Every so often a Family Law decision reads less like a judgment and more like a novel. The ruling in La France v. Saroli is one of those.
The basic facts involved a 4.5-year relationship between a woman named Louise, and a man named Robert. Louise was a retired Family lawyer living with disability. Robert was an extremely wealthy businessman; he had sold his company for roughly $380 million.
When they split up, Louise sought spousal support, but Robert resisted on the basis that she wasn’t entitled to much – if anything – from him. This despite Louise’s sworn evidence that they’d had a serious romantic relationship, and despite the fact that his income for support purposes was estimated by the court to be about $63.69 million a year.
In considering Louise’s support application, the court also heard from Robert, who tried to portray his lifestyle as being much more average than might be expected. As the court explained:
For example, during his evidence he testified “I lead a very modest life” and “I do not have the lifestyle of a wealthy guy.” However, the evidence is uncontested that [Robert]:
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- paid $18 million cash for a home for the parties on Lakeshore Road in 2021;
- owned a second home in the Cayman Islands that he valued at over $5 million;
- lost $60 million playing poker and baccarat in the first three months of 2024;
- enjoyed travel on a private jet, to and from the Napa Valley and Las Vegas, courtesy of a casino; and
- hosted an annual Halloween party in Las Vegas for hundreds of guests.
Based on this kind of evidence, the court drew adverse conclusions about his credibility:
For whatever reason, it was very important for [Robert] to tell himself and the court that he still lived a modest life. That self-image, however, is objectively and profoundly inaccurate and it causes me to have serious doubts about the accuracy of much of his evidence.
That set the tone for the rest of the fact-finding and legal conclusions in the case. It also opened the door for the court to scrutinize a set of secretly-recorded conversations between the former couple.
Louise had recorded four conversations with Robert without his knowledge. In Family Law trials, that kind of surreptitious recording is presumptively inadmissible. Ontario courts have consistently discouraged the practice, on the theory that the harm to trust and to the broader Family Law system usually outweighs whatever the recording proves.
However, the court ruled that in this case, on these facts, the presumption as to inadmissibility could be rebutted. In other words, the court ruled that Louise’s secret recordings of her conversations with Robert were admissible, because their value was simply too high to do otherwise. They were the best evidence of how Robert felt at the time, and it would have “done a disservice to the court’s truth-seeking function to exclude them,” the court said.
And what those recordings showed, was that Robert’s bid to position the relationship as mainly “causal” and as having ended much earlier, was simply not supportable. There was also written evidence to consider: For example, several weeks after a Louise finally moved out, Robert sent her a string of text messages from which the court quoted at length, including one he sent on a flight home from a Spanish beach vacation. One of them said:
I have never cried like this before but I cry tears of love for you… I love you darling and I miss you more than you know.
Based on this kind of evidence, the court found the couple had a serious and committed relationship, and that they cohabited long enough to qualify Louise for support. It awarded her a lump sum of $3 million (structured as a lump sum specifically to cut off any need for the two of them to keep dealing with each other), but rejected her separate claim for unjust enrichment.
For the full text of the decision, see:
La France v. Saroli, 2026 ONSC 1783 (CanLII)
https://canlii.ca/t/kk3r3
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