Suing Your Spouse for More Than Divorce : Texas Award for ‘Distress’ Sparks Uproar

From the start, this was no run-of-the-mill marriage. At the reception which followed her 1985 wedding to multimillionaire oilman Jerry E. Chiles, Patti Sue Sullivan Chiles--under duress, she now says--signed a prenuptial property agreement, a backup contract to one she had signed only two weeks earlier.

Now the couple’s divorce settlement is making U.S. legal history. In December, a Texas family court jury awarded Patti Chiles $500,000 for “severe emotional distress” inflicted over the stormy course of the 22-month marriage, marking the first time in a divorce case a husband or wife has been awarded civil damages for infliction of nonphysical injuries.

It was a trial described by Jerry Chiles’ attorney, John F. Nichols, as “Barnum and Bailey and dancing bears,” a spectacle during which Chiles was accused of “terrorizing” his wife during his drunken rages, possibly exposing her to AIDS by indulging in sexual liaisons with prostitutes and, ultimately, causing her to seek psychiatric help for post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Now the case, which is under appeal, has become a focus of debate among those who practice matrimonial law. Some see it as the first skirmish in a legal revolution, the cutting-edge issue in divorce law, the most provocative idea since palimony.

Questions Arise

Others see only trouble ahead: Will it bring back the concept of fault after two decades of no-fault divorce? Will a rash of these interspousal torts further clog the nation’s courts? Will lawyers be leaving themselves open to malpractice suits if they do not advise divorcing clients that such a tort may be viable? What about the statute of limitations?

The initial surge of me-too cases has already been filed, says Patti Chiles’ attorney, Earle Lilly, a man who sees himself as a courtroom “gladiator” and is unashamedly basking in the glow of his accomplishment, loving the national media attention, content that, at 50, he has received long overdue recognition from his peers.

But despite “an incredible amount of inquiry calls,” Lilly doesn’t anticipate a nationwide epidemic of emotional-abuse claims in divorce cases: “There aren’t that many spouses out there with $48 million. People could ruin one another financially doing this.”

Hot Topic at Conference

The effect of the decision was a major discussion topic at a March seminar of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers on Maui. Harry Fain, a Beverly Hills attorney who was active in abolishing the concept of fault in California divorce and is a past president of the academy, listened to the debate and said later in an interview:

“Before we jump into a ready-made opening, we ought to be very, very careful.” Expressing his concern about the continuing erosion of the institution of marriage, he wondered if these interspousal torts may “create more problems with getting people to even consider marriage.”

Patti Sue Sullivan was 35 and had been employed as a $36,000-a-year printing company representative when she married Chiles. He was 41, son of Eddie Chiles, owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, and in his own right president of Houston Offshore International, an offshore drilling company. By his estimate, he was worth $48 million at the time. It was a first marriage for each.

“For the first six weeks it was absolutely wonderful,” she says of the marriage.

“I thought it was all right for maybe the first six months,” he says.

But they are in agreement on one thing: Ultimately, it turned into a nightmare.

In a recent interview in attorney Nichols’ office in Houston, Jerry Chiles said he had always shied away from marriage, partly because of his preoccupation with business--in the “good days” of oil in the mid-1970s, he estimates, his net worth soared to about $200 million--and partly because he feared that every woman he met was after those millions.

Patti Sullivan, he says, seemed different. During the five years they knew one another before marrying, he recalls, “She always told me, ‘Look, Jerry, I don’t want any of your money.’ She always said that, over and over and over again.” He believed her, he says, although he began to get “real nervous” during discussions about a prenuptial agreement.

The main purpose of the prenuptial agreement, Jerry Chiles says, “was to protect my separate property and the income from my separate property. Under Texas law, without a prenuptial agreement, the income, which was substantial, would have become community property.”

That agreement stipulated that Patti Chiles was to have half interest in the townhouse where they lived, which was his separate property; insurance on his life in the amount of $427,000, coverage under his medical insurance plan and, in the event of his death, about 75% of his estate. By its terms, these were in lieu of community property.

The contract she signed at the wedding reception was a reaffirmation contract or, as Lilly puts it, “the nail in the coffin.” Still, Patti Chiles signed it because “I loved and trusted Jerry Chiles.”

The picture of Patti Chiles that attorney Nichols painted for the jury was different; it was of a woman in debt “looking for a rich man.” In an interview, he puts it this way: “Here comes Jerry, who’s certainly rich, a heavy drinker, lonely, insecure . . . what she was looking for and what he had, love had nothing to do with that.”

‘A Little Bit Lost’

Jerry Chiles acknowledges, “I was certainly lonely at that time . . . and I was a little bit lost. The company was going downhill fast so I was concerned and worried about what was going to happen to my employees, my investors, myself. I guess you could translate that into being insecure.” Did he love Patti? “I thought I did.”

Patti Chiles’ eyes tear as she listens to a recounting of his version of things. “Jerry knows better,” she says softly.

In court, attorney Lilly depicted her as a nice Baptist girl from Lubbock, Tex., who “had plans and visions and dreams and goals, part of which was a marriage forever, a husband forever, a child or children forever.”

Patti Chiles says she was attracted to Jerry Chiles not for his money but because he was “sweet . . . someone I could talk to. He could come to me with his problems and I could go to him with my problems. And we would laugh and we shared at that time, I believe, the same values.”

Lilly adds, “He was a charming, lovable, fun human being when he was sober and that’s the guy she fell in love with and still loved throughout most of the marriage despite his atrocities.”

Sex and Cocaine Allegations

Those “atrocities,” as attested to during the 10-day trial in a Harris County courtroom, included a late-night sex and cocaine encounter in his office with a former company secretary, and high-roller spending on topless dancers at Houston clubs, including Caligula and Texas Cowgirls. (He denies cocaine use.)

Jerry Chiles’ attorney depicts his client as a Jekyll and Hyde--”A perfect gentleman when he was sober, a perfect bear when he was drunk.” Chiles watched his fortune dwindle from $200 million to $16 million, as oil prices fell, and, Nichols says, “His drinking got worse. He was losing $15 million to $20 million a month. The jury said he had a good reason for drinking.” (Counting tax liabilities, Chiles estimates his fortune now at less than $13 million.)

Living with Jerry Chiles, Patti says, was “like walking a tightrope.” She describes drinking bouts during which he would yell and scream until 3 or 4 in the morning, once hitting her on the head with a pillow to keep her awake. At other times, she says, he hit her and threw things at her, including a large Jack Daniels bottle. It was this “terrorism,” she contends, that ultimately drove her to seek help from two psychologists, including Dr. James Weatherly, who testified that she is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Denies Being an Alcoholic

In an interview, Jerry Chiles denies that he is an alcoholic but acknowledges that he enjoys drinking and “there’s times when I drink too much.” And he suggests that it is he who was a victim of emotional distress. He describes Patti Chiles as “very violent,” says she struck him on numerous occasions, broke his glasses, attacked his bedroom door with a fireplace poker, spit in his face and called him names like “wimp” and “pig.”

She says, “I slapped him back, I did. I lost my temper. There were times when I did.” Once, she says, “He threw a little Baccarat (crystal) thing at me and I picked the other one up and I threw it back at him.” But she denies any wholesale tossing of the family crystal, as charged by Jerry Chiles.

Her “harassment,” he says in an interview, included tearing telephones out of the walls of their $365,000, 5,000-square-foot Houston townhouse, tearing up his tickets to an Oklahoma-University of Texas football game and “deliberately provoking” him into extramarital affairs by withholding sexual favors during the last year of their marriage.

Unbeknown to him, he says, she was taping their conversations even before the wedding and frequently afterward, even making a tape of him in his sleep, snorting and screaming and by Nichols’ description, “sloshed out drunk having a nightmare . . . it sounded like a beached whale that was dying.”

She explains that she began the tapings on advice of a drug counselor she had consulted after a domestic spat three months after the wedding, a fight triggered by his excessive drinking. The counselor, she says, felt the tapes might help him remember his actions when he was sober. Jerry Chiles believes, however, that she was just setting him up, in essence making those tapes to play for a future jury.

Says Warren Cole, Nichols’ associate and the attorney who did most of the discovery in this case, “These people fought over the same things that a lot of other (married) people fight over--money, sex, other types of vices.”

Adds Nichols, “The facts in this case are less notorious, less preposterous, less important, less society-needs-to-know, than probably 80% of the cases over there (at the Harris County Courthouse) . . . but Jerry Chiles happened to be the wealthy son of a famous Texan. And, until the reversal of their fortunes, the Chileses, father and son, had money, even by Texas standards.

Indeed, the case of Chiles vs. Chiles is about big money. Patti Chiles will receive no alimony (there is no permanent alimony in Texas) but, if the appellate court lets the judge and jury’s decisions stand, she will receive about $1.4 million, including 60% of the Chileses’ community estate--and that $500,000 for emotional distress.

Jerry Chiles observes of the $1.4 million, “That’s over 10% of my net worth at this point in time. That’s for a marriage that lasted 22 months.”

“And she could shop,” he adds. In October and November of 1986, he says, she charged “$15,000 or $16,000 on my Neiman-Marcus bill” and at a Christmas party that year at the store tried to cajole him into buying her a $15,000 lynx coat. He smiles and says, “She filed for divorce three days after that.”

‘No Hope of Reconciliation’

Lilly acknowledges that Jerry Chiles “wasn’t at all shortchanging her on the money when she filed for divorce. She had a home. She had all the clothes she wanted.” No, he says, “She came to me because her value system demanded it. The marriage was over, period. There was no hope of reconciliation. It had nothing to do with the money.”

Patti Chiles’ petition for divorce cites physical pain, depression, humiliation, nausea and despondency as well as a horror of having contracted AIDS as a result of her husband’s extramarital affairs. (In an interview, Jerry Chiles acknowledged having had two adulterous affairs but denied having sexual liaisons with topless dancers or prostitutes.)

Responding to suggestions that the emotional-distress claim was nothing more or less than extortion, a clever ploy on Lilly’s part to get more money for Patti Chiles in the face of the prenuptial agreement, attorney Lilly says, “If Patti had wanted his damned money, she would have let him drink himself into oblivion . . . she only had to hang in there. . . .”

Alleging emotional distress was not Lilly’s initial approach to the case. “When the breaching of the marital vows theory didn’t make it (with the judge),” he says, “I thought about a lot of ideas as to how to get the message across, and win some damages.” As a former personal-injury lawyer, he says, he knew there were damages for emotional injuries that were coupled with physical injuries--”that’s historically acceptable.”

And, during 15 years of representing clients in child-custody battles, Lilly had frequently looked to psychologists and psychiatrists as expert witnesses. In the Chiles case, he says, “I figured that I could get a reasonable jury to accept psychological testimony in lieu of medical testimony.”

Patti Chiles describes her “emotional dysfunction” as “a loss of concentration . . . whereas I used to be able to get things organized and put them in order and stay calm, I can’t do that. They frustrate me. There’s panic attacks.” She tells of running out of public places after seeing something or someone who reminded her of the case, of crying jags brought on by a movie or television scene that brings back bad memories of the marriage. She talks of feeling a “big numbness.”

She frequently mentions “the incident,” the night in July of 1986 when she burst into his office and found him in a state of undress with another woman. “I still wake up at night screaming because I see (her) stabbing me in the head with a knife or running chasing me, stabbing me in the back.”

That woman was wearing purple Calvin Klein underwear, she says, and just seeing purple Calvin Klein underwear in a lingerie department causes her to hyperventilate.

In fact, Lilly says, because of her emotional distress Patti Chiles “was a poor witness. She went blank at times. I’m saying to myself, ‘What the hell’s going on, Patti? We discussed that two hours ago and now you’re acting like you don’t know what we’re talking about.’ ”

He describes the assignation in Jerry Chiles’ office as “the triggering event” in her emotional distress, “the old straw that breaks the camel’s back.” In that one moment, Lilly says, she felt “that pain of losing someone you love.”

Jerry Chiles and his attorneys reject the notion that Patti Chiles’ “emotional distress” is worth $500,000 or, for that matter, a penny.

But John Nichols rationalizes that, in the mind of the jurors, half a million dollars was probably “a drop in the bucket” considering the size of the estate. He says, “In the olden days, most serious oilmen would spill that much on Saturday night.”

And apparently that award made more sense to the jurors than some of her other requests totaling $5 million, including $1 million in damages because Jerry Chiles had tracked through the house “dog droppings” from one of the couple’s poodles, Remy and Brandy.

John Nichols readily admits to a certain grudging admiration for Lilly’s legal coup. They are good friends and have great professional respect for one another and, in fact, Nichols represented Lilly in his successful battle for custody of his son in 1978 after the breakup of his second marriage.

And Warren Cole says that, on principle, it is a “real viable” tort but, “if anybody can crawl up on the witness stand and say something stressful has not happened during their marriage, they’re either sick or they’ve been out to lunch.”

He characterizes the Chiles union as “a short-term marriage (where) you hang in there just long enough to make your tape recordings and then say, ‘King’s X. I’ve just had it. I can’t stand it anymore. Where do I push the button for the money to come out?’ I have a real problem with that.”

Lilly is convinced, “if the jury had liked Patti Chiles, they would have given her $3 million.” (Nichols agrees, adding, “I shudder to think what the award might have been had she been a good witness.”)

Still, Lilly says, “I won. I won significantly. If John (Nichols) thinks it’s a modest amount of dollars, I wonder what the hell we’re doing in this appeal.” He says he didn’t expect the jury “would give anything like what they did.”

In his appeal and motion for a new trial, Nichols contends there was “legally insufficient evidence” to support the $500,000 judgment and says that at best that award should not exceed $50,000. Nichols and Cole contend, too, that the $500,000 award, plus the $900,000, her share of the community estate, is a “double recovery” and are asking that one or the other be eliminated.

They also ask that the premarital agreement be upheld as “valid and enforceable,” citing Patti Chiles’ testimony during the trial that she did not sign it under physical duress, and that there was adequate disclosure of financial information. Patti Chiles acknowledges her testimony but claims she was victimized by “emotional and psychological tricks.”

Before and After

Jerry Chiles says that “when Patti entered the marriage she had a leased BMW automobile, a leased apartment and she owed her father $15,000 . . . 22 months later when she filed for divorce her estate (including furs, jewelry and a $40,000 Mercedes he bought her, plus half of the townhouse) would have been worth, we figure roughly, somewhere between $300,000 to $500,000. She would have gotten that anyway, even if we hadn’t gone to trial, if we’d just split up along the terms of the prenuptial agreement.” (In addition, he points out that during the marriage she received numerous perks including $75,000 in cash for which she was not asked to account.)

Chiles produces a transcript of a taped telephone message in which, pre-marriage, he and Patti are discussing the agreement. In it, she says, “I understand what you’re trying to do. I understand totally. I don’t blame you. I’ve never wanted anything that wasn’t mine.”

Lilly acknowledges she signed voluntarily in that it was “not a physically coerced signing” and, he says, “I don’t have any doubt that Patti knew that was a premarital agreement she was signing and that he was worth $40 million or whatever. But she thought what she was giving up was not community property rights but his separate properties that she never wanted to make a claim on.”

Lilly points out that the lawyer then representing Patti was hired by her husband’s lawyers and contends she never knew “what the hell was going on.”

The jury found the prenuptial agreement unfair and state district Judge Henry Schuble III upheld that finding and set it aside. He then set the value of the couple’s community property at $1.5 million and decreed that Patti Chiles should get 60% of that, or $900,000 plus the $500,000 tort award. Fairness as a legal yardstick is “a question mark in the court of appeals,” Lilly says, with little precedent.

Warren Cole just smiles and says, “Premarital agreements aren’t supposed to be fair.”

Patti Chiles shakes her head: “You just can’t explain everything that happened and the effect it had on me.” She is still receiving counseling, trying to “rebuild my self-image.” For 22 months, she says, “I kept trying, and I kept trying” to help Jerry, to save their marriage.

She hasn’t decided whether to stay in Houston, where she so fears recognition, she says, that she will not go out alone and does her grocery shopping at night.

Does she consider $500,000 fair compensation for what she says she went through? “I can’t say what’s fair,” she says. “It’s a significant amount of money. It will allow me to put some pieces back together. By no means does it allow any kind of extravagant life style or anything . . . it will definitely help to, what do you call it, in a sense rehabilitate my emotions, I guess.” (Meanwhile, she is receiving temporary alimony that amounts to $15,000 a month in cash and perks such as club memberships.)

The Feelings That Remain

What does she feel toward Jerry Chiles today? “Sadness.”

Jerry Chiles, a man who laughs readily, laughs when that question is put to him about Patti. Then he says, “Let me put it this way: I don’t believe I’d marry her again.”

At $300 an hour, each side incurred about $200,000 in attorneys’ fees. The court has ruled that hers will be paid by him.

And Earle Lilly, noted for his courtroom theatrics (he claims to have been the first to use day-in-the-life videos in child-custody cases) has emerged as the mastermind of what he terms “a landmark decision.”

Lilly, a cab driver’s son from Massachusetts and an adopted Texan, is savoring the moment. “I knew I had a novel issue,” he says, “but I didn’t think it would cause as much alarm and concern as it has. Some law firms and some men’s rights groups have started worrying about men not being able to do things that historically they did to women and got away with.”

It could have happened anywhere, Lilly says--”if you had all the ingredients . . . and a defendant that could satisfy the judgment. You know, you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”

Lilly, who worked his way through night law school at University of Houston, admits to certain insecurities about not having gone to a Yale or Harvard and has spent years struggling to prove he is “not just a tough guy from the streets,” figures the attention is only his due.

He says, “I’ve worked so many cases that were impossible, and won them, without any recognition. I won a change of custody case for a Russian immigrant, a doctor, who was 66 years old (the child was 4 and custody had been awarded to her mother). Such unbelievable odds, I thought the entire world would want to know how you do that.” The world didn’t. He cites a string of other big wins, any of which he had thought “would make at least Texas history.”

But he says he never anticipated that the Chiles case would, at last, bring him national recognition. He smiles and says of the emotional abuse tort, “One lawyer said it would make palimony look like kindergarten stuff.”