A woman in New York has taken her husband to court for allegedly divorcing her in secret.
The couple married in 1994 not long after they first met at a mutual friend’s house. Despite the fact that her future husband was 30 years older than her, she claimed he was “absolutely charming” and that “it was love at first sight”. Following their marriage, she left her job as a college professor.
However, only four months after the wedding, the husband applied for a divorce in the Dominican Republic. He hired lawyers to represent both him and his wife in a hearing where he claimed his wife was “unbearable”, the New York Post reports. Despite these proceedings, he stayed with his wife for 20 years, the two had a son and the family divided their time between Manhattan, Massachusetts and France.
The wife was only alerted to the Dominican divorce in November, when she discovered a tax bill for the couple’s New York home which did not have her name on it. She then hired a lawyer to investigate. It was then that her husband’s legal proceedings were uncovered.
Following this discovery, she applied for the divorce to be nullified by a New York court. In her filing papers, the wife insisted that she had “no recollection of [giving] any authorization to anyone to proceed with a divorce”. The only way she would have done so would be if she had been “surreptitiously impaired, drugged or misled”, she continued.
The husband had obtained “an illegal and fraudulent divorce” in an attempt to shield his assets from her, she alleged. The 90 year-old’s divorce had not even been legal in the Dominican Republic, she asserted, because the law in the Caribbean nation requires that the end of a marriage must be published in a local newspaper.
Photo of Manhattan, New York by Maëlick via Flickr