’s lawyer claims that the agreement merely reserves each spouse’s separate assets as their own. Lute Olson’s attorney argues that certain pages of the agreement were not signed or initialed, that Christine refused to provide Lute with a copy of the agreement and that Christine did not fully disclose her financial resources to Lute before they signed the agreement. Christine is CEO of an oil and gas contract drilling company in Pennsylvania - an enterprise which has been in her family for several generations. She is also a member of the Republican National Committee.

Lute and Christine Olson were married in 2003, two years after Olson’s first wife Bobbi passed away. Olson and Bobbi were married for 47 years. Olson took a leave of absence from coaching in late 2007 and, very shortly thereafter, filed for divorce. Christine Olson initially objected to the divorce and asked the court to order the couple into counseling through a legal process called conciliation. Almost immediately, both parties agreed that counseling was futile and moved forward with the divorce. The case is expected to be tried later this year.

Sources: SI.com, The Tucson Citizen

After Pamela Anderson’s latest split from Paris Hilton-sex-tape-star Rick Salomon, I started seeing her name pop up again in all of the celebrity gossip blogs, linked to several different new men. All I could think was “stop the madness!” This, of course, is the woman who has been married three times (longest marriage - three years) and engaged several other times. The whole thing got me wondering about the shortest celebrity marriages on record. I think we’ve come up with a pretty comprehensive list of the quickest unions and separations in Hollywood history. Here ya go:

• Robert Evans and Catherine Oxenberg - he was old (68) and she was not (36); they split after 12 days of marriage
• Ali Landry and Mario Lopez - this acting couple dated for six years and separated after two weeks of marriage
• Eddie Murphy and Tracey Edmonds -they dated after Murphy broke up with Scary Spice, then married on an island in the Pacific on New Year’s Day; they acknowledged that the marriage wasn’t legal and planned to have a legal ceremony in L.A.; it never happened, they split two weeks later
• R. Kelly and the late Aaliyah - the singers were married for less than three months before the union was annulled due to Aaliyah’s age (15)
• Janet Jackson and James DeBarge - the young Miss Jackson was secretly married to DeBarge for four months
  
• Nicky Hilton and Todd Meister - married in Vegas, this marriage was annulled after four months
• Charlie Sheen and Donna Peele - this lasted four months; Sheen has married and divorced since and is now engaged again
• Colin Farrell and Amelia Warner - these two co-starred in a movie and were married for four months
• Renee Zellweger and Kenny Chesney - an odd couple, this marriage was annulled after four months

Oh yeah, there’s more… Continue reading "The Shortest Celebrity Marriages Ever"

New York Giants defensive end - and recent Super Bowl champion - Michael Strahan’s attorneys were back in court this week, battling Strahan’s ex-wife Jean and her lawyers. Last year, a New Jersey judge awarded Jean Strahan over $15 million in their divorce plus an additional $18,000 per month in child support. The judgment was stayed or suspended pending an appeal. This week, the New Jersey appeals court heard arguments from both sides as to why the lower court’s decision was or wasn’t appropriate. The Strahans filed for divorce in March 2005. It quickly became ugly when Jean made public accusations of adultery and physical abuse by her husband. The couple married in 1999 and have young twin daughters. They signed a premarital agreement (also called a prenuptial agreement) which gave Jean 50% of all marital assets (estimated at $22 million) and 20% of Strahan’s income each year they were married in the event of a divorce. Strahan was apparently allowed under the agreement to designate what was and wasn’t a joint marital asset - as long as he set aside 20% of his annual income for his wife. Strahan turned pro in 1992 and presumably also had substantial separate or premarital assets.

During the divorce, Strahan argued that he was not obligated to pay Jean the 20% of his income because she did not ask for it each year of their marriage. His lawyers also argued that he earned so much money which he allowed to be designated as joint assets that her share matched or exceeded the 20% set aside provision. The lower court judge did not agree with Strahan’s interpretation of the agreement and ordered him to pay $14 million plus interest (almost 70% of the marital property) as well as child support.

Strahan’s attorneys argued to the appeals court that the lower court’s decision penalized Strahan for not setting aside that 20% during the marriage and ended up awarding Jean far more than she ever would have received otherwise. At least one appellate judge reportedly asked Jean’s attorney why it was appropriate to punish Strahan rather than make an equitable distribution of assets.

The Strahan prenuptial agreement is unusual (and has been resoundingly criticized) because it seems to give the non-earning spouse substantially more than she would otherwise receive pursuant to divorce law and because it allowed one spouse to designate what property was “joint”. New Jersey, where the Strahans lived, is an equitable distribution state - marital assets are supposed to be divided in a fair and just manner, which could be a 50/50 split but doesn’t have to be. It is possible that the 20% clause in the contract was supposed to take the place of spousal support or alimony. Even in that light, it is a very strange provision. And one that is now causing Strahan a lot of grief.

The appeals court is not expected to make a quick decision in the case due to the sheer volume of the official record of the case, which must be reviewed.

Sources: The Star-Ledger, New York Post

Tennis star Chris Evert was on the Oprah show today, showing off her engagement ring from fiance/golf great Greg Norman. The two were engaged last year. The talk show appearance sparked a little curiosity about the status of Norman’s divorce from Laura Andrassy Norman, his wife of 25 years. I checked it out and, boy, Mrs. Norman is not going quietly.

Very shortly after Norman announced that he and Laura were divorcing, back in May 2006, he was seen out with Evert. Evert was still married to her husband of 18 years, Andy Mill, at the time. Evert and Mill divorced in December 2006, with Evert reportedly paying Mill $7 million in the settlement. The couple has three teenage sons. The Normans have two grown children. The Normans and the Evert-Mills were reportedly very close friends for many years, even taking trips together.

The Norman divorce, filed in Florida where the couple lived the majority of the time, was filed in June 2006 on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. Things got nasty when Laura’s lawyers threatened to force Evert to testify. Norman’s attorneys then requested that Norman be awarded the majority of the estimated $300 to $500 million marital estate because he was the only party responsible for his enormous golf winnings and related endorsement deals. In the summer of 2007, the Normans reportedly settled the divorce, with Laura receiving somewhere between $100 million and $150 million in assets. That settlement was never fully finalized due to a disagreement on who would pay a tax liability on the couple’s jets. (Laura argues that taxes due on the potential money made from the sale of the jets should be paid by Norman because he was awarded the jets in the settlement. Norman’s position seems to be that the tax debt should be divided as a marital liability because of some tax filing details.)

Florida is considered an “equitable distribution” state when it comes to property distribution in a divorce. The court is supposed to divide the marital property in a fair and just manner, taking into account all of the circumstances of the marriage and the divorce. Adultery can be considered in making an equitable distribution in most “no-fault divorce” states. It is somewhat unusual though for adultery to cause a major imbalance in the distribution unless it can be shown that the cheating spouse wasted marital assets on the affair.

A judge signed the Normans’ divorce decree in September 2007, but allowed a few issues to remain unresolved - including the tax question. (This procedure is called bifurcation. See our March 24th post on Johnny Knoxville’s divorce for more information on bifurcation.) Laura’s lawyers then sought to depose Evert regarding private trips she took in the Norman jets. The judge denied that request. Norman has now filed suit against Laura for breaching a confidentiality agreement that was part of their divorce settlement by talking in interviews about their marriage and about Evert. That suit as well as the remaining divorce issues are still pending.

Sources: New York Post, New Zealand Herald, Vero Beach Press-Journal

Earlier this year, basketball star Michael Jordan filed a civil lawsuit in Pennsylvania against Lisa Miceli, seeking to have Miceli permanently prohibited from contacting him, his family or his representatives. Miceli is allegedly Jordan’s former mistress and mother of a four year old son, whom she claims is Jordan’s. Jordan’s lawsuit argues that Miceli has violated a 2005 no-contact agreement by sending him and his attorneys hundreds of e-mails and voicemails, including some which were threatening or violent.

Miceli claims that she and Jordan had an intimate relationship from 1999 until 2003, when she became pregnant. She gave birth to a son in 2004. A paternity test conducted in 2004 ruled Jordan out as the child’s father. Jordan submitted to second paternity test in 2005, which again ruled him out as the father. Jordan agreed to take the second paternity test if Miceli agreed not to contact him again if the test indicated he was not the child’s father. It is this agreement that Jordan now claims Miceli violated.

According to the Erie (PA) Times-News, Miceli recently filed her official response to Jordan’s lawsuit. In that response, Miceli challenged the validity of the previous paternity tests and asked the court to address her allegations of paternity so that she could move on with “child support, custody and visitation issues for the best interest of the child.”

When the parents of a child are unmarried at the time the child is born, the courts must actually establish legal paternity of the child before there can be any judgment of child support, custody or visitation. This will often be a simple procedure where the father merely admits that he is, in fact, the child’s father. If there is no admission, however, the court will order a DNA test which compares the alleged father’s DNA to the child’s DNA. This can be done by blood test but is quite often done by buccal swab - or a quick scrape of the cells and saliva from the inside of your cheek. The samples are then sent to an independent lab and compared. DNA tests can determine (or rule out) parentage with almost 100% accuracy.

Reports indicate that Jordan’s two paternity tests were processed by completely different labs but both determined that he was not the father of Miceli’s child. There has been no public indication as to Miceli’s basis for arguing that the first two tests were invalid. The Pennsylvania judge has not yet been asked to rule on her redundant paternity request.

With all the recent talk about how much Heather Mills stands to get in her divorce from Paul McCartney, we got to wondering what the other biggest divorce settlements were. There are a lot of lists out there, but we couldn’t find one as comprehensive as the one we’ve put together here.

It’s not surprising to discover that many of the marriages on this list were fairly long term (at least for Hollywood). In general, the longer the marriage, the larger the divorce settlement or award will be - for this group, at least. In the longer marriages, there was more time to accumulate marital wealth (also known as community property). For the shorter marriages on this list, the length of the marriage might not have made a big difference because it was the timing of the marriage that resulted in a big payout. If a celebrity has a few big hits at the box office or on the radio during a short coupling, the marital assets earned during that time could be substantial. For a great example of this, check out the Linda Hamilton/James Cameron divorce discussed below.

Celebrity Divorces: the Rich and Famous

• $3.5 million: actor/comedian Jim Carrey and Melissa Womer, his first wife. Carrey and Womer were married for eight years, from 1987 to 1995. They have one child together. The couple met and married before Carrey hit it big in Hollywood. During their marriage, Carrey found comedic success and starred in the television show In Living Color and in movies Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb & Dumber.
• $6 million: actor Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen. Stallone and Nielsen were married for only two years, but those two years saw the success of Stallone’s Rocky IV and Rambo films.
• $12 million: Stallone and his first wife Sasha. Stallone was married to Sasha for 11 years, from 1974 to 1985. They have two sons. After their divorce, Stallone almost immediately married Brigitte Nielsen. It was during his marriage to Sasha that Stallone rocketed to fame and fortune with the first three Rocky movies and the first Rambo movie, First Blood.
• $15-$25 million: rock legend Mick Jagger and model Jerry Hall. Jagger and Hall met in 1977. They had two children together before marrying in 1990. They divorced in 1999 after Hall found out that Jagger fathered a child by someone else. Jagger was successful in challenging their Balinese marriage ceremony and was able to have the marriage annulled. Hall still got a substantial settlement in the neighborhood of $15 - 25 million. Jagger’s net worth at the time was reportedly about $325 million (much of this though was likely made prior to the Jagger-Hall relationship and certainly before their marriage).
• $20 million: singer Lionel Richie and his second wife, Diane Richie. Lionel met Diane when he was 36 and she was 18. They reportedly began a relationship shortly thereafter, while he was still married to his first wife Brenda (Nicole Richie’s mother). Brenda and Lionel divorced in 1993. Lionel and Diane had a child in 1994, married in 1995, then had another child in 1998. They divorced in 2004, in a very public and bitter battle.
• $20 million: television host Johnny Carson and Joanna Carson, his third wife. Johnny and Joanna were married for 11 years, 1972 to 1983, but had no children together. The couple lived and divorced in California, a community property state, where the assets accumulated during the marriage are divided equally between the divorcing spouses.
• $20 million: rock star Bruce Springsteen and Julianne Phillips. Springsteen married the relatively unknown model/actress in 1985, at the height of his commercial popularity following the Born in the USA album. They divorced in 1989. He immediately began seeing his bandmate and future second wife Patti Scialfa. This short term marriage was timed right (or wrong, if you’re Springsteen) because of the vast amounts of money brought in by Springsteen between ‘85 and ‘89.
• $25 million: actor Clint Eastwood and Maggie, his wife of 31 years. Clint and Maggie Eastwood were married from 1953 to 1984. They were married before he became a star. Over the years, Maggie endured Clint’s numerous affairs. He even had a child by another woman while married to Maggie. She went on to have two children by Clint and didn’t divorce him for another 20 years. During their marriage, Clint became a huge international movie star.

And those don’t even crack the top 15… Continue reading "The Biggest Celebrity Divorce Awards Ever"

Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) and wife Linda were married for 24 years when Linda filed for divorce in Florida in November 2007. The media was aware that the couple was having marital problems when the couple attended therapy on their reality television show “Hogan Knows Best.”

There have been recent reports that Terry was having an affair with his daughter, Brooke’s, friend, 33 year old Christine Plante. According to Ms. Plante, the affair was not the cause of the divorce, and it began after Linda and Terry had already talked about ending their marriage.

How Will the Affair Affect the Divorce?

Custody: Florida is a no fault divorce state which means that when seeking a divorce a person must only show that the marriage is “irretrievably broken.” An affair may call into question the moral fitness of a spouse and could affect child custody issues, but in the Hogan (Bollea) case one child (Brooke) is no longer a minor and the other (Nick) is seventeen years old, so there will be no custody issues. Courts usually defer to the preference of teenage children 16 years or older when determining what parent the child will live.

Property: An affair by one spouse could have an impact on the divsion of marital property. For example, the spouse having the affair may buy gifts for his or her girlfriend/boyfriend or pay for trips. If the spouse uses community property funds to make these purchases, then the spouse responsible for those expenses must pay them back. A spouse involved in a dissolution proceeding who knows or suspects that his/her wife or husband had an affair during the marriage should review credit card statements and bank statements to determine whether their spouse spent any community funds on gifts or expenses for the boyfriend or girlfriend. These are the types of expenses that the offending spouse must pay back.

So, since Florida is a no-fault state, Linda has no legal recourse in terms of being entitled to more than she normally would in the divorce, but there are certainly precautions that she can take to ensure that she does get not end up “paying” more for the affair than she has to.

Football great, Jerry Rice and his wife of 20 years, Jacqueline, are divorcing. In June 2007, Jacqueline filed for divorce in San Mateo county, California. She is represented by Lindy Barocchi, and Jerry is represented by Stephen Montavlo. Both attorneys are certified family law specialists, which means they have extensive expereience praticing family law in the San Francisco Bay Area.*

According to media reports, Jerry had extramarital affairs throughout the marriage - and in 2002, he was involved in a paternity suit filed in Arizona. But since California is a no fault divorce state, however, whether or not Jerry had extramarital affairs will have no impact on the court’s rulings in his divorce from Jacqueline.

It has been published that Jerry and Jacqueline had no premarital agreement (pre-nup). This is likely accurate, given the fact that the two married twenty years ago - when premarital agreements were not nearly as prevalant as they are today. If there is no pre-nup, the ruling will probably be straight forward: Jacqueline will be entitled to half of the marital estate. Since the size of Rice marital estate is significant (the parties are selling the family residence in Atherton, California, for example, which is reportedly listed at $22 million), Jacqueline will likely not be awarderd spousal support (alimony). Chances are the courts will find that she will have sufficient income from the assets she is awarded to meet her needs, which effectively eliminates her eligibility for alimony.

*Legal Specialization (also called certification) in the area of family law is a designation that, in states where it is offered, tells of an attorney’s practice’s emphasis on the area of family law. Interestingly, even celebrities who can afford most any lawyer they want sometimes choose to be represented by lawyers who are not certified family law specialists, perhaps based on those lawyers’ experience in handling other types of celebrity cases.

As mentioned in a previous post, Tom Brady has child support obligations to ex-girlfriend Bridget Moynahan and their child. But news and updates on the subject have been predictably absent from the press. Tom Brady has a brand to protect, and a quick and quiet resolution is definitely in his best interest. That doesn’t mean people have stopped asking questions about the resolution, though, so we put a few “what if” questions of our own to resident family law expert, Monica Mazzei:

Q: Given the situation, and the image that Brady has to protect, what would you recommend a client in Brady’s situation do?
A: I would advise Brady to voluntarily pay child support. This would be done through reaching an agreement outside of court that provides that the amount paid by Brady meets the child’s needs. Voluntarily paying child support will most likely keep Moyahan from filing for support in the court system which means that Brady’s finances will be kept out of the public record. Also, making voluntarily payments will show that Brady is responsible and help him maintain his all-American image.

Q: Tom Brady makes $10 Million a year from his NFL contract alone. What amount might Tom be ordered to pay in child support if a court ruled on the issue?
A: With an income of $10 million per year, Brady would be considered a high wage earner (meaning traditional support guidlines would not apply to him). The court would most likely base support on the needs of the child, keping in mind that the child should share the same lifestyle as the high wage earning parent. For a young child under the age of one, sharing in the lifestyle of one of the NFL’s highest paid athletes, expenses could range from $20,000 to $100,000 per month.

Q: How much might Moynahan have accepted as a volutary child support payment?
A: This is a difficult question to answer. Arguably, Moynahan would not have accepted less than the amount needed to meet the monthly needs of the child. On the other hand, Brady may have paid more than the “monthly needs” amount in an attempt to stay out of court, which is expensive, time consuming, and possibly damaging to his career.

Q: If Moynahan accepted Brady’s amount of voluntary child support, would she be able to pursue a greater amount at a later date?
A: Moynahan is never precluded from going into court at any time to ask for more support.

When celebrities are getting divorced, involved in a paternity suit or are seeking a prenup they often turn to what are recognized as the biggest celebrity divorce attorneys in Los Angeles.

The majority of big divorce, paternity, and child custody cases are kept under the radar. But when a case goes public, the high powered family lawyers handling celebrity cases can get nearly as much press as their famous clients. High net worth individuals, and celebrities in particular, need an attorney who is not only an expert in the field of family law, but who is familiar with the judges in the Los Angeles Superior Court, and who can keep their divorce out of the tabloids and as low key as possible.

What follows is a list of the top celebrity divorce attorneys in Los Angeles and some of their more famous clients:

Continue reading "Top Celebrity Divorce Lawyers in Los Angeles"