Avarice, cruelty and this tawdry case tells us about the injustice of modern divorce | |
Quote: Avarice, cruelty and what this tawdry case tells us about the injustice of modern divorce
00:03am 14th February 2008
What an utterly unedifying spectacle the divorce of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills has turned out to be.
Treachery, greed, drug-taking, violence - the allegations have been endless.
Few now could doubt that here was a marriage as short as it was miserable, ending in a lingering acrimony that no amount of PR spin or brave smiles outside the courtroom can disguise.
Now, as the final scenes are played out in the High Court and the couple reportedly edge towards a deal, it is tempting to dismiss this nightmare as belonging to a world apart from ours, a world of private jets and public histrionics.
But the truth is that this carnival of bile, this showbiz showdown, demonstrates everything that is wrong with the divorce laws of Britain today.
Let's step back and take stock of the settlement that Heather is said to be seeking. The sums differ wildly, according to which of the warring camps you believe.
But the most reliable estimate thus far is that the former Ms Mills is in line for roughly £55 million, made up of a £20 million lump sum, plus £2.5million a year for the next 14 years, until their daughter Bea turns 18.
By any reckoning, that's an astronomical return on a marriage that lasted just four short and unhappy years.
Heather denies she ever set out to be a gold-digger, yet the result is that she will emerge from that courtroom with a fortune far, far beyond anything she could have hoped to earn independently.
And for her to suggest that it is in any way an equitable return on the emotional investment and sacrifices she made in motherhood and marriage is farcical.
Granted, if she and Macca had been married for 40 years, she would have a far more persuasive case for sympathy. But four years?
That's not a marriage, it's an overgrown fling.
Nonetheless, the law is on Heather's side. Because common sense, it seems, counts for nothing in the divorce courts today, still less a modicum of decency and fair play.
The result is that marriage itself has been cheapened.
For if this bitter case has served one purpose, it has been to send a powerful message that divorce is a bonanza for women, however badly they behave, and especially if they choose to give up work the moment they marry.
Whether she intended it or not, Heather has become an icon for the Great Female Gold-Digger's Movement, and one who will have lasting consequences.
We saw a precursor to this case with the landmark judgement in 2005 when the £85,000-a-year PR executive Melissa Miller took £5 million of her husband's earnings after less than three years of a childless marriage.
How can it be right, in our age of equal opportunities, that a divorced man is forced to work into perpetuity to compensate an ex-wife - even successful, professional, skilled women who are more than capable of supporting themselves independently?
The same is true, incidentally, of those increasingly common cases where a high-earning woman separates from a husband she has been supporting financially.
Whatever the sexes concerned, it is manifestly unfair that when two adults are capable of working, only one should continue to shoulder the main financial burden in the event of a separation - all the more so when that burden is so unnecessary.
Yesterday a High Court judge decided that serial divorcee Susan Sangster will walk away from her fourth marriage without a penny from her last husband because they had both signed a pre-nuptial agreement and both were independently wealthy.
But how had Ms Sangster amassed her personal £18 million fortune? Yes, through her three previous divorces.
Heather Mills will certainly be independently wealthy as well, after her divorce.
Just look at the list of demands that the Mills camp has presented as justification for the massive payout it is seeking.
We are led to believe Heather needs two homes, one in Britain and another in the U.S., 24-hour security and two full-time nannies, household staff, a secretary and personal trainer - all to be paid for by her ex-husband.
Now, of course, children must be properly provided for financially. But this isn't a checklist of necessity, it's a shopping basket of greed and indulgence from a woman who, until she got her talons into Macca, was living a comfortable but by no means luxurious life in the mews flat she shared with a tennis tournament organiser.
Ah, say Heather's team, but the fall-out from her acrimonious divorce is such that she is now virtually unemployable. I rather doubt that.
Even if she is obliged to sign a gagging clause as part of the deal, her future bankability will owe far more to her brief marriage to a Beatle than to her own rather limited talents.
Indeed, without it she'd be earning a pittance. How much do you imagine Heather Mills - landmine campaigner and former glamour model - would be earning now, aged 40, if she hadn't shot to fame thanks to her marriage?
She'd be lucky if she netted £50,000 a year. So how can it be right that she should walk away with £50million?
But perhaps even more damagingly, this case also teaches us that in today's divorce courts, women who engage in cruelty and smear tactics - egged on by their lawyers - can be sure that it will increase their eventual payouts.
By all accounts, Paul is no saint, but the lengths Ms Mills' so-called friends have gone to vilify him have been breathtaking.
He may well be mean with his money (who can blame him for that, given the way things turned out?), but a wife-beater, an alcoholic, a druggie?
Three decades of marriage to Linda would suggest differently, despite the rocky patches that they supposedly encountered.
So, why smear his character through carefully placed leaks? Why propagate such hateful stories?
Because, as any divorcing dad knows to his cost, they serve to threaten the one thing in life they hold most dear - access to the children.
For a vengeful and unscrupulous wife, allegations of cruelty and abuse are the ultimate weapon in her armoury.
Never mind that "abuse" is a term now so loose in law it can mean anything from being a wife-beater to a husband who shouts at the dog.
A wife doesn't have to prove her allegations for them to be taken seriously in the eyes of the divorce courts. A judge must rightly consider the safety of the children first. Proof is difficult to ascertain.
The result? All too often a father, damned by his wife's allegations, knows that it is better to be the victim of an unjust financial settlement than to be denied access to his children.
Some might call that justice. I'd call it blackmail.
For little Bea, of course, it may already be too late. With a vilified mother and a humiliated father, no amount of luxury homes or holidays will compensate for the fall-out from her parents' very public cruelty to each other.
Who are the winners here? Paul's entourage of lawyers, supposedly the most expensive ever assembled for a divorce case in Britain, will walk away with millions.
And this circus will doubtless be a nice little earner for Heather's hangers-on, the personal trainer and the make-up artist.
But as for the main protagonists, Heather will get her blood-money, yes, but in the process she has become one of the most vilified women in Britain. The once-great Beatle is now living proof that there's no fool like an old and rich fool. Lasting damage has been inflicted on all the children caught up in the crossfire - not just Bea, but Paul's three grown-up offspring, too.
No, whatever the eventual deal, there are no winners here.
But the real legacy of the Mills v. McCartney case is this: it has demonstrated, in all-too painful detail, exactly what's wrong with divorce in this country.
It is no longer about justice; it is an opportunity for avarice, a theatre for character assassination and a gladiatorial contest in which everyone loses - except the lawyers
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~ A man needs a woman like a lion needs a stove. ~
~ Women deserve only equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. ~
~ Men are not collectively "guilty" of anything. ~
~ Never needing to be pregnant is a blessing. ~
~ Feminist ideology “men have to respect women, but women have no reason to respect men” ~
~ Everybody makes choices, and nobody should be entitled to special treatment because of those choices.
Equal results based on unequal treatment amounts to no kind of equality at all. ~
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27th-February-2008
