Rose Mary
Posted on 07/26/2008 8:24:50 AM PDT by sjl127
A jury this week ordered RoseMary Shell's ex-fiance, Wayne Gibbs, to pay her $150,000 after he broke off their engagement three days before the wedding by leaving her a note in their bathroom. Do you think she should receive financial compensation?
I could see such a thing as breach of verbal contract, but I’m not sure how you’d come up with a figure for damages.
So now there is precedence for a jilted bride or groom to sue for damages.
It’s Bushes fault.
Depends on the circumstances of the split-up but if he just chose to call it off he should make good on ALL the expenses.
I doubt there will be any more marriage proposals coming her way any time soon. If they do, and her fiance has any brains, there will be a bulletproof prenuptial agreement
The contract itself comes when you each sign the wedding license and file it.
Three days before the wedding?
It would seem he could be obligated to pay for unrecoverable losses (wedding dress, caterer deposits, hotel rooms, air fare etc.) due to the cancellation, which depending on the wedding could be a significant amout, though 150K seems a more then a tad steep.
Damages would be calculated the way any breach of contract damages are calculated.
Let’s say someone asked you to quit your $80,000 a year job to move to another city for another job with tenure. When you get there some important components of that new job didn’t materialize and you could only find a $30,000 job there.
I suspect more than a few prospective engagements will be trashed by this precedent. Why on earth would any sane man now risk his financial security when the courts have now ruled that a woman can cash in for big bucks by getting dumped? Now, any time there is a fight before the wedding day (and there almost ALWAYS are) there is a neat and profitible option: just get hysterical enough for the guy to call the wedding off, then head straight for the lawyers office. The Courts are killing marriage.
I would like to know what state this occurred in. 28 states prohibit this type of suit by law under what is called “heart balm statutes”.
Doubt she will get another sucker at her age.
Cheers!
If she had a mature attitude & discipline, she would not have been $42K in debt. The groom to be had paid off $30K of that for her and bailed when he found out she had more.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/25846393/
OK. I see that it was in Florida. Currently only nine states explicitly allow this type of action: Illinois, Hawaii, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota and Utah. 28 states prohibit them by statute. So I guess Florida has no explicit law on the matter.
There, fixed it.
according to what I heard on BOR’s show she kept the ring and he had already paid off $30,000 of her debt when they were dating. So it seems she came out pretty well overall when you add in the $150,000.
Georgia I believe, though she was from FL.
>>>The Courts are killing marriage.
The goal of Liberalism.
Before we all go ballistic, I’d like to know some more details to this story. It sounds like she sued for the money she (and perhaps her family) lost on the expense of the wedding. I do not think that it would be unreasonable to ask for the man who walked away to pay the expenses. Sorry.
Yes you are correct. The suit was filed in Georgia.
It was Gainesville,GA, right up the road from me. This guy needs to get a better lawyer on appeal.
A jury in the U.S. state of Georgia gave some relief this week to a furious woman scorned by a man, about $150,000 worth.
Rosemary Shell, 46, was scheduled to marry Daniel Gibbs in 2007 but he broke off the engagement a few months before the planned wedding.
Shell testified that she’d quit a high-paying job in Florida to join Gibbs in Gainesville, Ga., about 80 km northeast of Atlanta.
Her new position paid less than half of what she earned as a human resources manager for a newspaper company, she said.
She told the jury of six men and six women that she wanted compensation for lost income and for the suffering caused by Gibbs’s desertion.
“He asked me to marry him. He gave me a ring and I gave up my life and my career,” Shell testified, “He told me he would pay my bills and that we would be married by the holidays and we would live happily ever after.”
Instead, she returned home one day to find Gibbs’s wedding ring, a cheque for $5,000 and a note breaking off the engagement.
Gibbs was having an affair with another woman, Shell said.
For his part, the reluctant bridegroom said Shell had heavy debts and he got tired of paying them off.
His lawyer, Hammond Law, told jurors that finding in favor of Shell’s suit would open the floodgates to similar cases.
'Hope the Brinks truck backs up to the jury room' “You would be sending the message that if you have a dispute with somebody and you think they have been a scoundrel, go get a lawyer and hope the Brinks truck backs up to the jury room,” Law said in his closing argument.
“If you award one penny, you’re saying, ‘File frivolous lawsuits.’”
Juror Delita Smith told local media that she disagreed with the award, but was persuaded to go along with it by fellow jurors.
“He paid her a bundle, along with the engagement ring, and that really was worth a lot of money,” Smith told an Atlanta-area television station.
She said the amount of the award was based on one year of Shell’s former salary, plus benefits and a bonus she would have received if she hadn’t quit to marry Gibbs.
Judge Kathlene Gosselin said lawsuits for breach of promise in broken engagements were not unknown in the U.S.
“By the very nature of the action, there must be an actual promise to marry and acceptance of that promise before one can be held liable for a breach,” Gosselin said in her instructions to the jury.
Neither Gibbs nor his lawyer commented after the verdict.
----------------------------
Now that I've read the REST OF THE STORY..This is a TERRIBLE precident. I hope it's overturned.
There's a world of difference between "asked" and "forced". He didn't make her quit her job - she did that of her own free will.
The most predictable outcome of this case, if it's not beat on appeal, is that fewer men will propose.
Rose Mary
Wayne (about have less money)
I saw her admit he paid off her debts and I am astounded he owes her one red cent. What an ungrateful witch.
And they wonder why men aren’t marrying anymore. Treacherous beasts on the prowl for money, or they come with 3 kids from 3 different fathers covered in wretched tattoos and sagging mushroom soup arses. Thank the Lord I got a good one and ain’t searching for someone in my age category.
Any woman that would quit a good job and move in with a man she isn’t married to is an idiot anyway. She’s old enough to know better. So is he.
Don’t kid yourself, marriage has often been interfered with by money, and this is the real threat.
Marriage gives advantages to both men and women, and their children, above basic biological reproduction. It was a promise to the man that the offspring would be his, and the promise to the woman of a provider to help her support the children. And the benefits to the children are obvious.
However, marriage can also be seen as disadvantageous to the man and woman’s respective families.
The first result of this was the dowry, since the bride’s family would be losing a daughter who would profit them as a worker. The grooms family would be gaining her children. So they dowry was a payment for her children.
Then along came arranged marriages, that truly subverted the biological advantages of marriage. Men and women, or boys and girls would have their marriage arranged irrespective to preferred partner, or even if they loved each other. Children were downgraded as well, raised in a loveless marriage.
It is ironic that a lot of the modern rejection of marriage is not because of marriage itself, but because of the baggage piled on marriage, making it more difficult and onerous.
The first part is out the window. Look at the cases where DNA proves that his spouse/significant other/whatever was boinking someone else and yet he is still on the hook to raise someone else's spawn. The latter on the other hand is the sum-total of the marriage game. Support me whether I (or you) stick around or not. (no argument with supporting kids, IF THEY ARE YOURS) It's no wonder that shows featuring aging cougars on the prowl are popular, as there are more than a few viewers who do the same thing. Then they get angry that nobody wants em. What a shock.
And if it cost him $150K to unload the old battle-axe it was still a bargain!
I cut my farce teeth on Wodehouse. Splendid stuff.
She looks 66, not 46. I guess living in sunny Florida will do that to a gal.
Traditional marriage as a system only worked when it was a socially enforced system. That is, other people respected it, or else. Because of the corruptions I mentioned, such as dowry and arranged marriages, a reaction arose to reject marriage altogether.
However, soon it became obvious that the purposes of marriage needed to be enforced, if not socially, then by the law. And this is what is happening in society right now.
It began with divorce alimony and child support, whose purpose was provision for the children, and to support the wife who had raised children but would otherwise be deprived of support in a divorce.
That is two thirds of the equation. What remains is the legal assurance to the male that the children are his.
The ball began rolling for this in the counter to demands for child support. This was the paternity test, as you pointed out. However, it goes head to head with an odd concept in Common Law. That is, if you support someone for a period of time, and by doing so establish dependency, the law might require you to continue supporting them.
This is not widely known, but even applies to strangers. So you should always be careful about repeated, unsolicited gifts to other people for which you receive nothing tangible in return.
Another twist is that the state has a compelling interest in forcing child support, instead of paying it itself. So more and more, women are being required to state who the father is when a child is born.
For this reason, I imagine that in the future, when a child is born, a sample of blood will be taken from their umbilical cord, that will be retained by the hospital. The woman will be asked to identify the father of the child, and if she does, he will receive legal notice that he has say, a six month period, in which to have a DNA test to determine parentage. If she refuses to identify a father, the umbilical cord blood will be retained indefinitely.
If the alleged father is with the mother, and the DNA matches, he has support responsibility. If it does not match, for example because of sperm donation, with agreement of the mother he can still assert paternity.
However, if it does NOT match, and he does not want support responsibility, then within a period of some days, he must discontinue the relationship with the mother. He cannot continue to have a relationship with her and not her child, because they are legally one entity. If he continues the relationship, he automatically assumes support responsibility of the child.
If they already have children together, he also cannot choose to support just his biological children, so must either stay with her and all the children, or have the court decide what percentage of child support he is responsible for if they are divorced or separated.
Thus, the interests of the children, the mother, and the father will finally duplicate, in the law, what they had in traditional marriage.
A convoluted way of achieving what was once had, but is now lost to some extent, because people confused marriage with money.
That's also a big problem.
Nope. It's a shining example of how lawyers can screw up anything, even a tradition as old as marriage. Anyone who believes otherwise is probably a lawyer.
Would have been funny if it bounced.
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