Annulment is more like the spoonful of sugar going down than the spoonful of medicine.
Everyone wants it. Typically, just to avoid stigma of divorce, real or imagined.
But just a handful of cases actually meet the fairly strict and narrow criteria for eligibility for annulment. So, despite strong interest in them, we can rarely justify filing them.
In general, the best candidates for annulment are very short-lived marriages that were never consummated or where the couple stopped cohabiting immediately upon learning of the defect or fraud that invalidates or threats the validity of the marriage.
Still, not everyone – eligible or not – is deterred from pursuing an annulment …
Canadian heiresses can likely bear the cost of the potential false start and indulge their whim … especially when the financial stakes are high.
Take this food industry Heiress’ example.
She, like her sibling, entered prenuptial agreements at the insistence of their father, the company’s founder.
The agreement apparently established a modest fixed sum of parting gift property upon breakdown of the marriage.
In this case, $5 million. Not really such a large sum in the context of this family’s wealth.
But heiress simply doesn’t want her husband to walk away with even that.
So, throwing caution to the wind, Heiress files for annulment.
Because if her marriage is held to be void from the get-go, there won’t be any property division as there would be in a divorce.
Is $5 million worth the risk of wasting her nominal annulment filing fee … and enduring some ridicule?
Could be.
So she’s giving it the old college try.
Doing her best to paint her husband as a fraud who duped her into the marriage.
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