Baseball player Barry Bonds\u2019 problems with perjury and illegal performance enhancing drugs have been well documented, but what is not nearly so well know is his contribution to the law regarding prenuptial agreements, particularly in California.<\/p>\n
In 1988, Barry Bonds married Susann \u201cSun\u201d Margreth Blanco, a native of Sweden, in Las Vegas.\u00a0 The two had met the previous summer in Montreal while Bonds was playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Sun was working as a bartender.\u00a0 The day before they were married, each signed a prenuptial agreement by which each waived any interest in the earnings of the other during marriage.\u00a0 The agreement was prepared by Bonds\u2019 lawyers, and Sun was not represented by counsel.\u00a0 She was also unemployed at the time the agreement was signed.<\/p>\n
![\"bonds1\"](\"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/bonds1-114x150.jpg\" "\\"bonds1\\"")
In 1994, after six years of marriage and two children, Bonds petitioned for a legal separation, and his wife subsequently requested a dissolution of the marriage on grounds of physical abuse and infidelity (presumably involving Bonds infamous girlfriend, Kimberly Bell).\u00a0 She also decided to contest the validity of the prenuptial agreement she had signed six years earlier.<\/p>\n
During the trial concerning the validity of the agreement, Bonds testified that he told his wife-to-be that he would not marry her unless she agreed to waive any right to his income during their marriage.<\/p>\n
He also insisted that his wife understood perfectly well what he was proposing. In contrast, Sun testified that in 1987 and 1988, her English was poor and that she often did not understand what Bonds was talking about.\u00a0 She also claimed that she did not learn about the agreement until shortly before she was asked to sign it.<\/p>\n
The trial judge found Bonds\u2019 testimony more credible and ruled that the agreement was valid.\u00a0 On appeal, the intermediate appellate court ruled by a split decision that Sun\u2019s lack of legal assistance and the imminence of the wedding made her consent highly questionable, and remanded the case to the trial court with the direction that it needed to give much greater weight to such factors.\u00a0 The majority made it clear that Bonds had to overcome a strong presumption of invalidity due to the circumstances of this case.\u00a0 In re Marriage of Bonds, <\/em>71 Cal. App. 4th<\/sup> 290, reh. den., 72 Cal. App. 4th<\/sup> 94d (1999).<\/p>\n The decision was handed down on August 21, 2000, a day on which Bonds\u2019 Giants defeated the Florida Marlins 6-0 in San Francisco.\u00a0 Bonds was in the line-up that day and went one-for-three with a walk and a run scored.\u00a0 Sun petitioned for a rehearing, but on October 18, after the division champion Giants were eliminated in the National League playoffs by the New York Mets, the State Supreme Court denied this request.\u00a0 By the date of the final decision, Bonds had arranged to have his marriage to Sun annulled by the Catholic Church and had remarried.\u00a0 And, at least according to the book Game of Shadows,<\/em> he had also just finished the second season in which he used anabolic steroids.<\/p>\n From a national perspective, the California Supreme Court\u2019s Bonds<\/em> decision was just one of several decisions handed down at the end of the\u00a0twentieth century that appeared to represent a growing acceptance of the legitimacy of prenuptial agreements, which had historically been looked upon with disfavor.\u00a0 However, not everyone viewed this as a positive development.<\/p>\n Kuehl\u2019s act also required that parties to such an agreement be given at least seven days to consider the proposal and that the agreement be explained to the partner in his or her native language (which in Sun\u2019s case would have been Swedish).\u00a0 Kuehl made no effort to deny that her bill was inspired by the outcome of the Bonds case, and in fact cited it repeatedly to garner support for the proposed act.\u00a0 The bill easily passed both houses of the California legislature and was signed into law on September 12, 2001, by Gov. Gray Davis.\u00a0 In its story reporting the passage of the bill the following day, the Los Angeles<\/em> Times<\/em> described it \u201cas legislation sparked by the bitter 1994 divorce of baseball slugger Barry Bonds and the growing popularity of such accords.\u201d\u00a0 The statute is currently codified at Cal. Fam. Code \u00a71615 (2009).<\/p>\n The October 9, 2001 ruling came only two days after the PED-fueled slugger blasted his\u00a0seventy-third home run of the 2001 season, which remains, albeit shrouded in scandal, the all-time record.\u00a0 But thanks to Barry Bonds, in California it is now far more difficult than it used to be to coerce a vulnerable spouse-to-be into signing a prenuptial agreement.\u00a0 Also, since 2001, a growing number of jurisdictions have adopted a similar statute, or, as it might be called, \u201cthe Barry Bonds rule.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Baseball player Barry Bonds\u2019 problems with perjury and illegal performance enhancing drugs have been well documented, but what is not nearly so well know is his contribution to the law regarding prenuptial agreements, particularly in California. In 1988, Barry Bonds married Susann \u201cSun\u201d Margreth Blanco, a native of Sweden, in Las Vegas.\u00a0 The two had 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"\\"bonds2\\"")
Bonds appealed this decision to the Supreme Court of California, which on July 21, 1999, agreed to hear the case.\u00a0 The following year, in the case styled, In re Marriage of Bonds, <\/em>5 P.3d 815 (Cal. 2000), the state\u2019s highest court ruled unanimously that the evidence at trial was sufficient to establish a voluntary waiver on the part of Blanco (or Sun Bonds, as she preferred to be called). Contrary to the holding of the appellate court, the Supreme Court found that the lack of independent counsel was not dispositive, given the lack of evidence of coercion and no real proof of a lack of understanding on the part of the plaintiff.\u00a0 Consequently, it reinstated the judgment of the trial court.<\/p>\n![\"bonds-barry-ap-060520\"](\"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/bonds-barry-ap-060520-150x150.jpg\" "\\"bonds-barry-ap-060520\\"")
Bonds\u2019 \u201cpre-nup\u201d case was followed with great interest in California, and public sentiment was clearly on the side of his ex-wife.\u00a0 (Bonds\u2019 growing reputation for moodiness and surliness in his dealing with the baseball public hardly helped here.)\u00a0 In the next session of the California legislature, State Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica and in another life, the actress who played the zany Zelda Gilroy on the 1960\u2019s sitcom, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis<\/em>) introduced a bill that provided that for prenuptial agreements to be valid, both parties to the agreement had to be represented by their own lawyers.<\/p>\n![\"bonds](\"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/bonds-3-150x115.jpg\" "\\"bonds")
Although the legislative change came too late to help Sun Bonds, the ex-wife did receive some vindication on October 9, 2001, when a California appellate court in San Francisco ruled that the pre-nuptial agreement notwithstanding, Sun was still entitled to half the value of the two homes and an undeveloped lot that Bonds had purchased during their marriage. According to the San Francisco<\/em> Chronicle<\/em>, her interest in the three parcels was at least $1.5 million. After this decision, Bonds reportedly settled with his ex-wife for an amount in excess of the Chronicle\u2019s<\/em> estimate in exchange for her promise to stop suing him.<\/p>\n