LAS VEGAS JUDGE FINED FOR ROLE IN CANADIAN DIVORCE
Helping friend end marriage an ‘outrageous’ act
Melanie Andress-Tobiasson just thought she was doing a favour for a lawyer-friend close to death.
The Las Vegas judge looked over the relevant Canadian law, then issued a court order that would let her friend get a swift divorce in British Columbia — without the estranged lesbian wife having a say in the matter.
Suffering from cancer, the lawyer had wanted to finalize the split before she passed away; the woman she’d married in Vancouver a decade earlier had other plans.
Now, in a strange tale of cross-border legal misconduct, Andress-Tobiasson has been fined $1,000 for facilitating the B.C. divorce. As it turns out, she lacked jurisdiction to handle family-law cases even in Nevada, let alone in another country.
The state’s commission on judicial discipline publicly censured her this week for “multiple” code-of-conduct violations.
The judge’s reprimand adds an odd postscript to a unique period in Canadian legal history, when numerous American same-sex couples who got married here had to come back to end their unions, creating what a Toronto lawyer called a “small windfall” in fees for divorce courts.
That all changed in 2015, as the U.S. Supreme Court made the practice a legal right throughout the States.
But Vivian Wright-Bolton, the ex-wife of late lawyer Jennifer Bolton, is suing the woman’s estate, her law firm and the Las Vegas judge for what she calls an “outrageous” act.
Using the judge to get a Canadian divorce without Wright-Bolton’s knowledge caused “severe emotional distress,” required her to hire a Vancouver lawyer to fight the “fraudulent” annulment and deprived her of constitutional rights, the woman alleges in the $450,000 suit.
But Chris Rasmussen, a lawyer for one of the defendants, said Andress-Tobiasson simply got carried away as cancer consumed a popular member of Vegas’s close-knit legal community.
“We’re a small town here and everyone loved Jennifer. It was emotional for everybody to see someone so healthy collapse so quickly,” he said. “It probably caught Melanie’s emotions, too — ‘Whatever I can do to help’ — it didn’t seem like she was harming anybody.”
Bolton and Wright-Bolton — who owns a legal translation service in Las Vegas — married in 2004, travelling to B.C. after it became one of the first jurisdictions in North America to legalize same-sex marriage.
They were among hundreds of Americans who flooded to Canada to take advantage of laws that would generally come much later to the U.S.
By 2011, however, the couple’s relationship was finished, a custody battle ensuing over their two children.
Nevada still barred samesex marriage at the time and would not process the divorce Jennifer Bolton wanted, so she turned to a B.C. court in 2014.
Diagnosed with terminal cancer and in another relationship — with a Vegas courthouse employee who wound up adopting her children — she was anxious to finalize the break-up, and claimed Vivian Wright-Bolton was blocking the process, court documents indicate.
Canadian law was changed in 2013 to let foreigners in jurisdictions that barred same-sex marriage to get a divorce in the province where they were wed. It required each party to consent, but when that was not possible, permitted filing of a court order from the place the couple lived.
Armed with the controversial order from Andress-Tobiasson, Bolton obtained a divorce from a judge in B.C. When her estranged wife found out what had happened, Wright-Bolton complained to the Nevada court.
Andress-Tobiasson, who normally oversees preliminary inquiries and other minor criminal hearings, later rescinded her order, and the Canadian divorce was also, eventually, overturned.
Jennifer Bolton died in April 2014. The divorce finally went through in Nevada after the law changed, said Rasmussen.
According to a report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the judge was in tears at her discipline hearing.
“This was such a different, unique situation,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “I was wrong.”
The commission noted the judge had no previous discipline history and said her work had been otherwise “exemplary.”