This was the story: “A ruling by the California Supreme Court may save Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants millions of dollars because of a prenuptial agreement. The ruling on August 21, 2000, reversed a lower court decision that had ruled it was unlikely a trial court could find the agreement valid.”
In the above case, Barry Bonds and his bride-to-be, Sun, made a stop at his lawyer’s office in order to sign a prenuptial agreement. The stop occurred as they drove to the airport for a scheduled Las Vegas wedding. At the signing, Bonds had his financial adviser and two lawyers in attendance while Sun had only a friend from Sweden with her.
This occurred in 1988 when Bonds was earning $106,000 a year working for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Under the terms of the prenuptial agreement, when the couple divorced six years later, Sun received $10,000 per month in child support for each of their two children, and $10,000 per month in spousal support which ended in 1998.
This financial settlement would delight the average wife but Barry Bonds wasn’t earning $106,000 a year when he and Sun divorced, he was earning $8 million a year with the San Francisco Giants. Because California is a community property state, Sun would have been entitled to half of his earnings. Because she signed the prenuptial agreement, she received a fraction of what she would have otherwise received.
I admit to having a difficult time understanding how a couple could love each other enough to marry, yet not trust each other enough to enter that marriage without a prenuptial agreement. Shouldn’t marriage be the legal knot that not only binds two people together but also their possessions now and during the course of the marriage?
There are some instances where a prenuptial agreement might make sense particularly if one person is bringing a lot of property into the marriage, property that rightly should go to the children from a prior marriage should the parent die.
Without a doubt, anyone who feels they didn’t get a fair split of marital property when they divorced would be more apt to want a prenuptial agreement before they married again. Likewise, anyone who received less at divorce than they would have received if they had not signed a prenuptial agreement probably would not be quick to sign another one.
I wish couples didn’t need to consider prenuptial agreements. But with the divorce rate at well over 50%, I guess the idea of love everlasting and “till death do us part” are going the way of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It’s the stuff that kids believe in until they get old enough to know better.