CBS4 anchor asks wife for alimony !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2007 4:29 pm
...........''I frequently say if I'm representing a husband claiming alimony -- if we have to try this case -- I'm going to put a skirt on him for trial,''
Source: miami
Posted on Sun, Jan. 21, 2007
When CBS4 anchor Eliott Rodriguez was sued for divorce by his wife of 13 years, who then argued that a judge should award her a bigger cut of their assets, he reluctantly made a decision that puts him in a very small fraternity.
Rodriguez, 50, decided to ask for alimony.
Despite laws in Florida designed to reduce divorce to a matter of numbers and eliminate the influences of age-old gender biases, few men ever seek alimony, lawyers say. Even fewer receive it.
Whether it's fragile male ego or the continuing disparity in incomes between men and women -- in the absence of any studies, lawyers are left to theorize -- men don't go after the money the law says they can have.
''A lot of lawyers feel uncomfortable even asking for alimony, even if [the men] are entitled, because it's a very tough row to hoe,'' said prominent divorce attorney Andrew Leinoff. ``They know a lot of judges raise their eyebrows at it.''
However, as women increasingly outpace their husbands in earnings -- the percentage of women who earned more jumped from nearly 18 percent in 1987 to more than 25 percent in 2004 -- the number of men receiving alimony will surely rise, some say.
''When you look at the stats of where people make money, it's in small businesses, and most small businesses are owned by women,'' said forensic accountant Loretta Fabricant, who currently has two cases in which the husbands are seeking alimony. She says she once helped a West Palm Beach husband win $10,000 a month in support.
SALARY INFLUENCES
This year, Fabricant consulted with a woman who hit it big in the recent real estate boom. After calculating how much it would cost her, the woman decided not to divorce her husband.
''It's going to become more prevalent as more and more women escalate in their professions,'' Fabricant said.
As co-anchor of the 5:30 p.m. newscast and an Emmy-winning reporter, Rodriguez earns $300,000 a year. His wife, Univisión anchor Maria Elena Salinas, 51, earns more: upward of $2 million a year, with $60,000 a month available for expenses, he said in court papers.
The couple also owns a four-bedroom, 3,900-square-foot house in Coral Gables and 2,000-square-foot condo in Key Biscayne, together valued at over $2.1 million, according to property records.
Rodriguez said he would happily have settled for an even split of their assets. But his wife, who left on Mother's Day and filed for divorce, argued that she had contributed far more to their marital till and, therefore, was entitled to more. She also asked for child support.
Rodriguez agreed both should support their two daughters and that his wife should get the house in Coral Gables if he got paid for his half. He is now living in the couple's condo and faces mortgage, tax and maintenance fees of $5,500 each month, he says.
But he also argued that he was entitled to alimony and attorney's fees to maintain the marital lifestyle.
That's when things got a little ugly. His lower earnings, his wife countered, were due to his own lack of ambition.
''Our position is once they're divorced, there's simply no need,'' said Salinas's attorney, Bruce Christensen. ``Eliott Rodgriguez does not need alimony making $300,000 a year. He can support himself like everyone else making $300,000 a year.''
Salinas denied that Rodriguez had contributed to her career. If anything, she argued, he constantly criticized her and complained. ''The only reason that the husband did not further advance his own career was due to his lack of desire to do so,'' Salinas' attorneys wrote.
Reluctant to be cast as a poster boy for alimony, Rodriguez explained the instructions he gave his attorneys.
'I said `Look, I'm a journalist. What I do for a living is gather information. I've gathered the information in my case and given it to all of you very high-priced lawyers. Now please apply it to my case and let me move on,' '' he said in a telephone interview. ``Instead, I find myself in the middle of this legal battle that I don't want to be a part of.''
Rodriguez says that he is going after the alimony because he is entitled to it because of the difference in salaries and marital lifestyle. If he wasn't entitled to it, Rodriguez says, he would not want it.
But it isn't that simple.
In 1995, in a seminal case that brought the same issue to a bitter courtroom battle, attorney Alice Hector, a partner at Steel, Hector & Davis, filed for divorce after her stay-at-home husband, Robert Young, admitted having an affair. After a 10-year battle over their 14-year marriage, Young walked away with just $36,000 in alimony.
SUPREME COURT
Florida's Supreme Court made alimony gender neutral in 1980, said attorney Maurice Kutner, who is representing Rodriguez. Every case, he said, is supposed to be based on the fairly straightforward set of ''operative'' facts.
The reality, however, is that if those facts go against stereotype, the man is likely to suffer, attorneys say.
''I frequently say if I'm representing a husband claiming alimony -- if we have to try this case -- I'm going to put a skirt on him for trial,'' said Kutner, who has never won an alimony award for a man in court but recently settled a case in which the wife agreed to pay her husband $5,000 a month.
Sometimes, men can be their own worst enemy.
Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and an attorney in New Canaan, Conn., once represented a woman who owned a book-publishing company. Her husband was a mechanic and earned far less, but he refused to ask for alimony.
''It's a macho thing,'' said Burton Young, a family law attorney for 57 years who represented Hector in the appeal in which she regained custody of her children. Because of the difficulty in winning alimony, he sees it as a better negotiating tool.
``The bigger issue here is how the judges look at men who seek alimony. That's the emotional thing. The old-timers, an old-timer whether male or female, sort of recoil when they see a request for alimony.''
Part of the difficulty can be the financial inequity at the outset. The spouse with more money can get a better attorney.
GENDER BIASES
''That's a big issue in family law,'' said Karen Haas, who represented Young during his three-year appeal.
``Don't give him $7,000 if she's paying her lawyer five times that. There's got to be some kind of parity.''
But the flip side, Haas explained, is that women have long suffered under the system and even now find that increased earnings can hurt them when it comes to getting child support, which in Florida ends when the child turns 18.
Young, 54, initially lost his bid for custody of their two daughters and alimony but won temporary custody on appeal, along with $8,000 in alimony, over four months. The victory gained national attention as it was cast as an attack on women with successful careers.
Hector and Young fought through repeated appeals. Eventually, Young lost custody but had his alimony upped to a lump sum of $36,000.
Young, who moved back to New Mexico in 2003 and refurbishes houses, says he was repeatedly penalized for being a man who gave up his career as an architect to care for his two daughters.
''I don't really know if I would do it again,'' Young said. ``In the final analysis, how long do you fight this? The answer should really be that it should not have to be fought because that's the law.''
Source: miami
Posted on Sun, Jan. 21, 2007
When CBS4 anchor Eliott Rodriguez was sued for divorce by his wife of 13 years, who then argued that a judge should award her a bigger cut of their assets, he reluctantly made a decision that puts him in a very small fraternity.
Rodriguez, 50, decided to ask for alimony.
Despite laws in Florida designed to reduce divorce to a matter of numbers and eliminate the influences of age-old gender biases, few men ever seek alimony, lawyers say. Even fewer receive it.
Whether it's fragile male ego or the continuing disparity in incomes between men and women -- in the absence of any studies, lawyers are left to theorize -- men don't go after the money the law says they can have.
''A lot of lawyers feel uncomfortable even asking for alimony, even if [the men] are entitled, because it's a very tough row to hoe,'' said prominent divorce attorney Andrew Leinoff. ``They know a lot of judges raise their eyebrows at it.''
However, as women increasingly outpace their husbands in earnings -- the percentage of women who earned more jumped from nearly 18 percent in 1987 to more than 25 percent in 2004 -- the number of men receiving alimony will surely rise, some say.
''When you look at the stats of where people make money, it's in small businesses, and most small businesses are owned by women,'' said forensic accountant Loretta Fabricant, who currently has two cases in which the husbands are seeking alimony. She says she once helped a West Palm Beach husband win $10,000 a month in support.
SALARY INFLUENCES
This year, Fabricant consulted with a woman who hit it big in the recent real estate boom. After calculating how much it would cost her, the woman decided not to divorce her husband.
''It's going to become more prevalent as more and more women escalate in their professions,'' Fabricant said.
As co-anchor of the 5:30 p.m. newscast and an Emmy-winning reporter, Rodriguez earns $300,000 a year. His wife, Univisión anchor Maria Elena Salinas, 51, earns more: upward of $2 million a year, with $60,000 a month available for expenses, he said in court papers.
The couple also owns a four-bedroom, 3,900-square-foot house in Coral Gables and 2,000-square-foot condo in Key Biscayne, together valued at over $2.1 million, according to property records.
Rodriguez said he would happily have settled for an even split of their assets. But his wife, who left on Mother's Day and filed for divorce, argued that she had contributed far more to their marital till and, therefore, was entitled to more. She also asked for child support.
Rodriguez agreed both should support their two daughters and that his wife should get the house in Coral Gables if he got paid for his half. He is now living in the couple's condo and faces mortgage, tax and maintenance fees of $5,500 each month, he says.
But he also argued that he was entitled to alimony and attorney's fees to maintain the marital lifestyle.
That's when things got a little ugly. His lower earnings, his wife countered, were due to his own lack of ambition.
''Our position is once they're divorced, there's simply no need,'' said Salinas's attorney, Bruce Christensen. ``Eliott Rodgriguez does not need alimony making $300,000 a year. He can support himself like everyone else making $300,000 a year.''
Salinas denied that Rodriguez had contributed to her career. If anything, she argued, he constantly criticized her and complained. ''The only reason that the husband did not further advance his own career was due to his lack of desire to do so,'' Salinas' attorneys wrote.
Reluctant to be cast as a poster boy for alimony, Rodriguez explained the instructions he gave his attorneys.
'I said `Look, I'm a journalist. What I do for a living is gather information. I've gathered the information in my case and given it to all of you very high-priced lawyers. Now please apply it to my case and let me move on,' '' he said in a telephone interview. ``Instead, I find myself in the middle of this legal battle that I don't want to be a part of.''
Rodriguez says that he is going after the alimony because he is entitled to it because of the difference in salaries and marital lifestyle. If he wasn't entitled to it, Rodriguez says, he would not want it.
But it isn't that simple.
In 1995, in a seminal case that brought the same issue to a bitter courtroom battle, attorney Alice Hector, a partner at Steel, Hector & Davis, filed for divorce after her stay-at-home husband, Robert Young, admitted having an affair. After a 10-year battle over their 14-year marriage, Young walked away with just $36,000 in alimony.
SUPREME COURT
Florida's Supreme Court made alimony gender neutral in 1980, said attorney Maurice Kutner, who is representing Rodriguez. Every case, he said, is supposed to be based on the fairly straightforward set of ''operative'' facts.
The reality, however, is that if those facts go against stereotype, the man is likely to suffer, attorneys say.
''I frequently say if I'm representing a husband claiming alimony -- if we have to try this case -- I'm going to put a skirt on him for trial,'' said Kutner, who has never won an alimony award for a man in court but recently settled a case in which the wife agreed to pay her husband $5,000 a month.
Sometimes, men can be their own worst enemy.
Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and an attorney in New Canaan, Conn., once represented a woman who owned a book-publishing company. Her husband was a mechanic and earned far less, but he refused to ask for alimony.
''It's a macho thing,'' said Burton Young, a family law attorney for 57 years who represented Hector in the appeal in which she regained custody of her children. Because of the difficulty in winning alimony, he sees it as a better negotiating tool.
``The bigger issue here is how the judges look at men who seek alimony. That's the emotional thing. The old-timers, an old-timer whether male or female, sort of recoil when they see a request for alimony.''
Part of the difficulty can be the financial inequity at the outset. The spouse with more money can get a better attorney.
GENDER BIASES
''That's a big issue in family law,'' said Karen Haas, who represented Young during his three-year appeal.
``Don't give him $7,000 if she's paying her lawyer five times that. There's got to be some kind of parity.''
But the flip side, Haas explained, is that women have long suffered under the system and even now find that increased earnings can hurt them when it comes to getting child support, which in Florida ends when the child turns 18.
Young, 54, initially lost his bid for custody of their two daughters and alimony but won temporary custody on appeal, along with $8,000 in alimony, over four months. The victory gained national attention as it was cast as an attack on women with successful careers.
Hector and Young fought through repeated appeals. Eventually, Young lost custody but had his alimony upped to a lump sum of $36,000.
Young, who moved back to New Mexico in 2003 and refurbishes houses, says he was repeatedly penalized for being a man who gave up his career as an architect to care for his two daughters.
''I don't really know if I would do it again,'' Young said. ``In the final analysis, how long do you fight this? The answer should really be that it should not have to be fought because that's the law.''