Brandy Corbell Holland v. Michael Samuel Holland

Court of Civil Appeals of Alabama·Decided April 24, 2026·No. CL-2025-0210·Published

Opinion

Rel: April 24, 2026

Notice: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the advance sheets of Southern Reporter. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Alabama Appellate Courts, 300 Dexter Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama 36104-3741 ((334) 229-0650), of any typographical or other errors, in order that corrections may be made before the opinion is published in Southern Reporter.

ALABAMA COURT OF CIVIL APPEALS OCTOBER TERM, 2025-2026

CL-2025-0210

Brandy Corbell Holland

v.

Michael Samuel Holland

Appeal from Walker Circuit Court (DR-21-900314)

FRIDY, Judge.

Brandy Corbell Holland ("the wife") appeals from a judgment of the Walker Circuit Court divorcing her from Michael Samuel Holland ("the husband"). In the judgment, the trial court awarded the wife rehabilitative alimony, divided the marital property, awarded the parties

joint legal custody of their minor children and awarded sole physical custody of those children to the husband, subject to the wife's visitation, and ordered the wife to pay child support. For the reasons set forth herein, we affirm the judgment in part and reverse it in part.

Background

The parties married in 2004; three children were born during the marriage, but the oldest, S.H., had already reached the age of majority when the trial began in June 2024. The two younger children, E.H. and H.H., were sixteen years old and twelve years old, respectively, when the trial began.1 The husband commenced the current divorce action in October 2021, and the trial took place over five days in June, August, and November 2024. At the trial, the husband testified that, in the years leading up to the commencement of the action, he and the wife had each filed divorce complaints but then had dismissed those complaints. The wife testified that, just before the husband had commenced the current

1The wife also had an adult child who was born before the parties

married and who the husband said that he had raised and considered his own child.

action, they had a conversation during which they agreed that "they just [could not] do this anymore." The wife said that she did not have the financial means to pursue a divorce, but the husband said that he did, so he commenced the present divorce action.

It is undisputed that, when the first two divorce actions were commenced, neither the husband nor the wife moved out of the marital residence. When the husband commenced the present action, it appears that, at first, the parties again maintained the status quo. Both remained in the marital residence. The husband said that they continued to have sexual relations; the wife said that they rarely had sex. They celebrated Christmas and a child's birthday together, but, the wife said, "everything was different after that divorce filing."

The wife testified that, in the year leading up to the commencement of the present divorce action, the husband did not regularly give her money and that, at times, she had had to use her father's check card to make purchases. The wife's father died in January 2022, and she began receiving his pension check. The husband said that he added the wife to one of his individual bank accounts in February 2022. The parties agreed that some of the pension money the wife received was used to pay for a

family beach trip in the spring of 2022. The husband said that, at that time, he still had hopes for making the marriage work.

The wife moved out of the marital residence in June 2022, going to stay briefly with a friend and then moving into a rental house in July 2022. She said that, when she was still living in the marital residence, every time the husband got mad at her, he swore and told her to leave and that nobody, including the children, wanted her there. The husband testified that all the children had asked for the husband and the wife to divorce and had "begged" for the wife to leave the marital residence, in part because of the wife's behavior, which included essentially living on the front porch and sometimes going weeks without a shower.

The husband testified that each of the children had threatened suicide because of the way the wife made them feel. He said that the wife was mean to the youngest child, and he described an occasion when the wife urinated on the garage floor and in the bedroom and "pitched a tantrum" on a day when the youngest child was at home preparing for a pageant. He said that the youngest child appeared to be nervous when he took her to visit the wife and that she has cried "uncontrollably" when preparing to visit the wife.

All three children testified during the trial; however, because of a problem with the recording equipment on the day they testified, their testimony was not taken down. On July 29, 2025, four months after the notice of appeal was filed, the wife filed a motion in the trial court asking that it approve a statement of the evidence that she said she had prepared pursuant to Rule 10(d), Ala. R. App. P., and asking to supplement the record on appeal with the statement.2 In the motion, the wife's attorney, who had not been the wife's attorney during the trial, indicated that she had communicated with the husband's attorney about stipulating to the content of the children's testimony that had been omitted from the trial transcript but that the husband's attorney had advised her that she could not agree to such a course of action. The wife filed the statement of the evidence in the trial court and served the statement on the husband's attorney on the same day that she filed the

2Rule 10(d) provides, in part, that, "[i]f no report of the evidence or

proceedings at a hearing or trial was made, or if a transcript is unavailable, the appellant may prepare a statement of the evidence or proceedings from the best available means, including the appellant's recollection."

motion for its approval and to supplement the record. On November 10, 2025, the trial court granted the wife's motion.3 According to the statement of the evidence, H.H., the parties'

twelve-year-old daughter, expressed a desire to have a relationship with the wife. E.H., the parties' sixteen-year-old daughter, said that she had a strained relationship with the wife, which E.H. believed was the result of the "toxicity" of the husband and the wife's relationship. E.H. acknowledged that the wife had reached out to her, but she said that she was "not in a place where she [was] ready to work on her relationship" with the wife and that she was not ready to obtain counseling to assist her with that relationship. She added that she wanted to see the wife "in accordance with her own wishes and desires" once the wife became healthier. S.H., the parties' nineteen-year-old son, testified that the parents' relationship was so toxic that he believed they should no longer

3We recognize that, under Rule 10(d), Ala. R. App. P., the wife was

required to serve her statement of the evidence on the husband no more than twenty-eight days after she filed her notice of appeal. The wife filed her notice of appeal on March 24, 2025, and did not serve the husband with her statement of the evidence until July 29, 2025, far beyond the time allowed. However, the husband did not object to the statement, move to strike it, or challenge the trial court's subsequent approval of it, and he does not challenge on appeal either the statement or the trial court's approval of it.

be married. He said that he wanted to visit the wife when his schedule permitted and that he had maintained contact with her.

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