Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 4, 1990 TAG: 9003013747
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SHARI SPIRES COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But that's not happening, says Raoul Felder, the New York City divorce lawyer who has presided over some of the messiest marital splits of the decade.
In fact, Felder predicts the divorce rate will soar even higher and the process of untying the marital knot will get even uglier.
"No doubt about it, divorce is nastier today than when I started 31 years ago," said Felder. "And I think it will continue to be so."
If movies are a reflection of society, films such as "War of the Roses" and Roseanne Barr's "She-Devil" confirm Felder's assessment.
But the celebrity divorce lawyer doesn't need to look to Hollywood to see what the glamorous set is doing. His clients have included Robin Givens, Jackie Mason, the former Mrs. David Merrick, the former Mrs. David Susskind, the former Mrs. Frank Gifford, the former Mrs. Carl Sagan and the former Mrs. Robin Leach, to name a few.
"I've seen everything that happened in `War of the Roses,' with the exception of death in the sauna," Felder said in a recent phone interview from his Fifth Avenue office.
"Not that I haven't had people die," he added. "I've had several suicides and one man who dropped dead before the case was closed. You see them deteriorate and crumble bit by bit.
"I also had a husband who ran over his wife's dog, a wife who put her husband's cat in the microwave and another woman who put his cat in a washing machine."
Then there was the wife who took a hammer to her husband's priceless china collection.
Vindictive acts by divorcing parties are hardly confined to celebrities, Felder said. They just tend to make the news more often.
Val Gabaldon, a West Palm Beach, Fla., attorney who has represented clients in criminal and divorce cases for 21 years, said he's no longer surprised at anything that happens in a divorce case.
"In criminal cases, you see bad people on their best behavior; in divorce cases, you see good people at their worst," Gabaldon said. "People who are divorcing want vengeance."
One of Gabaldon's clients complained her ex-husband was bugging her phone. The man later crawled in her bedroom window and beat up her boyfriend who was sleeping with her. Another client tried to run over his estranged wife with his car.
"They steal and vandalize each other's cars constantly," Gabaldon said. "Breaking in the house and cleaning it out is pretty common too."
In one case where both people wanted the house, the husband broke in, put an ice pick in the refrigerator's cooling system, poisoned all the plants and sabotaged the alarm system.
"People getting a divorce are likely to do anything from beating each other up to turning in each other for child abuse," Gabaldon said."
Felder sees two causes behind the apparent increase in hateful divorces.
"We've had a decade of greed that has filtered down to the divorce cases," he said. "These younger people who are now getting divorced have a basic insensitivity and tolerance of violence that I never used to see. I think it comes from television."
Secondly, Felder said, the no-fault divorce laws haven't stopped the anger, merely sidetracked it.
Embraced in 1970s as the cure for messy marital splits, no-fault divorce hasn't worked, at least not among the very wealthy clients he represents, Felder said.
"A lot of the anger ends up in the child-custody issue," Felder said. "And a lot gets dumped on the divorce lawyer. You've really got to have broad shoulders to be in this field."
Gabaldon recalled one case in which his client had left her husband to live with another man who had gotten her pregnant. She then filed for divorce asking for alimony amounting to $100 a week more than the man made.
"I tried talking to her, but she wouldn't budge," Gabaldon said. "Naturally, when the case went to court, the judge laughed at her."
Afterward, outside the courtroom, the woman attacked Gabaldon screaming, "I told you what I wanted. You're not worth a damn."
Both Felder and Gabaldon say they have seen an increase in the number of child-abuse allegations - many of them spurious - being filed by one spouse against another.
Twenty years ago, men had little chance of gaining custody of their children, Gabaldon said.
"That changed just about the time no-fault divorce came into being," Gabaldon noted. "The law now says the husband and the wife stand on equal footing in gaining custody. That's not quite true, but it did open up another area of dispute."
Gabaldon said it is rare that a father can win custody of his children without showing something negative about the woman.
"That's where the allegations of child abuse or sexual abuse come in," Gabaldon said.
Recently, a Health and Rehabilitative Services child abuse investigator was relieved of his duties after, acting on a complaint by the ex-husband, he seized the children of one of Gabaldon's clients. It turned out the investigator and the ex-husband were good friends.
"I've always said, if killing each other was all they did, it wouldn't be so bad, but they end up destroying the children in the process," Gabaldon said.
Unfortunately, neither lawyer sees an answer to the escalating hostility surrounding divorce.
"I don't believe the words easy and divorce ever go together," Felder said. "It's such a devastating experience, such an experience of failure. To have an amiable divorce, you have to have two people who feel exactly the same way and that never or very, very rarely happens."
by CNB