Women hit the jackpot and then filed for divorce!
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After winning the lotto and keeping it a secret from her ex-husband, a woman was forced to give the money to him.
Wow, the burn must be quite deep.
You experience the high of winning a substantial monetary award, the awful feeling of losing it, and then the added humiliation of losing it to your ex-husband.
Is there a more tragic tale?
I suppose, to be fair.
In any case, the judge believes that Denise Rossi caused this situation to arise.
Rossi and other coworkers bet on a California lottery syndicate, and their winning numbers appeared 11 days before Rossi’s divorce petition was submitted in 1996.
She had won a jackpot worth $1.3 million, or £1.02 million in today’s currency, but she made the decision not to notify her husband Thomas.
He didn’t learn until several years later, when he received a letter from a business that gives lottery winners a lump sum of money.
It stated that the business has “helped hundreds of lottery winners like you around the country receive a lump-sum payment for the present value of their future annual lottery payments” and was addressed to Denise.
The divorce court was told that Denise withheld information from her husband and, more importantly, the divorce court by having the actual cheque sent to her mother’s residence.
Denise claimed that she had “wanted to end [their] relationship for years,” while Thomas countered that he had been taken by surprise and was left feeling “blindsided” by what had happened.
He told PEOPLE: “She wanted me to move out of the house very fast. It wasn’t like her to act this way.”
Denise was found to have broken the law regarding the disclosure of assets and cash prior to a divorce, behaving dishonestly or with malice, after he obtained an injunction and presented her before the judge.
Then 49 years old, she was instructed to split her gain between her ex in 20 monthly payments of $66,800.
Connolly Oyler, Denise’s attorney, claimed that if she had simply told them about the windfall, she could have been able to keep it.
“I could have argued successfully that it was her separate property,” he said.
“Or we could have argued, and we would have reached some adjustment.
“But the judge got mad and gave it all to him.”
Her attorney did acknowledge that the sentence imposed on his client was “very punitive.”
However, there is a lesson to be learned here.
But you have to imagine Denise Rossi just doesn’t like to think about it.
