Williams v. Williams

112 N.W. 528, 101 Minn. 400
CourtSupreme Court of Minnesota
DecidedJune 28, 1907
DocketNos. 15,170-(112)
StatusPublished
Cited by24 cases

This text of 112 N.W. 528 (Williams v. Williams) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Minnesota primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Williams v. Williams, 112 N.W. 528, 101 Minn. 400 (Mich. 1907).

Opinion

.JAGGARD, J.

This was an action for an absolute- divorce, brought by the husband, plaintiff and respondent, against the wife, the defendant and appellant. The complaint set forth the marriage and the existence of two [401]*401children — Hazel, aged twenty-four, and Olive, aged eighteen. The first of the grounds upon which the divorce was sought consisted of cruel and inhuman treatment, detailed in nineteen paragraphs, without a charge of actual physical violence. Part of this cruel and inhuman treatment consisted in accusing the plaintiff of infidelity, in spying, and in publishing such accusations. The second ground was desertion. Defendant denied cruel and inhuman treatment, and alleged in justification of her conduct improper conduct of the plaintiff with a young woman who will hereafter be referred to as the plaintiff’s bookkeeper. She also filed a cross-complaint asking a separation from bed and board upon the ground of the husband’s cruel.and inhuman treatment, improper conduct with the said young woman, and desertion. The court found facts in detail, and therefrom concluded as a matter of law that neither party had deserted the other; that the wife had been guilty of cruel and inhuman treatment of the husband within the meaning of the divorce law; and that the husband had not been so guilty with reference to the wife. The court, therefore, granted the plaintiff an absolute divorce, but required him to provide for the wife’s support for the rest of her life, unless she should remarry, in the sum of $1,000 per annum. From an order denying defendant’s motion to grant a new trial, this appeal was taken.

1. An examination of the record has satisfied us that the findings ■of fact of the trial court are justified by the evidence, within the familiar rule on that subject. This is peculiarly a case in which those findings are entitled to the usual presumption of law in their favor. The trial judge calls attention to “one remarkable feature o'f the trial, to wit, the manifest deliberate perjury of some of the witnesses who then gave testimony.” Having seen the witnesses and heard their testimony, he was in an altogether better position to determine what the truth was than we can possibly be in, with only the printed record before us. We proceed, accordingly, to refer to some of the salient features of the evidence, not in order that we may determine the merits of the controversies de novo, but the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain the trial court’s findings of fact, supported by the presumption in their favor.

The charges of unchastity made by the wife against the husband continued during a period of more than eighteen years. The present

[402]*402inquiry, however, is limited to the last ten years. The first of two recent aggravated cases concerned a young woman who, the defendant herself testified, was “a respectable lady,” and against whose character she knew nothing. The defendant, indeed, denied having charged her husband with infidelity with this particular woman. Her testimony in this regard was demonstrated to have been false.

The second of such cases concerned another young woman, a bookkeeper in plaintiff’s employ. Defendant.had a hole bored in a covered stairway, through which she watched her husband and this bookkeeper work at his place of business in the evenings for three or four weeks. Strong proof of the lack of foundation for her accusations is to be found in her own testimony as to what she thus observed. Many circumstances were referred to as showing some reasonable ground for her suspicion. Careful examination of the record with respect to all of them has satisfied us that the trial court properly regarded them as inadequate, and that her accusations were not justified by probable cause. In quaint, ingenious, and conspicuous ways she spied on her husband and the young woman, and induced and employed many other persons to watch them. The publication of the scandal covered a long period of time, and occurred at divers places to various people. The trial court was justified in finding that the wife caused “many of [the husband’s] acquaintances and business associates to suspect the existence of criminal relations between the plaintiff and his women employees, and has subjected him to much discussion, scandal, and ridicule in this regard, and has greatly humiliated him, and has seriously injured his reputation and business standing.” The court did not find that “such conduct on her part has to any considerable extent injured his health.” It certainly, however, constituted a serious menace, and substantially tended to injure his nervous system, as it had destroyed his peace of mind and domestic happiness.

The court also found, and was justified in finding, that neither party was ever guilty of actual serious physical violence toward the other, nor had any reason to fear such violence. There was testimony that the wife tried to induce one witness to “get a lot of women together and have [the witness’] son to be the head leader of the mall, and give them [the husband and the bookkeeper] a coat o.f tar and feathers.” She offered another $150 if he would “shoot the brute” (her husband), [403]*403and another $5 to hold her husband while she went in his place of business and horsewhipped the girl. This evidence, although corroborated, is justly subject to grave criticism. The wife denied the facts thus testified to; but her own testimony on material points the trial court properly held to have been successfully contradicted. Whatever truth there may have been in these charges, there is, however, no reasonable controversy that her recurrences to the subject of these young women occasioned domestic broils innumerable, distressing, and, on the wife’s part, accompanied by paroxysms of rage. The scene of these eruptions of what the trial court calls her “somewhat violent temper and morbidly jealous disposition” was indifferently the home, or where the unhappy pair had gone in search of peace or pleasure, or the husband’s place of business, or in public generally. There was proof, for example, of an outbreak of her passion at the table which drove one of the children upstairs. The wife ran around the table and seized a carving knife. The husband and the other daughter, at the end of a. couple of hours, “succeeded in quieting her down.”

We regard as insignificant here the trial court’s finding of fact that the tenderness of her nature, which she did not manifest to her husband* led to the wife’s employment to a considerable extent in matters relating to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, against the known wishes of the plaintiff, and'that she neglected the management of her household. In that connection, however, a multitude of circumstances appearing in the record — and it is the record only of which we speak — must be considered. Here, however, only their general result may be stated. The husband’s success as a large manufacturer made possible his sustained generosity to his family, but brought him nothing save a house divided against itself. The home was a place of torment. His efforts to attain peace there and elsewhere encountered only reproach and vituperation as fluent as it has. been held to have been unjust, and as indelicate as it was irrepressible. The epithets which the wife, according to the record, applied to the women she suspected, are unfit for repetition here: As the trial court remarked: They were “more suitable to a brothel than to polite society.” Her abuse of her husband extended to charges of disease et similiter.

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Bluebook (online)
112 N.W. 528, 101 Minn. 400, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/williams-v-williams-minn-1907.