A businessman who signed three support agreements with his ex-wife convinced a court to throw out his divorce settlement because the woman had exploited his narcissistic personality.
The Tel Aviv District Court issued the ruling in response to an appeal against a family court decision, in a case replete with complicated personal relations and unusual financial demands by the woman. The couple met when the woman was 23. In 1993, while the man was still married to his first wife, he drafted a written agreement with the woman, agreeing to support her should she get pregnant.
Under the agreement, she would buy a four-room apartment in Tel Aviv for $200,000 at the end of the fifth month of her pregnancy. She would pay for a quarter of the apartment, and it would be registered equally between the two.
Furthermore, they agreed that if the man ended their relationship and refused to pay child support, he would owe her NIS 3,500 a month in child support anyway.
A year later, they had a child together. That year, they drafted another written agreement, in which the man agreed to divorce his wife within six months and to marry the other woman a month later. If he failed to follow through, he agreed to compensate the woman $250,000 for every year of their acquaintance.
At that point, the parties declared they had known each other for seven years.
The two married in 1997. The next year, they signed a third agreement, after the woman filed a number of complaints against the man, then her husband.
The parties declared their interest in ending the legal disputes between them and their desire to stay married. They agreed to open a joint bank account into which they would deposit their salaries. The man also agreed to give the woman 50% of a company he owned, and the authority to sign corporate checks.
However, this agreement was never carried out.
The couple ultimately separated, and a year later, they entered into a divorce agreement, which called for the third agreement to be nullified. The divorce settlement called for the man to pay monthly payments of NIS 5,000 for child support, as well as NIS 10,000 in alimony for the rest of the woman's life.
The divorce agreement, which was arranged by the wife's attorney, also required the man to pay her an additional $100,000 within 90 days. The husband was not represented by legal counsel, and the settlement was presented to him when the court was not in session.
The couple officially divorced two weeks later, but after three months, the man stopped making child support and alimony payments. He was arrested by the Bailiff's Office, and in 2005, he petitioned the court to rescind the support agreement.
In court, he stated that he had transferred NIS 2 million to his then-wife's private bank account two months before the divorce settlement.
The man called the agreements exploitative and discriminatory, and said he signed them because he felt nothing would sadden him more than ending his relationship with the woman. He said he only understood that their relationship was over when the woman had another child with another man. He said he then realized that the woman had exploited his emotional distress and had extorted large sums of money from him.
The man provided the court with a psychologist's evaluation indicating that he had a narcissistic personality and a megalomaniacal outlook that enabled him to succeed in his business. The man's "psychological makeup," the psychologist wrote, "was meant to hide from the world his fear of abandonment and of being hurt," and the man could not relate to the subject in a rational manner.
The woman stated that her former husband had not fulfilled his obligations under the agreements, and was trying to transfer his property to his first wife. The second wife also told the court her former husband was a "businessman who signs agreements worth millions of shekels and knows how to provide for his actions and business affairs," adding that he had entered into the agreements out of his own free will.
She contended that it was he who shaped their relations, and that he had befriended other women, leading to crises in the relationship.
She also said that the lawyer involved in handling their divorce settlement represented both of them.
The family court had rejected that contention, saying the agreement the lawyer drafted reflected only the woman's interests, and extremely so. The family court concurred that the man suffered from "fear of abandonment ... to the point of an inability to deal with the reality that preceded signing the agreement, as a result of his subjective understanding that his only chance to get [his wife] to come back to him was by agreeing to sign the agreement."
Therefore, the family court judge ruled he suffered from emotional and mental weakness, and that the woman was aware of this and exploited it.
The woman appealed to the Tel Aviv District Court, which refused to overturn the family court ruling.
The district court ruled, "There is no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that we are dealing with unreasonable and possibly even unethical terms." The district court rescinded the divorce agreement other than the child support, and ordered the woman to return funds to her former husband that were paid through the Bailiff's Office, and to pay him NIS 30,000 in legal fees.
Total Members: 
