Lorna Wendt
Lorna Wendt can identify with Joan Stonecipher, the latest corporate wife thrust into the headlines by her husband's philandering. Barely a month after celebrating her golden wedding anniversary, Stonecipher is filing for divorce from her husband, Harry, who lost his job as CEO of Boeing two weeks ago after acknowledging an affair.
"It turns out there was another woman in my case, too," says Wendt, "but that wasn't the issue in my divorce." Rather, it was money, or the fair division of it in the settlement she sought from her husband of 32 years, Gary Wendt, then a top General Electric executive. Lorna Wendt's 1995 divorce request, in which she argued for half of her husband's assets, estimated by her experts at more than $100 million, touched off a national dialogue about stay-at-home corporate spouses and what they're entitled to in divorce.
"When we started out with nothing, I was an equal partner, and at the end I was, too," says Wendt. "In addition to 99 percent of the domestic workload, I was my husband's biggest supporter, married to the company but with no benefits."
Gary Wendt offered his wife what he said was 10 percent of his assets--about $8 million--but after two years of court wrangling, her take was closer to half, though she won't disclose the exact sum. "I'm very happy with the outcome," says the 61-year-old, who also got the Stamford, Conn., house where she still lives.
What did she do with the money? Some of it went to start the nonprofit Equality in Marriage Institute, which seeks to educate stay-at-home spouses--Wendt calls them "CEOs of the home" --about how to avoid the ordeal she went through. Her basic advice: "Discuss what equality means to you as a couple, and legalize it in a contract."
The institute's website, www.equalityinmarriage.org, gets 10,000 hits a month. But the publicity Wendt's case spawned, including an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, probably had a much bigger effect.
"Lorna Wendt's attempt to challenge long-standing notions of what people should get in these settlements has had an impact," says Mary Kay Kisthardt, a law professor and executive editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Kisthardt believes many judges are starting to give more consideration to settlements spouses deserve, whereas the calculation used to be all about how much money they needed to live on. And more couples are splitting their own riches. "What we're seeing is that when wealth starts to accumulate, people are making post-nuptial agreements."
As for the Stoneciphers, they've chosen to keep their divorce process private, according to a lawyer for Joan Stonecipher, whose divorce filing asks for "a fair and reasonable sum." Whatever that is, says Wendt, "I would like to see her stand up for the value she brought to the marriage."
This story appears in the March 28, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
