When the "Marriage" Was Never a Marriage

"Appellate Court Upholds Annulment---Aiming to get funds, future husband lied about marital history, finances, transvestism".
(Headline from 12/25/07 article in Arizona Daily Star)

When I had an active divorce law practice, I frequently met people who wanted to file for annulment rather than for divorce. Annulment means that there was a legal "impediment" to the marriage that rendered the marriage null and void from the start. People apparently feel there is less stigma to an annulment than to a divorce, and getting an annulment removes any religious objection to remarriage (since, legally, there wasn't a marriage in the first place, even though there was a wedding ceremony).

What is or is not an impediment varies from state to state, but typically they include anything that would have made the marriage a legal impossibility (such as one party already being legally married to someone else), or anything that one party deliberately concealed before the wedding that, had it been disclosed, would have caused the other party to bail out of the deal (e.g., no intent or ability to have sex, or marrying someone solely to get U.S. citizenship).

Most of the time, though, people seeking an annulment can't cite a legally-recognized impediment. They simply feel that, if they had known then what they know now (that their spouse is a slob; a poor communicator; a chronic nag or complainer; a cheap, miserable s.o.b.), they never would have married him or her. Unfortunately, such behavioral traits are not grounds for annulment. Divorce is normally the sole legal remedy for terminating the marriage of those who have been disappointed in their choice of partners.

With that as background, I was more than a little surprised to read about a Tucson, Arizona couple---Ronald and Kumiko Cuthbertson---whose marriage was, at Kumiko's request, annulled by a family court judge. What particularly surprised me was that the couple had lived together in Japan for 17 months before getting married there in 1999 (they had met on the Internet); then moved to Tucson, where they got married in an American ceremony in 2001; and then continued to live together another four years in Tucson before Kumiko filed for annulment in 2005.

Normally, if there is truly an impediment to the marriage, it's going to be discovered shortly after the wedding, not six or seven years later. In the Cuthbertson case, what saved Kumiko was her limited understanding of English. She had to use a dictionary to understand Ronald's e-mails at the beginning of their relationship, and she was overwhelmed, confused, and misled by his fast-talking accounts of nonexistent business deals, nonexistent book publishing contracts, and similar schemes designed to, as the court concluded, separate her from her money.

Ronald had also lied to her about his numerous former wives (one was a prostitute), and he was a long-time transvestite. However, all four of those earlier marriages had been legally terminated by divorce, and Kumiko had learned of Ronald's cross-dressing practices while they were still just living together. The court noted Ronald's promise to Kumiko that he would stop wearing women's clothes once they got married, but, here too, the court seemed to give her the benefit of the doubt. Normally, you can't knowingly get married to, say, an alcoholic, or a cheater, or a spendthrift, and then claim later on that you're entitled to an annulment because your spouse had failed to keep his promise to change his ways.

I think what happened here is that the court stretched the law a bit to produce a fair result. Arizona is a community property state, which means that if Kumiko had filed for divorce instead of annulment, she would probably have had to give Ronald 50% of her assets, and---who knows?---maybe even pay him alimony. With an annulment, the community property and alimony laws don't apply, because by definition there was no marriage.

From everything I've read of the case, I'm convinced that Kumiko paid a heavy price for her years with Ronald, and I'm glad that she won't suffer additional financial losses in the future. But I hope that the case doesn't give false encouragement to those who decide, years after their wedding day, that they can simply get the marriage annulled and thus avoid the messiness, stigma, and financial consequences of the divorce process.