Total Divorce Blog

A man in Spokane, Washington wanted to avoid a divorce so he decided that murdering his wife would be a better choice.  With Halloween coming up, it was just the right time to put his cunning plan into action.

Sean Jennings reportedly set up a haunted house in his garage and invited his wife to come have a look at it.  He then allegedly had her climb a ladder to test a noose where a skeleton was supposed to hang.  Mrs. Naive put her neck in the noose and then her husband pulled the ladder out from under her, according to police reports.

The woman still has bruises and rope burns on her neck from the incident.  She says that at the last moment she was able to get out of the noose by promising her husband that she would give him a divorce and that she would not tell anyone that he tried to kill her.

She kept her promise not to tell until she called police from a Wal-Mart parking lot on October 9.

As soon as the final paperwork is filed the divorce between actress Kate Hudson and musician Chris Robinson will be officially final.

Hudson and Robinson have both signed the final divorce paperwork and it has been submitted to the court for final approval and processing.  The famous pair were married for about six years.

Robinson was the plaintiff in the case.  He filed for a divorce from Hudson last November amidst rumors that she was involved with Owen Wilson.

No nasty custody battle here.  The pair have agreed to share custody of their son, Ryder, who is almost four years old.  There will also be no fighting over money.  The couple had a pre-nuptial agreement and Robinson did not seek any spousal support payments.

As far as celebrity divorces go, this one was fairly uneventful.

Jermaine Jackson and his ex-wife Alejandra were in family court today to settle matters of child support and custody of their children.

Things didn’t go so well for Jermaine. The judge ordered him to begin paying child and spousal support and refused to give him the 50/50 custody arrangement he had wanted.

Jermaine reportedly only sees his sons, Jaffar and Jermajesty, on alternating weekends. Alejandra says that he is an unfit parent because he does no help them with homework, give them lunch money and forgets to pick them up from school. It seems that those would all be difficult and unnecessary tasks for every other weekend visitation though.

The judge did not grant Jermaine’s request for 50/50 custody, but instead ordered the pair to work on their custody arrangement through mediation.

Jermaine got another smack down in court when the judge ordered him to catch up on child and spousal support payments. He now must pay Alejandra $11,511 per month in support, retroactive to July 1.

When Bernice Heslop won the $28.5 million jackpot in the lottery she decided not to share the good news with her husband. After all, she and her husband, Ernest Moore, Jr., had been living apart for more than five years and she certainly didn’t want to share the money with him.

Now, more than 12 years later, the legal fight over the lottery money continues. You see, her not quite ex-husband did find out about the money and sued to have a share of it. And the person who informed him that Bernice had won the lottery wants his fair share too.

When Bernice realized she had won the jackpot, she tucked her ticket away and called a divorce lawyer. She wanted a quick divorce.

Moore agreed to some easy terms for the divorce. There were to be no child support or alimony payments and the two would simply go their separate ways.

On February 1, 1996 the divorce was finalized and the next day Bernice went to the lottery commission to claim her prize money. She didn’t pose for any photographs or give any press interviews and was in and out within minutes.

Moore remarried and had no idea his ex-wife had become a millionaire until someone approached him and told him they had overhead some financial information that pertained to him. The person who approached him, Marvel Rodriguez, wanted 35 percent of whatever Moore recovered as a result of the information and Moore agreed, signing a notarized contract.

Armed with his new information, Moore sued his ex-wife and in 2000 they settled out of court. Moore received $300,000 plus $57,000 per year for 15 years. The confidential agreement gave Moore the money tax free, as Bernice agreed to pay all of the taxes owed on the money.

Each year when Moore has received his $57,000 payment, he has paid Rodriguez his share of the money, $19,950, but Rodriguez always felt as if he has been shorted somehow.

This year, Rodriguez finally found out how much he had been shorted when in August, a judge ordered Moore to disclose the terms of his agreement with his ex-wife. Rodriguez found that he is still owed $175,000 from the initial $300,000 that Moore received and he also wants to be paid interest on the money and 35 percent of the taxes Bernice paid on the settlement.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that he and his wife, Cecilia, are divorcing. The couple had been married for 11 years.

Sarkozy came into office as the President of France about six months ago, and his wife Cecilia has shown little interest in the whole ‘First Lady’ gig. Sometimes she would appear in public with her husband, and then sometimes not, whatever fit into her busy schedule. She once even snubbed the American First Lady, Laura Bush, by not appearing with her husband for a lunch date with President and Mrs. Bush and instead going shopping with friends.

The pair have appeared before a judge with their lawyer and said that it is a mutual decision to end their marriage.

Caren Ann Burke, 49, of Seymour, Wisconsin has divorced Rory S Burke and cited that as the reason on her August 23 petition to change her last name to bin Laden.

Perhaps rethinking her choice of names, Burke didn’t show up at Outagamie County Circuit Court this month for the hearing and Judge Dee Dyar dismissed the case.

In Court Dyar said he had received a letter from Burke saying that she didn’t file the third legal notice, as required by law, and did not intend to show up for the hearing.

In the ongoing saga that is the Britney Spears and Kevin Federline child custody battle, after a hush-hush hearing yesterday, today it was announced that Spears has lost visitation privileges with her two young boys.

Apparently the court is frustrated that Spears does not seem to be taking the court orders seriously.  It has been reported that the telephone number that the drug screening professionals were given was that of a cell phone belonging to an ex-assistant of Spears’.  Since Spears has been ordered to undergo mandatory random drug screening, the inability to contact her has frustrated the process.

Spears and Federline are due back in court on October 26.  Perhaps by then Spears will have complied with the court order and be able to have visitation with the kids again.

Oops … The state of Arkansas enacted a new marriage law this past July that allows children of any age, even toddlers, to marry. The law was intended to set 18 as the minimum age to marry while allowing pregnant minors to marry with parental consent. The Associated Press reports that an extraneous “not”, in the law, messed up the law.

An Arkansas judge recently upheld the mistaken law, ruling that the Arkansas Code Revision Commission could not correct the error. The Commission has authority to correct typos and technical errors, but Judge Tom J. Keith said the Commission had overstepped its bounds because correcting the error would have changed the meaning of the law. Only the state legislature has the power to make a meaningful change to a law.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel suggested court clerk’s follow the judge’s order. I wonder where you can find baby sized wedding rings? And …. How do you divvy up the pacifiers when they divorce?

The news keeps getting worse for pop singer Britney Spears. Earlier today, a California court ordered the pop singer to give up custody of her two children to ex-husband Kevin Federline, effective this Wednesday at noon. Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon ruled that Federline retain custody of the couple’s two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden, “until further order of the court.” The dysfunctional couple had been engaged in a bitter custody battle, with Federline recently asking for 70-30 custody in his favor after the couple had earlier agreed to a 50-50 split. It is unknown what caused Gordon to award Federline full custody, and a transcript of the court proceedings was ordered sealed. Spears and Federline were married for two years before finalizing their divorce this past July.

Last month, Gordon ordered Spears to spend eight hours per week with a “parenting coach” and to take drugs tests twice a week after it became known that she frequently used unspecified drugs. Federline and Spears were also both ordered to avoid alcohol or any non-prescription drugs 12 hours before taking custody of the children, to refrain from any “derogatory remarks” about each other during the case, and to undergo “joint co-parenting counseling.”

The last couple of months have been pretty embarrassing for Spears. Her career is going nowhere as evident by her shaky, lackadaisical and disturbing performance at the MTV Video Music Awards on September 9th. Spears’ former divorce lawyer resigned last month, and her management company recently quit after a month of representation. And now a judge feels that Federline would be a better influence on the couple’s children. Who would have thought it could get this bad for Spears!

In the New York Times, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, assistant professors of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that recent reports about marital breakups are “divorced from reality.”

They assert that statistics showing that couples married in the later 1970s are more likely than not to be divorced 25 years later are faulty. They claim the divorce rate has fallen continuously over the past quarter-century and is at its lowest level since 1970.

According to the assistant professors, marriage rates have fallen, but marriages are more stable than in the past. More couples, married in the 1990s, are likely to see their tenth anniversary than couples who married in the 1980s, who were more likely to be together after ten years than those who married in the 1970s.

The Census Bureau reported that more than half of marriages occurring between 1975 and 1979 had not seen their 25th anniversary. Stevenson and Wolfers point out the Bureau conducted its study in mid-2004, and at that time, it had not been 25 years since the wedding day of 1 in 10 of the couples surveyed. Those married in the last half of 1979 could not possibly have been married 25 years, yet. They say if the study had been conducted six months later, it would have found that a majority of couples married in late 1979 had made it to through their 25th year. Including all of the marriages in 1979, about 53 percent of those married between 1975 and 1979 had celebrated their silver wedding anniversary.

Divorces peaked at 22.8 per 1,000 marriages in 1979 and have fallen by 2005 to only 16.7 per 1,000.