New York Divorce

As bad as it gets it takes too long, costs too much and ruins people's lives

This series was reported by Daily News staff writers Richard T. Pienciak and Linda Yglesias. Computer analysis by Russ Buettner. Design by Bernadette Sheridan.
New York Daily News, Page 4, © 1998 Daily News, L.P.

New York husbands and wives destined to wage legal war amid the ruins of their failed marriages descend into one of the worst divorce courts in the nation.

With their own and their children's futures at stake, separating spouses enter a system that operates like a sick marriage: It provokes bitter fighting instead of bringing calm and allows warring couples to engage in combat year after year sometimes for longer than it took to fight World War II.

The average contested divorce completed in New York City last year had stretched out for 640 days, trapping thousands of couples in marital limbo for four years, five years even a decade.

Those times are far longer than the one-year limit the state Office of Court Administration requires for completing a divorce.

As the months turn to years, spouses find themselves surrounded by mass confusion.

They are commanded to make useless appearances before judges who frequently haven't read their legal papers and who seem unable to decide even simple issues, such as whether a child-support payment has been made.

They listen as false, if not perjured, testimony is allowed to pass unchallenged and unpunished.

They hear judges issue stern orders dealing with child custody and spousal support, only to see the directives ignored.

They are put through an emotional wringer when high-priced psychologists and psychiatrists evaluate their fitness as parents, only to discover that the courts know little about the qualifications of these so-called expert witnesses.

And they suffer delays because their lawyers file faulty paper work or time-consuming motions that have little or no chance of winning.

Divorce proceedings are supposed to help couples move on to new lives as quickly and civilly as possible. That is not what happens in New York City.

Here, by the time the divorce becomes final, the parties often feel bewildered and betrayed. Many also end up broke, having weathered a system where seemingly no one is in control and where no one, absolutely no one, is held accountable.

The vast majority of the people who endure this process do not have famous names such as Trump, Wildenstein or LeRoy. Nor do they garner headlines with tales of wealth, power and sex.

The city's divorce courtrooms are clogged instead with housewives and truck drivers, construction workers and secretaries, cops and firefighters, teachers and nurses, welfare recipients and the unemployed.

The stories of their long courtroom sieges reveal pain no statistic can convey.

For Tina Beth Glick and Ralph Bell, two years in divorce court have produced a mountain of debt.

Glick, 44, an assistant physical therapist from Manhattan, earns $28,000 a year. Her legal bills have topped $180,000 although her lawyer has said he'll forgive all but $44,000.

Bell, 43, is an attorney. His weekly pay is $950. He estimated that he has paid his lawyer $24,000, and owes $28,000 more.

"I'm living on a couch with my friends since October 1997," Bell testified. "The most I do is pay for food. I don't have money to pay rent."

For a little boy identified as J., his parents' out-of-control divorce meant intense distress and emotional damage.

J.'s father, an architect, hit his mother, a musician, at least four times during their stormy marriage, including once when she was six months pregnant.

Their legal battling lasted for more than two years and culminated with J.'s mother being allowed to move with the child from Manhattan to Boston for career reasons.

According to the court decision, here's what happened to J., who was 7 when his parents' legal fight began:

"J. has exhibited behavioral problems in school; he has had bowel- control problems and other physical ailments of an apparently psychosomatic nature; he has had bad dreams, and he has had mysterious losses of concentration."

"It is beyond dispute," the court said, "that all of the discord has been detrimental to his interests."

For Kausar Singh, a 43-year-old Queens teacher, getting divorced included taking off from work to hear a court-appointed psychologist testify regarding the custody of the two Singh children a daughter, 12, and a son, 13 only to discover that the psychologist would not be delivering the long-awaited report after all.

"Her report was due, it was even on the court bulletin board, 'Singh vs. Singh, forensics report due,' " said Singh, who was ordered to split the psychologist's $2,500 fee with her husband, a parole officer. "But she was not there. She had gone on vacation. It is a waste of our time and money."

For Lillian Alvarado, a 44-year-old Metropolitan Transportation Authority police detective from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, three years in divorce court with city firefighter Lt. Michael Scotto meant running through four lawyers and $20,000 in legal fees.

Alvarado went from a two-family home to a room at her parents' house.

Although the divorce was granted in 1993, Alvarado is back in court in a dispute over visitation with the couple's 13-year-old daughter, who lives with Scotto. This time, Alvarado is representing herself.

"Divorce court is not really a place where justice is served," Alvarado said. "It's whoever has the better lawyer, whoever is willing to fight whatever the cost. That's who the winner will be."

Inside a secretive world

New York's divorce courts do not give up secrets easily. The public is generally entitled to attend proceedings, but documents, including transcripts, are sealed.

To penetrate the system, the Daily News attended dozens of matrimonial trials, conferences and hearings in Supreme Court and related proceedings in Family Court. On four occasions, attorneys sought unsuccessfully to exclude News reporters.

The News also interviewed scores of men and women who agreed to waive their rights to privacy, often providing their divorce case files for review.

Finally, after threatening suit under New York's Freedom of Information Law, The News obtained from the Office of Court Administration a computer database containing 435,000 records on divorce cases dating to 1988.

The database was then analyzed to develop the first statistical picture of how long and difficult it can be to get divorced.

New York divorces fall into two categories: contested and uncontested. For either type of divorce, the parties must cite grounds such as adultery or abandonment.

In uncontested cases, husbands and wives agree to the reason for their breakup, as well as on child custody and support. When all is in order, they file their papers in Supreme Court, where a divorce decree usually is issued within a matter of months.

Nine of 10 divorces in the city are recorded as uncontested. But the term is often a misnomer.

In most cases, the parties have battled vigorously between their lawyers or have fought out the questions of custody and support in Family Court, which also has jurisdiction over those matters.

In contested cases, the spouses bring the fight right into Supreme Court, where the justices are supposed to move cases swiftly through a series of deadlines until they are completed within a year.

But here's what The News' analysis of the computer database revealed about how long and costly the courts have allowed contested cases here to become:

The city's courts completed nearly 15,000 contested divorces between 1993 and 1997. On average during those years, it took 719 days to move a case from the parties' request for assignment of a judge to the issuance of a final decree.

Couples who filed in Queens suffered through the longest proceedings; their contested cases dragged out for an average of 883 days. Next came the Bronx, at 787 days; Brooklyn, at 726; Staten Island, at 694, and Manhattan at 594 days.

Last year, the average divorce granted citywide took 640 days, still nine months over the court system's one-year limit. And no borough came close to finishing cases within the deadline.

In nearly one of five cases between 1993 and 1997, the legal fight raged on after the divorce was granted, with parties continuing to battle over issues such as visitation and support payments. On average, those cases stretched for another 371 days.

Thousands of New Yorkers saw their cases stretch for astoundingly longer times.

In 1995, the average case completed in Queens took 1,453 days nearly four years. Bronx cases in 1996 averaged more than three years each.

A half-dozen pending cases are more than 10 years old.

One closed case that was on the books for more than a decade, DeSantis vs. DeSantis on Staten Island, took so long that the husband's original attorney, Joseph Maltese, is now a state Supreme Court justice who hears matrimonial cases.

While their cases dragged on, divorcing New Yorkers were summoned to an average of eight court appearances. But in 614 cases, they had to show up more than 25 times.

In some cases, the number of appearances have run into the hundreds. DeArakie vs. DeArakie in Manhattan racked up 228 scheduled appearances, and Rackis-Adelman vs. Adelman tallied 200.

Cangro vs. Cangro in Staten Island, which began in early 1994, had 105 listed appearances which meant the parties averaged one court appearance every two weeks for four years.

One of the nation's worst

Given the personal horror stories and the results of The News analysis, it is no surprise that matrimonial experts consider New York one of the worst places if not the worst to get a divorce.

Mike McCurley, a Dallas attorney who serves as president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, said he was amazed at the length of New York divorces.

Asked how long the most complicated divorce should take, McCurley replied without hesitation: "One year that's how long a full-blown contested, with complete and extensive discovery, should take from beginning to end."

He said the high annual averages meant "there are plenty of cases going into the four and five-year range."

Marsha Garrison, a professor of family law at Brooklyn Law School who has studied New York's divorce court, said, "The system is too cumbersome, too expensive, and the rules are not clear enough."

She said New Yorkers "are more reliant on lawyers" because of the state's antiquated and highly discretionary divorce laws.

Jacqueline Silbermann, the state's first administrative judge for matrimonial matters, acknowledged that divorces still take too long. She contended, however, that the average wait for a divorce had shortened markedly since the late 1980s.

"I'd like to see it go down, of course, because the longer it takes, the more it costs and the more emotions are spent on it," she said. "But I also think that there clearly has been improvement."

Silbermann's boss, Chief Administrative Judge Jonathan Lippman, said Friday that the courts will introduce several more improvements by year's end.

They will include early involvement of social workers in custody and visitation disputes, an out-of-court arbitration program and a legislative proposal that would require basic financial documents, such as tax returns, bank statements and pay stubs to be turned over within 45 days of the filing of divorce papers.

Silbermann, a former matrimonial judge, said blame for divorce delays needs to be spread around.

"Sometimes it's the fault of the court, undoubtedly. Sometimes it's the fault of the lawyers, undoubtedly," she said.

But often overlooked, she added, are delays caused by warring spouses "who just don't want to let go because they are out for that last ounce of flesh or blood."

So you wanna fight it out in court? Divorces last year took an average of 640 days. The courts' own rules say it should take a year at most.

Here's how long it took, on average, to get a contested divorced in each borough in 1997

• Queens 820 days
• Manhattan 653 days
• Staten Island 604 days
• Bronx 572 days
• Brooklyn 541 days

The averages are deceiving. One-third of the cases took less than six months. But the remaining two-thirds averaged more than 1,100 days.