PAYING THE PRICE
JOLIE, PITT SHOW BATTLE GOES ON — EVEN FOR SUPER-RICH
Poor Angelina Jolie. It can’t be easy trying to scrape together a living on her multimilliondollar earnings with no fewer than six children to care for. The last thing she needs is her ex-husband, Brad Pitt, paying “no meaningful child support since separation,” as she alleged in a recent court filing.
Pitt, for his part, countered that he had in fact paid more than US$1.3 million in costs, and lent US$8 million to Jolie to help her buy a house. By which point in the saga — and it’s now been two years since the two A-list actors separated — you’d be forgiven for walking away from the whole sorry spectacle, shaking your head and muttering, “Celebrities! They don’t know they’re born.”
To those of us yet to star in a Hollywood blockbuster, the sums may indeed seem eye-watering; the concept of wrangling over money when you have it coming out of your ears incomprehensible, even. But when it comes to divorce, money itself is not always the object — even in arguments that purport to be about just that. The court filing issued by Pitt’s legal team this week posited that Jolie’s claims were “a thinlyveiled effort to manipulate media coverage.”
While only Jolie herself, and perhaps her confidantes, could know whether this is the case, the accusation touches on a broader theme: that when it comes to a process that carries the high emotional charge of divorce, disputes ostensibly about finance may be a way of fighting battles of a very different nature.
Andy Francis, 43, a graphic designer from London, whose divorce proceedings started in 2007, knows this well. “Rather than settle everything in an amicable way, I was presented with a court summons and lawyers’ requests,” he recalls. “After a huge amount of money had been spent, and two years of battles, we ended up settling on what had been initially agreed in the first place.”
At heart, the protracted and undignified wrangling wasn’t about the cash sum at all, he believes. His ex-wife, who owned her own property, “would not have been on the breadline at all” had she not had her ex to support her, he says. “But she was being advised to get exactly as much as she could. Solicitors work very hard to make that happen.”
So, too, do the warring exspouses involved; and their motivations vary.
“Often money is used as a way of exerting control,” says Ruth Abrams, a partner in the family law team at SA Law.
“What we do find typically with many of our cases is, for example, the husband, the earning spouse, he will withdraw any financial support during the course of the divorce case. It might mean that he stops paying bills or refuses to keep funding a holiday.
“You sometimes have a non-earning spouse who’s been completely reliant on her husband to support her, and he may be feeling animosity toward his soon-to-be ex-wife and may no longer be willing to fund things.”
It may be his way of saying “I’m not happy any more” or “I don’t love you any more,” she adds.
Sometimes, these and other such negative feelings have simmered beneath the surface during the course of a marriage; when it comes to an end, they then bubble violently to the surface and manifest themselves through the process of financial disagreements, say lawyers.
“Family court proceedings can very easily become acrimonious,” notes divorce lawyer Patricia Beckett of Wilson Solicitors, adding that “the subject matter of disputes will usually relate to the failure of a relationship, how to divide up property and assets, and/or how time with children should be divided. These are all emotional issues, and many want to try and put the blame at the other party’s door.”
The supposed focus of the argument can sometimes be quite trivial, too. A lawyer at Stowe Family Law was once asked by a client to write a letter demanding that their ex return an expensive pot of mustard and some smoked salmon. This, despite the fact that the cost of the legal work quite evidently dwarfed the value of the desired condiment.
Beckett is familiar with the turn that these quarrels can take. “I have known divorce cases where parties will spend an inordinate amount of time and money arguing over a particular piece of furniture or an asset, at huge expense,” she says.
“Invariably these battles arise out of a matter of principle or sentimentality rather than the monetary value of that item. Family cases generally do not have a winner or a loser, but people lose sight of this and seek some kind of victory.”
The arenas in which they may do so, however, are limited. For in divorce, the two principal battlegrounds are namely financial and familial: money and children.
The wealth of the couple to begin with is, in this sense, irrelevant. As Jolie’s own lawyer, Laura Wasser, once said: “Divorce is the great equalizer. You can hack off or add on several zeros to the income or the size of the estate but in the end everybody has the same anxiety, sadness and anger when a marriage ends.”
And, often, a desire to control how that ends, too. Georgina Hamblin, a divorce lawyer at Vardags, has represented a number of celebrities and high-net-worth individuals in her time, helping win a jurisdictional battle for Malaysian former beauty queen Pauline Chai against her ex-husband Khoo Kay Peng, the Laura Ashley boss. She believes that “the amount of money you have doesn’t reduce the amount of control you want over giving it. It may even increase it”.
Likewise, where the parent with custody of the children is seeking more money in maintenance from the father — even when she appears to have plenty of money herself — other factors come into play.
“There’s an element of the parent who’s with of the time wanting the recognition,” says Hamblin.
“The biggest thing that gets in the way of is issues relating to the children and who has them when,” Hamblin continues. “If either party doesn’t get what they want, then there’s anger and resentment” with financial disputes becoming the vehicle through which that animosity plays out.
Jolie and Pitt have been caught up in a bitter custody battle over their children ever since their 12-year relationship ended. No amount of money, it would seem, can circumvent such messy separations.
But messy is perhaps an understatement in many such divorce battles, no matter what the riches in question might be. “Sometimes the parties are almost drawn to the conflict,” says Abrams.
Why? “Because they just don’t want the other to win.”
OFTEN MONEY IS USED AS A WAY OF EXERTING CONTROL.