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Years and marriages later, they still pay
By Bella English, Globe Staff |
Steve Niro got married in 1981 at age 23 and divorced less than five years later. At the time of the divorce,
he and his wife were in their late 20s, and both were working. Niro remarried nearly 15 years ago, but he’s
still paying his alimony. Two years ago, Niro’s youngest son graduated from college, ending child support
payments and leaving his former wife with alimony of $65 a week. “The next thing I know, I get summonsed
to court for alimony adjustment,’’ he says. A probate court judge increased the alimony to $700 a week
even though the couple had divorced nearly a quarter of a century ago — five times longer than they were
married.
“I paid child support. I paid college. I was never late. I fulfilled my obligations,’’ says Niro, 52, a Milford
native who works for an environmental engineering firm in Portland, Maine. “I just have to hope that
legislators in Massachusetts have enough sense to pass a law that puts guidelines on alimony because
the courts don’t exercise any common sense or logic.’’
Niro and other men — and women — like him say the state’s alimony law is archaic, reflecting an era when
women kept house and men provided. Today, with women making up nearly half the workforce, they say
alimony should be a temporary boost, not a lifetime subsidy. Critics charge that the Legislature has
avoided the issue for years in part because drawn-out divorce litigation is lucrative for lawmakers, many of
whom are lawyers. Now these critics are working to change the law, a vague statute that gives judges wide
discretion over alimony awards. Two bills have been introduced, and a legislative task force is working on
a third version.
The current law sets no formulas or guidelines, saying only that the length of the marriage, assets,
occupation, and employment aspects will be considered in setting alimony. Massachusetts probate judges
have relied largely on case law and generally consider any marriage of more than 20 years a long-term
marriage that merits lifetime alimony, or payments until the recipient remarries. But often marriages of
much shorter duration — such as Niro’s — also result in lifetime payments.
In his decision, Worcester County Probate Judge Ronald King noted that Carol Niro reared the children
largely by herself and was unemployed for a year after she was laid off from her job as an administrative
assistant. Further, King said that since Steve Niro has an executive salary and Carol Niro was making
$30,000 a year as a preschool teacher, he should pay his former wife 30 percent of the difference
between their annual incomes, or $36,000 a year indefinitely. That doesn’t sit well with Steve Niro. “Even if
she had the kids to take care of, the youngest is now 25,’’ he says. “In the last nine years since he went to
college, she had ample opportunity to get trained and educated. Massachusetts has created a lifetime
annuity program for anyone that gets divorced in this state.’’
Carol Niro, who was also laid off from her preschool job, recently went to work in a veterinary office. Her
lawyer, William Mayer, says she bore the brunt of the child-rearing, which gave her former husband
“unrestricted opportunity to develop his career over the last 20 years.’’
Yet even when he retires, there’s no guarantee that Steve Niro will be relieved of alimony. “The burden is
going to be on him to come in and tell the court why he should,’’ Mayer says.
Bill filed to amend law. Last fall, a crowd of frustrated alimony payers testified at a State House hearing on
a bill that would amend the law.
Introduced by Steven Walsh, Democrat of Lynn, the bill attracted 72 cosponsors. It would limit alimony
payments to half the length of the marriage, with a cap of 12 years and automatic termination when the
payer turns 65. It would protect second spouses’ income from contributing to the alimony award for first
spouses. The court would have to consider “the marketable skills’’ and “willingness and diligence’’ of the
recipient to seek work. In addition, if the recipient is cohabiting with a partner, alimony would be decreased
substantially. But that bill has been shelved, and critics of the existing law say the large number of lawyer
legislators, many of whom practice family law, is the reason. They argue that the current law encourages
endless expensive litigation. Cynthia Creem, Democrat of Newton and chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, filed her own bill on behalf of the Boston Bar Association, but it has been widely criticized for
doing little to change the status quo. She then appointed a task force to look into the issue.
“It’s clear that one of the bills went too far and one may not have gone far enough,’’ she says.
Creem denies that, as a family lawyer, she has a conflict of interest in writing alimony law. “I don’t benefit
from any of this,’’ she says. Of the nine members on the task force, eight are lawyers. The ninth, Steve
Hitner, started the nonprofit advocacy group Mass Alimony Reform five years ago over frustration with his
own case. He’s also frustrated with the task force, which he says has met only three times since December;
the group is scheduled to meet again Tuesday.
Three years ago, Hitner filed for bankruptcy after a judge refused to reduce the $45,000 he has paid
annually in alimony since his divorce became final in 1999. Hitner’s Marlborough printing business tanked
in 2001, and he was having trouble paying his bills. He was relying on his second wife’s credit to keep the
business going. Steve and Jeanie Hitner learned the hard way that in Massachusetts the income and
assets of the second spouse may be called into court to help determine the amount of alimony owed to a
former spouse.
When they married 11 years ago, Jeanie joined him at his printing business but had to take a second job
tutoring four nights a week to help him keep up with the alimony payments. In 2005 he sought a
modification of his alimony. He was denied. “Instead, the judge says, ‘Your second wife needs to support
you more,’ ’’ says Hitner, who has spent $250,000 on legal fees and owes $20,000 more. The Globe was
unable to speak with any of the judges who ruled in the cases described in this story. A spokesman for the
court system said sitting judges are barred from commenting on decisions. Jeanie says, “I love him, but I
never would have married him if I’d known the laws in this state.’’
“Why should people be saddled with involuntary servitude when the other person refuses to work?’’ Steve
Hitner says. “There is absolutely no incentive in Massachusetts for the receiving spouse to work.’’ Since
Hitner’s former wife now collects Social Security, his alimony payments have been lowered from $865 a
week to $730 a week. The court also approved a deal by which he must sell his business when he turns
65, in three years. After bills and loans are settled, he’ll get $125,000 and his former wife will get 30
percent of the net profits from the sale. Alimony will then cease.
Retirees still obligated
“Due to the oppressive amount of the alimony payments, and attorneys’ fees, I am broke and can never
retire, and Jeanie and I will need to continue working to survive,’’ he says. Hitner’s former wife, Joan, who
lives in Florida, did not return the Globe’s calls.
Rudolph Pierce, a lawyer and former judge, was in a similar bind. Divorced for 10 years, he’d been paying
$110,000 a year in alimony. When he retired two years ago at age 65, he assumed that he would no
longer have to pay alimony. But a judge merely reduced his payment, to $42,000 a year. For 27 years
during the 32-year marriage, his former wife, Carneice, was employed by IBM. At the time of her husband’s
retirement, she was earning $95,000 a year as a fund-raiser for a nonprofit and had $1.25 million in
assets. But the court ruled that Rudolph Pierce could continue to have “significant earning power’’ in
retirement through part-time legal work. His second wife, Mildred, earned $125,000 annually and was
paying many of the couple’s bills, the court noted.
His lawyer, Anthony Doniger, says Pierce and his former wife were equal in terms of income and assets
with one major exception: his second wife’s income.
“The second spouse by law is not obligated to make support payments, but this was kind of a backdoor
approach of having her help,’’ Doniger says. Carneice Pierce’s lawyer, David Cherny, says the initial
divorce agreement stipulated that alimony would continue until she remarried or either party died. “They
had an agreement that made no mention of retirement,’’ he says. The two sides finally reached a
settlement last month, and Pierce is no longer paying alimony.
Senator Gale Candaras, a Democrat from Wilbraham who cochairs the task force wrestling with the law,
says lifetime alimony is bad public policy that discourages people from supporting themselves and from
remarrying.
“If you’re 50 years old and getting divorced,’’ she says, “you need to think seriously about rebuilding your
life and rebuilding your career and not fail to do that because you don’t want to give up lifetime alimony.’’
The task force is also tackling the issue of retirees paying alimony and maintaining their former spouse’s
lifestyle. “The recipient spouse should have been planning for the eventuality that the payer would have
been retiring just as he would if they had remained married,’’ says Candaras. Judge Paula Carey, chief of
Probate and Family Court, is on the task force and agrees reform is necessary. She favors setting time
limits for alimony payments as long as judges can make exceptions based on age and health of the
parties. In marriages of 10 years or less, she says, both parties have an obligation to work. Carey also
says people should be able to retire without a heavy alimony burden.
More women pay support
Although men accounted for 97 percent of the payers in alimony cases in 2008, according to the US
Census, women have increasingly found themselves supporting former husbands.
Brenda Caggiano of Westwood is one. At 71, she is living off her schoolteacher’s pension and Social
Security — and paying her former husband alimony. Ten years ago, she came home one afternoon to find
that her husband of 27 years had left, without a note. He filed for divorce, and a judge ruled that since she
made more money she had to pay him $500 a month indefinitely.
Her husband, an accountant, hadn’t worked a full-time job for 15 years before he left, she says, because
he couldn’t find a job he considered suitable. “I feel like I’m being penalized because I worked harder than
he did,’’ she says. She declined to go back to court when she retired because she couldn’t afford a lawyer.
Robert Caggiano, who lives in the couple’s Chatham home, which he got in the divorce, says he worked
the first 12 years of their marriage while she stayed home with the children and later had a few clients.
Today he has a live-in girlfriend who also works in accounting. He says he’s redone the kitchen, had the
house painted, and took a recent trip to Italy. Of the alimony, he adds: “I’m not complaining about what the
judge did. He’s the person up there who determined what was fair.’’ But people like Steve Niro are
complaining. Niro, who was ordered to pay health insurance for his first wife until recently, says that for a
long time, he couldn’t afford such insurance for his second wife, to whom he has been married for 15 years.
“Essentially, every day of my working life, my ex-wife, who I was married to for less than five years, is
getting a piece of my income.’’
Even Mayer agrees that the law should set time limits on alimony payments to “provide some measure of
certainty for the payer and the recipient.’’ Steve Niro sums it up this way: “You know, you can get married
in Massachusetts, you just can’t get divorced, at least not financially.’’
By Bella English, Globe Staff |
Steve Niro got married in 1981 at age 23 and divorced less than five years later. At the time of the divorce,
he and his wife were in their late 20s, and both were working. Niro remarried nearly 15 years ago, but he’s
still paying his alimony. Two years ago, Niro’s youngest son graduated from college, ending child support
payments and leaving his former wife with alimony of $65 a week. “The next thing I know, I get summonsed
to court for alimony adjustment,’’ he says. A probate court judge increased the alimony to $700 a week
even though the couple had divorced nearly a quarter of a century ago — five times longer than they were
married.
“I paid child support. I paid college. I was never late. I fulfilled my obligations,’’ says Niro, 52, a Milford
native who works for an environmental engineering firm in Portland, Maine. “I just have to hope that
legislators in Massachusetts have enough sense to pass a law that puts guidelines on alimony because
the courts don’t exercise any common sense or logic.’’
Niro and other men — and women — like him say the state’s alimony law is archaic, reflecting an era when
women kept house and men provided. Today, with women making up nearly half the workforce, they say
alimony should be a temporary boost, not a lifetime subsidy. Critics charge that the Legislature has
avoided the issue for years in part because drawn-out divorce litigation is lucrative for lawmakers, many of
whom are lawyers. Now these critics are working to change the law, a vague statute that gives judges wide
discretion over alimony awards. Two bills have been introduced, and a legislative task force is working on
a third version.
The current law sets no formulas or guidelines, saying only that the length of the marriage, assets,
occupation, and employment aspects will be considered in setting alimony. Massachusetts probate judges
have relied largely on case law and generally consider any marriage of more than 20 years a long-term
marriage that merits lifetime alimony, or payments until the recipient remarries. But often marriages of
much shorter duration — such as Niro’s — also result in lifetime payments.
In his decision, Worcester County Probate Judge Ronald King noted that Carol Niro reared the children
largely by herself and was unemployed for a year after she was laid off from her job as an administrative
assistant. Further, King said that since Steve Niro has an executive salary and Carol Niro was making
$30,000 a year as a preschool teacher, he should pay his former wife 30 percent of the difference
between their annual incomes, or $36,000 a year indefinitely. That doesn’t sit well with Steve Niro. “Even if
she had the kids to take care of, the youngest is now 25,’’ he says. “In the last nine years since he went to
college, she had ample opportunity to get trained and educated. Massachusetts has created a lifetime
annuity program for anyone that gets divorced in this state.’’
Carol Niro, who was also laid off from her preschool job, recently went to work in a veterinary office. Her
lawyer, William Mayer, says she bore the brunt of the child-rearing, which gave her former husband
“unrestricted opportunity to develop his career over the last 20 years.’’
Yet even when he retires, there’s no guarantee that Steve Niro will be relieved of alimony. “The burden is
going to be on him to come in and tell the court why he should,’’ Mayer says.
Bill filed to amend law. Last fall, a crowd of frustrated alimony payers testified at a State House hearing on
a bill that would amend the law.
Introduced by Steven Walsh, Democrat of Lynn, the bill attracted 72 cosponsors. It would limit alimony
payments to half the length of the marriage, with a cap of 12 years and automatic termination when the
payer turns 65. It would protect second spouses’ income from contributing to the alimony award for first
spouses. The court would have to consider “the marketable skills’’ and “willingness and diligence’’ of the
recipient to seek work. In addition, if the recipient is cohabiting with a partner, alimony would be decreased
substantially. But that bill has been shelved, and critics of the existing law say the large number of lawyer
legislators, many of whom practice family law, is the reason. They argue that the current law encourages
endless expensive litigation. Cynthia Creem, Democrat of Newton and chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, filed her own bill on behalf of the Boston Bar Association, but it has been widely criticized for
doing little to change the status quo. She then appointed a task force to look into the issue.
“It’s clear that one of the bills went too far and one may not have gone far enough,’’ she says.
Creem denies that, as a family lawyer, she has a conflict of interest in writing alimony law. “I don’t benefit
from any of this,’’ she says. Of the nine members on the task force, eight are lawyers. The ninth, Steve
Hitner, started the nonprofit advocacy group Mass Alimony Reform five years ago over frustration with his
own case. He’s also frustrated with the task force, which he says has met only three times since December;
the group is scheduled to meet again Tuesday.
Three years ago, Hitner filed for bankruptcy after a judge refused to reduce the $45,000 he has paid
annually in alimony since his divorce became final in 1999. Hitner’s Marlborough printing business tanked
in 2001, and he was having trouble paying his bills. He was relying on his second wife’s credit to keep the
business going. Steve and Jeanie Hitner learned the hard way that in Massachusetts the income and
assets of the second spouse may be called into court to help determine the amount of alimony owed to a
former spouse.
When they married 11 years ago, Jeanie joined him at his printing business but had to take a second job
tutoring four nights a week to help him keep up with the alimony payments. In 2005 he sought a
modification of his alimony. He was denied. “Instead, the judge says, ‘Your second wife needs to support
you more,’ ’’ says Hitner, who has spent $250,000 on legal fees and owes $20,000 more. The Globe was
unable to speak with any of the judges who ruled in the cases described in this story. A spokesman for the
court system said sitting judges are barred from commenting on decisions. Jeanie says, “I love him, but I
never would have married him if I’d known the laws in this state.’’
“Why should people be saddled with involuntary servitude when the other person refuses to work?’’ Steve
Hitner says. “There is absolutely no incentive in Massachusetts for the receiving spouse to work.’’ Since
Hitner’s former wife now collects Social Security, his alimony payments have been lowered from $865 a
week to $730 a week. The court also approved a deal by which he must sell his business when he turns
65, in three years. After bills and loans are settled, he’ll get $125,000 and his former wife will get 30
percent of the net profits from the sale. Alimony will then cease.
Retirees still obligated
“Due to the oppressive amount of the alimony payments, and attorneys’ fees, I am broke and can never
retire, and Jeanie and I will need to continue working to survive,’’ he says. Hitner’s former wife, Joan, who
lives in Florida, did not return the Globe’s calls.
Rudolph Pierce, a lawyer and former judge, was in a similar bind. Divorced for 10 years, he’d been paying
$110,000 a year in alimony. When he retired two years ago at age 65, he assumed that he would no
longer have to pay alimony. But a judge merely reduced his payment, to $42,000 a year. For 27 years
during the 32-year marriage, his former wife, Carneice, was employed by IBM. At the time of her husband’s
retirement, she was earning $95,000 a year as a fund-raiser for a nonprofit and had $1.25 million in
assets. But the court ruled that Rudolph Pierce could continue to have “significant earning power’’ in
retirement through part-time legal work. His second wife, Mildred, earned $125,000 annually and was
paying many of the couple’s bills, the court noted.
His lawyer, Anthony Doniger, says Pierce and his former wife were equal in terms of income and assets
with one major exception: his second wife’s income.
“The second spouse by law is not obligated to make support payments, but this was kind of a backdoor
approach of having her help,’’ Doniger says. Carneice Pierce’s lawyer, David Cherny, says the initial
divorce agreement stipulated that alimony would continue until she remarried or either party died. “They
had an agreement that made no mention of retirement,’’ he says. The two sides finally reached a
settlement last month, and Pierce is no longer paying alimony.
Senator Gale Candaras, a Democrat from Wilbraham who cochairs the task force wrestling with the law,
says lifetime alimony is bad public policy that discourages people from supporting themselves and from
remarrying.
“If you’re 50 years old and getting divorced,’’ she says, “you need to think seriously about rebuilding your
life and rebuilding your career and not fail to do that because you don’t want to give up lifetime alimony.’’
The task force is also tackling the issue of retirees paying alimony and maintaining their former spouse’s
lifestyle. “The recipient spouse should have been planning for the eventuality that the payer would have
been retiring just as he would if they had remained married,’’ says Candaras. Judge Paula Carey, chief of
Probate and Family Court, is on the task force and agrees reform is necessary. She favors setting time
limits for alimony payments as long as judges can make exceptions based on age and health of the
parties. In marriages of 10 years or less, she says, both parties have an obligation to work. Carey also
says people should be able to retire without a heavy alimony burden.
More women pay support
Although men accounted for 97 percent of the payers in alimony cases in 2008, according to the US
Census, women have increasingly found themselves supporting former husbands.
Brenda Caggiano of Westwood is one. At 71, she is living off her schoolteacher’s pension and Social
Security — and paying her former husband alimony. Ten years ago, she came home one afternoon to find
that her husband of 27 years had left, without a note. He filed for divorce, and a judge ruled that since she
made more money she had to pay him $500 a month indefinitely.
Her husband, an accountant, hadn’t worked a full-time job for 15 years before he left, she says, because
he couldn’t find a job he considered suitable. “I feel like I’m being penalized because I worked harder than
he did,’’ she says. She declined to go back to court when she retired because she couldn’t afford a lawyer.
Robert Caggiano, who lives in the couple’s Chatham home, which he got in the divorce, says he worked
the first 12 years of their marriage while she stayed home with the children and later had a few clients.
Today he has a live-in girlfriend who also works in accounting. He says he’s redone the kitchen, had the
house painted, and took a recent trip to Italy. Of the alimony, he adds: “I’m not complaining about what the
judge did. He’s the person up there who determined what was fair.’’ But people like Steve Niro are
complaining. Niro, who was ordered to pay health insurance for his first wife until recently, says that for a
long time, he couldn’t afford such insurance for his second wife, to whom he has been married for 15 years.
“Essentially, every day of my working life, my ex-wife, who I was married to for less than five years, is
getting a piece of my income.’’
Even Mayer agrees that the law should set time limits on alimony payments to “provide some measure of
certainty for the payer and the recipient.’’ Steve Niro sums it up this way: “You know, you can get married
in Massachusetts, you just can’t get divorced, at least not financially.’’
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