Getting divorced is common. Winning the lottery is rare. But if you’re divorcing – or thinking about it – and your spouse buys a winning ticket, it never hurts to get the ball rolling early on making sure you get your fare share.
Case in point: In a divorce case that took years to resolve, a former lottery-winning husband and his ex-wife finally came to terms on how to divide the proceeds of a record-setting $149 million win back in 2004. As reported by several U.S. and international media outlets recently, about 20 years ago a man named Juan Rodriguez had a remarkable stroke of luck when he hit the jackpot in the lottery. At the time of the win, he was working as a parking garage attendant in midtown Manhattan making $28,000 per year, and had just $0.78 in his bank account. He owed about $44,000 to his creditors, and was only one month into bankruptcy proceedings when he bought a $1 ticket on his lunch break.
Naturally, Juan’s big win made the headlines at the time. But it also garnered attention because his wife Iris, to whom he had been married for 17 years, filed for divorce a mere 10 days a later. Pending a divorce settlement, she got an injunction preventing him from getting at his winnings – which amounted to $60 million after taxes, since Juan opted to take it as a lump sum.
They started haggling over the money in 2005, and it sat in a special bank account pending a resolution of their divorce. At one point the court allowed them to each have $2 million, to tide them over until their lawyers were recently able to work out a settlement.
In another lottery case, this time from Canada, the wife wasn’t so speedy to assert her claims against the husband. There, the couple had married in 1993 and had two children. In 2019 the father filed a notice of his Family Law claim and served it on the wife, but she failed to respond. He obtained a final divorce order soon after, on a default basis and without her involvement.
About 18 months later the wife went to court to ask that the default judgment be set aside. She claimed her initial non-response and delay were from post-traumatic stress disorder, caused by years of the husband’s abuse.
The court looked at her evidence, and accepted that at least some of her divorce-related defences were worth exploring. One of them was that she was entitled to a portion of $2.7 million that the husband had won in a lottery. The former couple was at sharp odds over whether this money was “family property” that should be divided equally: The husband claimed they separated before his lottery win (which meant it was excluded); the wife said they reconciled a few months later and then lived together for over a year (in which case it would be included).
With these facts in mind, the court reasoned that if the 2019 default settlement was not set aside as the wife asked, then she was poised to be unjustly penalized by at least $1 million, in a situation where she had no income, and had also been suffering from mental health issues.
The court accordingly ruled that despite the wife’s delay, the interests of justice called for the default judgment to be set aside. This would not only allow the wife to defend the husband’s claims against , to allow her to not only defend the husband’s claims against her, but also pursue her own Family Law claims against him.
For the full text of the decision, see:
Cretu v. Cretu, 2022 BCSC 305, 2022 CarswellBC 498, 2022 A.C.W.S. 2248
