Wife Attempts to Get Prenuptial Agreement Tossed in Appeal

In the case of Francavilla v. Francavilla, the husband and wife had a choppy relationship. They were married twice. The first marriage occurred within a few weeks of them meeting in 1982. They moved to Georgia where the husband began studying to become a chiropractor. By 1984, the wife had left the husband. Their first marriage ended in divorce. Three years after the divorce, the couple began living together again. The wife left the husband again and began living with another man at the apartment complex. By the end of 1992, the wife learned from her father where the husband was practicing chiropractic services. She scheduled an appointment with him, and they quickly began dating. Within a month, the wife was pregnant. The couple contemplated remarrying.

Because of their past rocky history, the husband insisted that the wife sign a prenuptial agreement “as a precondition of marrying her.” He told the wife that she broke his heart twice but she’s not going to take his money. Over the next four months, the parties negotiated the terms of the prenuptial agreement. Two months before the marriage, the husband’s tax attorney provided the wife with a financial statement and tax returns for the preceding two years. He told his wife to take the documents to her lawyer for review. But she never did. The wife did, however, know that the husband was worth between $1.6 and $2.5 million. At trial, the court determined that the disclosures “adequately apprised” the wife of the husband’s “financial condition at the time of the parties’ marriage.”

As part of the prenuptial agreement, the husband agreed to pay the wife $1,250 per month over the course of 5 years after the youngest child reached the age of majority (18). As far as equitable distribution went, the wife would be entitled to 10% of the husband’s “total net worth,” which included both marital and non-marital assets. However, the agreement stipulated that for each year of marriage beyond 10 years, the wife would be entitled to receive an additional 1% of the husband’s “total net worth.”

Arguing against a prenuptial agreement 

Once you enter into a prenuptial agreement with your spouse, the agreement is binding. There are precious few ways to get the agreement tossed once it has been signed. One way to do so is to argue that the party benefiting from the agreement somehow tricked or defrauded the other party into signing it. This is usually established by proving that the party did not make a full financial disclosure, hid assets, or otherwise lied about their financials when negotiating the terms of the prenuptial agreement. Alternatively, a prenuptial agreement can be voided if it was entered into at the point of duress or coercion.

In this case, the wife argued that the prenuptial agreement should be set aside because it was the product of duress. A prenuptial agreement can be set aside if the party attempting to vacate the agreement establishes that the arrangement was made under fraud, deceit, duress, coercion, misrepresentation, or overreaching. In this case, the wife argued that she was “in a condition of mind produced by an improper external pressure or influence that practically destroys the free agency of a party.” A party must prove that:

• The prenuptial agreement was effected involuntarily and thus not as an exercise of free choice
• That this condition of mind was caused by some improper and coercive conduct

In this case, the wife could establish neither and thus, the court rejected her appeal.

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Source:

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