California’s 2nd District Court of Appeals has decided that the financial settlement agreed to during the divorce between former Los Angeles Dodgers owner and his ex-wife will stand.
Divorce Settlement Stands
The appeals court has refused to overturn a financial settlement that paid Jamie McCourt $131 million in addition to other assets in order to resolve the couple’s divorce. Jamie McCourt sought to block the deal on claims that McCourt misled her about how much the team was worth as well as television broadcast rights.
Unanimous Ruling
A unanimous ruling by the three-judge panel will leave the agreement intact, ruling that there is no basis to overturn the ruling from the lower-court. That lower-court judge found Jamie McCourt was not credible when she claimed that her ex-husband had not provided accurate estimates for the baseball team’s worth. The Dodgers were sold for $2 billion in 2012 to Guggenheim Baseball Management.
The ruling noted that not only did Frank McCourt provide more than 220,000 pages of financial records to his ex-wife’s lawyers during the divorce proceedings, but also that Jamie McCourt reviewed a document that estimated the combined value of the Dodgers and television rights to be more than $2.4 billion while she was a team official during 2009.
Divorce
Jamie McCourt filed for divorce in October 2009. The financial agreement was decided in late 2011, after the Dodgers filed for bankruptcy. The divorce agreement also included several luxury homes and other pieces of property to be set aside for Jamie McCourt.
The appeals court ruled that the lower-court divorce judge was correcting in ruling that Jamie McCourt had not entered into the agreement by mistake.
“Jamie simply chose the security of a guaranteed $131 million payment, plus more than $50 million in real and personal property, over the uncertainty and risk presented by the valuation and sale of the Dodger assets,” the ruling stated.
Additionally, Jamie McCourt will now have to repay her ex-husband $1.9 million for legal fees relating to her attempts to appeal the divorce judgment.
Source: ABC News, Appeals Court Won’t Toss Ex-Dodgers Owner’s Divorce Deal, February 25, 2015