Author Topic: Has Katie Holmes Spent Enough Time in New York to Get a Divorce There?  (Read 2455 times)

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Offline Rapunzel

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Has Katie Holmes Spent Enough Time in New York to Get a Divorce There?

Today 7:54 PM PDT by Natalie Finn and Claudia Rosenbaum


Now that we think about it, for a gal with a mansion in Beverly Hills that boasts the Beckhams as neighbors, Katie Holmes sure spent a lot of time in New York over the last couple years.

Is it possible that Holmes had something else in mind all that time besides proximity to the theater scene and great delis?

Aside from her prescient comments to Elle about "coming into her own," rumors are now swirling that her split from Tom Cruise was years in the making—and that she made sure to regularly touch down in New York expressly so that she could file divorce papers in the Big Apple.

Obviously she had her reasons, so...how can Holmes ensure that she gets divorced in New York, even if Cruise counterfiles in Los Angeles?

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First of all, there's a two-year residency requirement to file for divorce in New York—meaning Holmes has to prove that she has physically been in the state for an adequate amount of time and intends to stay there after her split from Cruise is finalized. (The courts are OK with petitioners having residences in different states.)

So far so good: Holmes leased a unit in the luxurious Chelsea Mercantile building and is currently residing there with 6-year-old daughter Suri Cruise. But will it be enough?

"It's really a subjective test," New York divorce attorney Bettina Hindin tells E! News. "The court is going to look at all aspects of residency—length of time you have been here, child schooling, purchase of leasing or purchase of homes, places of worship, clubs, where you pay taxes, where your car is registered, where your cable bill is sent, etc."

MORE: Katie Holmes Grabs Ice Cream With Suri, Says She's "All Right"

"They don't want people who aren't here and don't intend to stay here to filling up the courts," explains Hindin. "You have to have real ties to New York. And it can't be for the sole purpose of obtaining matrimonial relief."

As for matrimonial relief, Holmes and Cruise have a prenuptial agreement that details what sort of payout Holmes is entitled to based on the circumstances surrounding the end of their marriage. But though the usual NYC divorce settlement is 50-50ish, the actual law is one of equitable distribution, unlike California's law that states a couple jointly own everything acquired during the course of their marriage.

That joint ownership extends to the kids, unlike in New York, where "either he gets her or she gets her, and the other person has access," Hindin says. "The [New York] court can't order two divorcing parents to coparent. If they can't do it like grownups here, the court will make a direction that either he gets custody or she gets custody, and the other one will have visitation."

MORE: Tom & Katie's divorce: What's 33 got to do with it?

Cruise has hired Dennis Wasser, who represented him when he divorced Nicole Kidman, and, according to his longtime legal rep, Bert Fields, is planning to file his own divorce paperwork. Fields wouldn't say whether the actor was going to file in California or request joint custody of Suri.

Hindin says that Cruise has several options if he objects to Holmes' desired New York jurisdiction: He can bring it up at their first hearing, which is scheduled for July 17. He can file a motion in NYC expressing his opposition. Or, he can file a motion in California to the same effect.

Seemingly gearing up for her side of the fight, Holmes visited her attorneys' office in Manhattan today.

And, going by the photographic evidence alone, the Don't Be Afraid of the Dark star has spent considerable time in New York during the past two years.

Holmes attended the red-carpet premiere of The Extra Man in the city on July 19, 2010, and was spotted at least a few times every month thereafter. Prior to that, lest we forget, she lived in Manhattan (in the $15 million brownstone she shared with Cruise) while making her Broadway debut in All My Sons in 2008.


Read more: http://www.eonline.com/news/has_katie_holmes_spent_enough_time_in/328393#ixzz1zuv28A73
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline Rapunzel

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And, going by the photographic evidence alone, the Don't Be Afraid of the Dark star has spent considerable time in New York during the past two years.

Holmes attended the red-carpet premiere of The Extra Man in the city on July 19, 2010, and was spotted at least a few times every month thereafter. Prior to that, lest we forget, she lived in Manhattan (in the $15 million brownstone she shared with Cruise) while making her Broadway debut in All My Sons in 2008.



I have seen a LOT more pics of her in NYC than in CA for a long time -- back to at least 2008 when she moved there to do the aforementioned play....... and since the play she seems to be in NY a LOT.....
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline Rapunzel

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/07/why-katie-holmes-may-win-custody.html


Why Katie Holmes May Win Custody
by Nancy Hass Jul 7, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

The shock of TomKat’s split is fading, replaced by the cold reality of a custody fight. Nancy Hass on why Holmes may have the upper hand.
 
Katie Holmes may often have seemed like a doe in the footlights during her marriage to Tom Cruise. But one thing has become increasingly clear in the days since her Mission Impossible stealth court filing: the 33-year-old actress is no naïf when it comes to divorce law.

Child custody battles among super-wealthy celebrities can be particularly bruising and protracted. But Holmes’s intricate plan to leave the Church of Scientology and win full custody of her six-year-old daughter, Suri, has many of New York’s top marital attorneys—a tough crowd—impressed.

“She will win plain and simple,” says Raoul Felder, who has represented Rudy Giuliani and the wives of Patrick Ewing, Tom Clancy, and Martin Scorsese. “The case will be settled with a whimper in six months and he will fade off into the sunset. I don’t care how aggressive Scientology is or how many lawyers he has. He will lose.” Holmes, he says, with admiration in his voice, “is a little diabolical.”

Holmes, aided by a phalanx of legal advisers, made several choices that will be hard for Cruise to counter, experts agree. Holmes’ father, who is said to be advising her closely on her strategy, is a Toledo lawyer with experience in matrimonial matters.

First, Holmes filed in New York, where joint legal custody is not taken for granted as it is in California. “In fact, it’s cases like this that make the courts here remember why they don’t like joint custody; it’s just unworkable in too many instances, “ says Eleanor Alter, who represented Mia Farrow and Christie Brinkley. While joint custody is indeed widespread in New York as it is across the nation, that’s because the parents agree to it, under the terms of settlements that are generally reached long before the cases wind up in court, says Alter.

New York courts instead tend to favor a “spheres of decision” approach in which one parent may get the final say in some areas (education and health care, for example), while another gets another sphere, say, religion, says Patricia Hennessey, whose client list is a who’s who of Wall Street heavies. But Holmes’s lawyers may successfully dispatch even the suggestion of such an approach because Scientology’s influence is felt through all the traditional domestic spheres; Scientologists often send their children to special schools and liken psychiatric medications to poison. “You can’t just peel off one aspect of it, so that wouldn’t work,” says Hennessey. “It’s a zero-sum game in this case. Someone has to get full legal custody, meaning final say in all the important decisions.”

Even if Holmes signed a pre-nuptial agreement in which she said she would raise Suri as a Scientologist, the court could throw it out, says Hennessey. “Nothing about children is enforceable, unlike spousal support items. The court won’t sacrifice the well-being of the child just because five years ago someone said they would raise the kid that way. And Katie could get around it by saying that at that point she didn’t know what it entailed.”

    “She will win plain and simple,” says divorce lawyer Raoul Felder. Holmes, he says, with admiration in his voice, “is a little diabolical.”

Much has been made of the secrecy with which Holmes filed – the inference being that the church would somehow have prevented the action if Holmes had informed Cruise that she intended to seek a divorce. But experts say the secrecy was likely as much a matter of Holmes wanting to win what lawyers call the “race to the courthouse,” says Harriet Newman Cohen, who has represented Laurence Fishburne and Andrew Cuomo.  The party who files first in a case where there may be jurisdictional issues has an advantage, she says.

Cruise may indeed seek a change in venue to California, says Cohen, but as the couple owns a townhouse in Manhattan (Holmes also bought an apartment in Chelsea in recent months) it will be “a big challenge for those lawyers.” (For once, the paparazzi dogging her steps may be a benefit for Holmes; virtually every moment of her life in Manhattan over the past year–Suri almost always with her–has been documented). “They will have to show that Suri’s pediatrician is in L.A., that her life is there. With celebrities who have so many properties and so much traveling, it’s complicated.”

The judge in the case, Matthew Cooper, is “a man of strong ideas, most of them very well thought out,” says Hennessey. “Not the kind of guy who’s going to let this case go to California.” She predicts that any jurisdictional issues in the case will be worked out quickly, in Holmes’s favor, within the next couple of weeks.

Holmes’s timing in filing the divorce was also “clearly well thought out,” says Rick Ross, an expert in controversial religions and cult deprogramming who says he has testified as an expert witness in “scores” of custody cases involving Scientology, the Unification Church and Jehovah’s Witnesses. While there has been much speculation that Holmes filed at this moment in her child’s life because she was worried that Scientology ramps up its indoctrination at age six, there is also a legal issue at stake, says Ross. As children reach the age of six or seven, courts begin to take into account issues of consistency and stability. “Even if the court is skeptical of an extreme religion or a cult and would want to give custody to the parent who has left, if the child has spent most of his life in the religion or cult and has been fully indoctrinated, the court will leave the kid there because it’s the life the child knows.”  Holmes, he said, would be at much greater risk of losing Suri if she had waited.

Such a dynamic may have played out in Cruise’s divorce from Nicole Kidman. The couple had two adopted children, Connor and Isabella, who were six and eight when their divorce proceedings began in 2001. On the record at least, both Cruise and Kidman favored joint custody. But Kidman, who like Holmes was raised Catholic and never seemed to embrace Scientology with any fervor, fled back to Australia around the time of the separation announcement, and by the time the settlement was reached, the children were had spent much of their childhoods in the church. “Even if she had tried to get custody through the court, it would probably have failed,” said Ross. “It was too late for those kids. The court doesn’t like to disrupt their lives.”

Holmes also made a canny move, experts say, when she announced in her filing that she was open to Cruise sharing physical custody, despite suing for sole legal custody. Such a statement was likely a coded salvo to contrast with he church’s policy of “Disconnection,” they say. Scientology formally declares dissenters and those who leave precipitously as “Suppressive Persons,” a labeling that is a form of “shunning.”  Many former Scientologists, especially those who were deeply involved in church hierarchy or members of the “Sea Org,” a small core of full-time workers who are often second generation Scientologists and have no relationships outside of the church, have said publicly that being named an SP was devastating. Some have posted their “Declare” (the document sent by the church) on such websites as “Ex-Scientology Kids.” Kidman has never said publicly if she received a “Declare,” but she has conceded she has little relationship with Connor or Isabella. In 2010, Isabella told an Australian magazine that she sees Kidman “sometimes.”

Mike Kelly, a Santa Monica divorce lawyer and former chairman of the American Bar Association’s custody committee told the Los Angeles Times last week that California courts would not view Scientology differently than another other religions, and that Cruise would be allowed to raise Suri in his faith while she was with him. But Hennessey and others who have experience with both celebrity and high-worth divorces that involve religious differences insist that that is untrue in New York. The church’s policy of disconnection would come into play if the case wound up in court, says Hennessey: “The judges don’t like anything that smacks of parental alienation. They don’t like even the suggestion that one parent would poison the mind of the child against the other parent. That’s considered a deal breaker.”

The fact that Scientology has such a strong opposition to psychiatric medications for conditions including ADHD and depression also could affect a judge. Ross, who has testified in many cases relating to Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Christian sect that opposes blood transfusions and practices a form of shunning called “disfellowship,” says that the courts “aren’t comfortable with religions that are ‘non-accommodating’ and could threaten the child’s health. That’s where they tend to draw the line.”

And while Scientology has long fought to be regarded as a legitimate, even mainstream, practice, Holmes’s divorce action is likely to highlight how alien most people, including New York matrimonial judges, find the church.  “No snake-handler religion is ever going to get custody of that child,” says Hennessey. “No way.”
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline U-238

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These are the rules for divorce in New York State:
New York Domestic Relations - Article 13 - § 230 Notice of Nature of Matrimonial Action; Proof of Service

 §  230.  Required residence of parties. An action to annul a marriage,
  or to declare the  nullity  of  a  void  marriage,  or  for  divorce  or
  separation may be maintained only when:
    1.  The  parties  were  married  in  the  state  and either party is a
  resident thereof when the action is commenced and has  been  a  resident
  for a continuous period of one year immediately preceding, or
    2.  The  parties  have  resided  in this state as husband and wife and
  either party is a resident thereof when the action is commenced and  has
  been  a  resident  for  a  continuous  period  of  one  year immediately
  preceding, or
    3. The cause occurred in  the  state  and  either  party  has  been  a
  resident   thereof  for  a  continuous  period  of  at  least  one  year
  immediately preceding the commencement of the action, or
    4. The cause occurred in the state  and  both  parties  are  residents
  thereof at the time of the commencement of the action, or
    5.  Either  party  has  been  a resident of the state for a continuous
  period of at least two years immediately preceding the  commencement  of
  the action.


http://law.onecle.com/new-york/domestic-relations/DOM0230_230.html
« Last Edit: July 07, 2012, 07:14:30 am by U-238 »
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Offline U-238

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These are the rules for divorce in New York State:
New York Domestic Relations - Article 13 - § 230 Notice of Nature of Matrimonial Action; Proof of Service

 §  230.  Required residence of parties. An action to annul a marriage,
  or to declare the  nullity  of  a  void  marriage,  or  for  divorce  or
  separation may be maintained only when:
    1.  The  parties  were  married  in  the  state  and either party is a
  resident thereof when the action is commenced and has  been  a  resident
  for a continuous period of one year immediately preceding, or
    2.  The  parties  have  resided  in this state as husband and wife and
  either party is a resident thereof when the action is commenced and  has
  been  a  resident  for  a  continuous  period  of  one  year immediately
  preceding, or
    3. The cause occurred in  the  state  and  either  party  has  been  a
  resident   thereof  for  a  continuous  period  of  at  least  one  year
  immediately preceding the commencement of the action, or
    4. The cause occurred in the state  and  both  parties  are  residents
  thereof at the time of the commencement of the action, or
    5.  Either  party  has  been  a resident of the state for a continuous
  period of at least two years immediately preceding the  commencement  of
  the action.


http://law.onecle.com/new-york/domestic-relations/DOM0230_230.html

California Rules for Divorce:


1. What are grounds for divorce in California?

In California, there are two grounds for divorce (also known as dissolution):

•Irreconcilable differences. You simply check this box on the dissolution petition and the court will grant your divorce.
•Incurable insanity (almost never used). Medical proof that one spouse was insane when the petition was filed-and remains incurably insane-is required.
In addition, you or your spouse must have lived in California for six months and in your county for three months before filing a petition to dissolve your marriage. There is no residency requirement for filing for legal separation

You can get a legal separation or an annulment (also called a nullity) without having lived in California for six months or your county for three months before filing.
•Legal separation. You may have religious, insurance, tax or other reasons for wanting a legal separation instead of a dissolution. If you obtain a legal separation, you and your spouse will remain married, but the court can divide your property and issue orders relating to child custody, visitation, child support and spousal support, and, if necessary, a restraining order.
•Annulment. If you are granted an annulment, it is as though your marriage never existed. You may be able to get an annulment if you married when you were a minor without the consent of your parents or guardian, or if certain types of fraud or deceit were involved. If you want an annulment, however, you will have to appear in court for a trial
.

Is there a simplified process for getting a divorce?

Yes. California has a process called summary dissolution. If you qualify for a summary dissolution, you will have less paperwork to file and you will not have to appear in court. You may be eligible for such a process if you and your spouse have agreed in writing to a division of your assets and debts and if the following conditions exist:

•You have been married for five years or less.
 
•You have no children from the relationship.
 
•Neither of you own a home or other real estate.
 
•The value of all community property amounts to less than $25,000, excluding automobiles.
 
•The value of either party's separate property amounts to less than $25,000, excluding automobiles.
 
•Your combined debt does not exceed $4,000, except for an auto loan.
 
•Both of you waive spousal support.
Both spouses must agree to all of the terms of a summary dissolution. Also, either of you can cancel it for any reason before the dissolution is final. Further information on this simplified procedure may be available at your local court or on the California Courts website
http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Public/Pamphlets/DivorceCustody.aspx#4
« Last Edit: July 07, 2012, 07:26:12 am by U-238 »
"To do a great right, do a little wrong."(Merchant of Venice Act 4, Scene 1
“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter” – George Washington

Offline Rapunzel

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I think here attorneys -- who are the best money can buy -- are well aware of the laws of NY Residency..... like I said, she has been in NY much more than anywhere else going back to 2008 when she did the play there for six months and they have had a home there since they were married... and the home in CA is HIS home from before she married him.   He has homes all over the place including Telluride, CO....
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline U-238

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I think here attorneys -- who are the best money can buy -- are well aware of the laws of NY Residency..... like I said, she has been in NY much more than anywhere else going back to 2008 when she did the play there for six months and they have had a home there since they were married... and the home in CA is HIS home from before she married him.   He has homes all over the place including Telluride, CO....

I agree. She would get an easier divorce somewhere else other than California.Its too messy here.
« Last Edit: July 07, 2012, 07:29:34 am by U-238 »
"To do a great right, do a little wrong."(Merchant of Venice Act 4, Scene 1
“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter” – George Washington

Offline U-238

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I think here attorneys -- who are the best money can buy -- are well aware of the laws of NY Residency..... like I said, she has been in NY much more than anywhere else going back to 2008 when she did the play there for six months and they have had a home there since they were married... and the home in CA is HIS home from before she married him.   He has homes all over the place including Telluride, CO....

There are no winners in a divorce escpecially when children are involved
"To do a great right, do a little wrong."(Merchant of Venice Act 4, Scene 1
“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter” – George Washington

Offline mountaineer

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If Holmes ultimately keeps her child out of the clutches of the Scientologists, I'd say Suri will be the winner in this divorce.
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