AGREEMENTS — ANTENUPTIAL CONTRACTS — VALIDITY — ATTACK BY FOREIGN-BORN SPOUSE. Beginning to let these matters get mighty complicated, the Virginia Court of Appeals made some very precise distinctions and rulings for the first time when it reviewed Chaplain v. Chaplain, the case of a complaining wife originally from Morocco trying to overturn her pre-nuptial agreement. After that remand, with all sorts of directions for the trial judge to examine certain issues, or examine them in a different way, it now had to hear a second appeal by this wife because she was even more unlucky when the judge below did a very patient and very thorough job with all the requisite determinations and ultimately held the agreement valid. The Court of Appeals now does the same kind of scrupulously objective job with great thoroughness in Chaplain v. Chaplain II, unpublished, 25 VLW 931 (1/18/11), reviewing every possible issue, one by one. You may remember that the wife said her English wasn’t very good, so that merely finding that the husband was honest and open about everything at the time of marriage, the trial court could justifiably find that she married him in order to get his money and U.S. citizenship and had actually let it be known that she planned to lie about her understanding of what was going on at the time of the agreement if there should ever be a divorce. The Court of Appeals had ruled last time that husband did not make sufficient disclosure of his property holdings and wife had not waived her statutory right to disclosure before signing. And the Court of Appeals now says that the decision below sustaining the agreement would in fact be wrong if the evidence had proved either that the agreement was unconscionable at the time or that it was not fully voluntary. In this framework the Court of Appeals reviews the evidence in great detail. It finds that this wife spoke and understood English quite well back then, and it gives fully detailed findings as to why, so that lawyers taking on such a dispute in future cases might use these indices as a checklist. Before the marriage she read newspapers and menus in English, wrote business letters in English for husband, and was able to converse without a translator, dictionary or phrase book on some complicated subjects. The evidence also established that she had said that if there should ever be a divorce she would lie about all this, and the evidence also supported the finding that she had not proved any kind of physical or mental limitations or any financial oppression brought to bear so that the contract would be unconscionable. All the circumstances of her meeting up with her future husband during a vacation trip from Morocco here are reviewed, as is wife’s 15 or more years’ office experience in Morocco before that, her college education, and her preparation of business letters and other business documents in English once here. It was proved that she had the intellectual capacity to understand what the agreement would mean and she never proved at trial that she didn’t have at the time of the agreement the ability to support herself either over here or over there. The Court found no evidence of bad faith, concealment, misrepresentation, undue advantage or bullying on the husband’s part. And even though he did not completely disclose his financial condition, that alone is not enough to prove any of those necessary elements. The evidence proves she knew exactly what was in the agreement before signing, and had plenty of chance to consult with independent legal counsel if she had wanted. Nor was there any evidence of gross disparity in assets. In fact, the agreement said that the parties would keep their separate assets in the event of a future divorce as separate property. At this point the Court of Appeals says that even if the evidence below had proved a gross disparity of assets, that would not have made it unconscionable nor have established oppression or overreaching. The trial court’s finding that wife signed the agreement voluntarily was also well supported by the evidence, and hence the Court of Appeals affirmed.
