After a whirlwind romance and 11 days of marriage, I discovered who my husband really is when I ended up in the hospital with a concussion and broken collar bone when he came home drunk. I got a restraining order and moved in with a friend.
This should be a no-brainer. I should file for divorce immediately but in a bizarre twist of fate, I learned last week that a distant relative died and rather than leave her estate to my mother, her only remaining relative, she left it all to me.
My friend told me because it was an asset I learned about during the marriage and we did not have a pre-nuptial agreement, my husband has the right to claim part of my inheritance.
Is she right? Is there any way I can protect it?
Now that you clearly have the means to do so, you should first hire an experienced family law attorney so you don’t make any missteps. The sooner you file for divorce the better. The shorter your marriage actually is, the less likely a judge will be to order you to give your husband a dime. While you say your marriage lasted 11 days, you are still married and each day you go without serving him with a divorce complaint and summons adds one more day to your marriage.
Your friend has a point. If you receive an inheritance during the marriage, a judge will consider it a marital asset and can order you to give him a certain amount of the inheritance.
However, generally when the court orders such a division, the parties have been married significantly longer than 11 days and they have used the inheritance for joint purposes during the marriage for things like buying a home, taking vacations or paying living expenses.
Here none of those factors exist so the money was not “woven into the fabric of the marriage.” When you say you learned of the inheritance, it sounds like you may not even have it yet. If you file before receiving the funds, that strengthens your argument that the marriage was irretrievably broken before the inheritance was received.
If you file for divorce and he makes a convincing play for some of the money, you do have another card in your hand. You have three years from the date of the incident that landed you in the hospital to sue him for damages on account of the physical abuse — especially when it was severe enough to land you in the hospital with a concussion and broken bones. You can ask to be awarded his share of any deemed marital assets. That should be enough to get his attention and help him realize just walking away is really the best road for him to travel.