After getting the prize and keeping it a secret from her ex-husband, a woman was eventually compelled to hand over the large lottery win to him. That had to be a pretty deep burn.
Not only do you go from the high of winning a large sum of money to the low of losing it, but you also have to lose it to your ex-husband. Is there a more tragic story? To be fair, most likely.
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- Woman asked to handover hidden jackpot amount to husband after divorce
- The man obtained an injunction and brought his wife to court
Woman asked to handover hidden jackpot amount to husband after divorce
Fox/Karol Serewis
According to the judge, this is something Denise Rossi brought on herself. Rossi and a group of coworkers bought into a California lottery syndicate, and their numbers came in just 11 days before Rossi filed for divorce in 1996.
She’d won a $1.3 million jackpot – £1.02 million in today’s money – but had elected not to notify her husband Thomas. He didn’t find out until years later when he received a letter from a corporation that pays out lump sums to lottery winners.
It was written to Denise and stated that the company had ‘helped hundreds of lottery winners like you around the country get a lump-sum payout for the present value of their future annual lottery winnings’.
Denise, the court heard, had the actual cheque sent to her mother’s residence while concealing the fact from her husband and, critically, the divorce court.
Denise said she had ‘wanted to get out of [their] relationship for years,’ but Thomas claimed he had been ‘blindsided’ and left ‘confused’ by what had occurred.
“She wanted me to get out of the house as soon as possible,” he told PEOPLE. “This was not typical of her.”
The man obtained an injunction and brought his wife to court
He obtained an injunction and brought Denise to court, where it was determined that she had broken laws requiring the disclosure of assets and cash prior to divorce and that she had done so with deception or malice.
The then-49-year-old was ordered to pay her ex 20 annual payments of $66,800, totalling the whole amount of her award.
Denise’s lawyer, Connolly Oyler, stated that if she had simply told them about the windfall, she could have kept it.
“I could have successfully argued that it was her separate property,” he explained. “Alternatively, we could have argued and reached an agreement.”
“But the judge became enraged and gave it all to him.”
Her lawyer did concede that the punishment was ‘very harsh’ for his client. Still, there’s a lesson somewhere in there. Denise Rossi, on the other hand, probably doesn’t like thinking about it.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn