Alimony agony
Rudolph Pierce thought it was time to retire. But as a veteran member of the Massachusetts bar - and a former judge - he must have known that shedding the burden of alimony would never be so easy.
And it won’t be. The Supreme Judicial Court ruled this week that Pierce must continue to pay his ex-wife, Carneice, $42,000 a year in alimony, even though they have been divorced for 10 years, and even though Pierce, 66, retired from his downtown law firm two years ago.
Things could be worse for him, of course: Pierce used to pay $110,000 a year in alimony.
There may not be a more emotionally fraught issue boiling under the surface at the State House than the movement for alimony reform. Although lawmakers have ducked the issue for years, they are feeling pressure to bring Massachusetts law closer to the rest of the country.
The Pierce case burst into public view with this week’s court ruling, but insiders had been closely watching it for months, because it touched on the most contested issues of divorce law here.
Massachusetts divorce law gives trial judges broad discretion over both the amount and duration of support. The people - mostly divorce lawyers - who like the system the way it is say judges have the right to protect women who need and deserve it. The system’s many critics, meanwhile, say it creates an overly subjective and unpredictable maze that makes it difficult to ever completely sever ties with former spouses.
There are at least two major issues. In Massachusetts, unlike most other states, alimony is usually forever. And in Massachusetts, if a divorced person remarries, the income and assets of the new spouse can be used in determining how much alimony gets paid. Advocates scream, persuasively, that both provisions are unfair.
“We’re not against alimony, we’re against alimony for life,’’ says Stephen Hitner of Massachusetts Alimony Reform. He is the state’s reform movement leader.
Hitner tends to dwell on horror stories, and has amassed a huge collection of them. Yes, he is divorced, for what it’s worth.
His argument, stripped of expletives, is that the legitimate purpose of alimony is to help people weather the economic dislocation of divorce, as opposed to maintaining a certain lifestyle forever.
Like most states, Massachusetts divorce law changed in the 1970s, the golden era of no-fault divorce. But while divorce changed, alimony really didn’t. The idea that the lower-earning spouse needed and deserved to be supported for life in some approximation of their old lifestyle was simply too deeply ingrained.
This held true even for spouses clearly capable of supporting themselves. Pierce’s wife was making $95,000 a year when this case began, with close to $1 million in various retirement and other accounts - although she, like her former husband, is now retired.
Senator Cynthia Stone Creem is the Senate chair of the Judiciary Committee, a joint committee that will consider the bills to reframe alimony. Creem is also a practicing, successful defense lawyer who appears to see no conflict with divorce lawyers like her driving the process.
“I don’t think the conflict you’re driving at is there,’’ she told me recently.
Creem has rounded up an ad hoc committee that is about to look at the issue. Predictably, it will include representatives of every bar association you can think of. In a nod to critics, Hitner has also been invited to serve on it. Such committees are often the kiss of death for any real change, but the pressure to address alimony is unlikely to evaporate.
Pierce is paying alimony out of his retirement accounts. The SJC ruling did leave the door open for him to seek an alimony modification, as he plans to do.
“It really begs the question of whether you have the right to hang up your cleats at some point,’’ his attorney, Anthony Doniger, said yesterday. “He’s retired, but not the way he planned it.’’
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 
