I'm about ready to file for divorce from the Boston Globe:
"New Mass. alimony law a ‘model’ — but is it working?; Some judges ignore reforms, critics say" by Bella English | Globe Staff, October 20, 2013
Just more than a year ago, Gary Young was sentenced to 120 days in Middlesex Jail in Cambridge for failing to come up with $20,000 for his wife’s lawyer during their divorce proceedings in Cambridge Probate and Family Court. He was found in contempt of court and led away in handcuffs and leg irons.
“It was the most humiliating thing,” says Young, who is from Sudbury. “I’m in there with gang bangers and drug addicts and felons. I had no criminal record. I have a pharmacy degree and an MBA. I was a Marine.”
Six days later he was released by Judge Patricia Gorman after family and friends raised the $20,000. But shortly after, before his divorce was finalized, Young, who was unemployed, took a dramatic step to protest the system he says failed him and the new alimony law he says isn’t being enforced.
He lit out for a Cherokee Indian reservation in eastern Oklahoma. Young, whose father was half-Cherokee, says he has no intention of coming back to Massachusetts, where the courts have ordered him to pay nearly $4,000 a month in alimony — money he says he doesn’t have and shouldn’t have to pay.
It is 20 months since the state’s sweeping alimony law went into effect, replacing an old system marred by inequities and abuses, including, in some cases, alimony payments for life, even for short-term marriages. Critics said the old law discouraged recipients, most of them women, from supporting themselves, and from remarrying.
The new law, which went into effect March 1, 2012, was hailed as the most dramatic reform in family law in decades and as a model nationwide, with alimony based on need. Unanimously approved by the Massachusetts Legislature, it curbs lifetime payments and sets specific time limits on alimony for marriages of 20 years or less. In longer marriages, judges may still determine the length of support payments.
It also terminates alimony when the payor reaches full retirement age as defined by the Social Security Administration, though judges can extend alimony payments only for “good cause shown.” Such exceptions must be justified in writing by the judge.
Also under the new law, alimony is supposed to end when a recipient spouse has been living with another partner for at least three months.
“The message here is that everyone has to plan and be responsible for his or her own retirement,” says state Representative Gale Candaras, Democrat of Wilbraham, who cochaired the task force that wrote the new law. “The alimony law we had before discouraged people from rebuilding their lives and taking care of themselves after divorce.”
But the law, while a clear improvement, hasn’t been the hoped-for panacea. Judges, lawyers, claimants, and advocates complain that its language is unclear and confusing on key issues, leading some judges to misinterpret the law, and others to simply ignore it.
The previous law reflected an era when women kept house and men provided....
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The overall message? Don't get married in Massachusetts. Sorry, gays.
