Mitt Romney's testimony in his friend's divorce case -- in which he's accused of lying under oath to screw over his friend's ex-wife -- will be unsealed today and released to the Boston Globe ... the judge has ruled.
As we first reported, Mitt testified in the divorce of Staples' founder Tom Stemberg -- and Tom's ex-wife Maureen claims Mitt lied under oath, falsely undervaluing Staples' stock in order to shaft her in the divorce.
Mitt's people have already said the Presidential hopeful doesn't care if the testimony is released -- he has nothing to hide.
Things didn't fare so well for Gloria Allred -- her request to ungag her client was shut down by the hot judge ... because Gloria never submitted an official motion to the court.
Gloria was grasping at straws in a last ditch effort to get the judge to cut her a break -- but she was shot down, hard.
8:30 AM PT -- Gloria denied accusations she's a "surrogate" for the Democratic party ... who's only representing Stemberg in order to wreak havoc on the Romney campaign.
8:20 AM PT -- During a news conference, Gloria accused the Boston Globe of pulling a "double-cross" because she says the paper abandoned its motion to have the gag order against Maureen Sullivan Stemberg lifted.
Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2012/10/25/mitt-romney-divorce-testimony/#ixzz2AKvimSpE
The Weekly Standard has the whole story behind the divorce case/trial and Ms. Sullivan's perpetual whining since 1987 over the fact that she only got millions from her ex-husband in their divorce.
Allred and her client are rumored to believe that Romney misstated the value of Staples in order to help his friend, Stemberg, receive a more favorable divorce ruling. But it's hardly news that Stemberg believes she settled for too little.
"The entire spectacle is about her client's divorce, which began almost twenty-five years ago. It has been litigated and re-litigated," one source with knowledge of the the divorce proceedings tells me. "She has attempted to get her settlement overturned, but failed. She appealed the decision, and failed. She tried to take her case to the State Supreme Court, and was rejected. She has accused her husband and others of defrauding her, to no avail. She has sued her attorneys for malpractice, and lost. She has declared bankruptcy, and tried to sell her story as a book and a movie, also to no avail."
The case goes back to at least February 1987, when the two were separated, court documents reveal. Lawyers presented the separation to a Massachusetts court later that year in September. And then in 1990 Maureen Sullivan Stemberg "filed a complaint in equity to rescind the separation agreement dated September 23, 1987," according to the court document.
"In 1990, she alleged in a lawsuit that Mr. Stemberg had failed in 1987 to reveal material facts about the value of Staples stock and the extent of his assets ‘present and future.’ Thus, she claimed, she had been wrongfully induced to part with thousands of shares at fire-sale prices. She also said that she had suffered from hormonal imbalances that had impeded her ability to concentrate when she agreed to the settlement," the Wall Street Journal reported in 1997.
But the court rejected Sullivan-Stemberg's request in 1994. Instead, Stemberg-Sullivan was found to have sold her stock expeditiously, before it matured to what it would be worth only a couple years later. "[T]he wife cannot blame the husband for her uncoerced decision to sell approximately one half of her shares prior to the initial public offering of the Staples stock," the judge ruled. She had 500,000 shares of Staples, from the first divorce settlement.
You can see the entire divorce Procedural Background and Findings of Fact here:
court.pdf
The couple had only been married for 10 years. Notice the part where it says that one day before the final judgment was to be entered, "the wife filed objections" and asked that the separation agreement be rescinded, in part because "at the time of the negotiations regarding the separation agreement, the wife was under the care of physicians for hormonal imbalances, as a consequence of which she was unable to concentrate and focus on matter of detail, including financial matters, and that this ailment prevented the wife from fully and fairly considering the terms of the separation agreement, and the resulting consequences to her." (p.2)
A few months later the husband filed a motion to terminate alimony because the wife was living with a man and had been for a year, which violated the provision that upon remarriage of the wife, alimony would end. His motion was eventually dismissed by agreement. After a 50 day trial, the judge wrote the 52 page document above and found that the wife's hormonal imbalance did not affect her decisions and that her attorney (NOT Gloria Allred, although she was old enough to be there) represented just fine. He said that "during her extensive trial testimony, the wife demonstrated that she is a highly intelligent, competent and articulate individual." And the judge did not make the wife pay for the husband's extensive legal fees for dragging out the case, even though they had agreed to that during the settlement. He did apply the "unclean hands" doctrine to the case, pertaining to the wife, to further support his decision that she was not entitled to anything more than she already got.
This case is NOT going to make anyone feel sorry for Maureen Stemberg Sullivan. Why on earth she would agree to let is become public is beyond me. If she thinks it is going to hurt Mitt Romney, she is as much a greedy fool now as she was back in 1987. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from this legal spectacle other than trying to hurt Mitt Romney. Allred is a disgrace to lawyers everywhere.
Now, here's my question. Why does Gloria Allred always have her arm around her clients even though they are able-bodied women who capable of standing on their own? I never did that when I was practicing in the courts. Are they invalids when they come to her or only after she gets her claws in them?
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| Here's Gloria and Maureen Stemberg Sullivan |
Finally, this photo says it all.
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