A KwaZulu-Natal high court judge has delivered a scathing rebuke to a wealthy, retired attorney who tried to walk away from a three-decade marriage, leaving his wife with nothing more than a maintenance cheque and a demand that she be ordered to pay punitive legal costs. Judge Pieter Bezuidenhout ordered the lawyer to transfer 40% of the net value of his estate to his former wife, pay her maintenance of R20,000 for a year and cover all her legal costs. This brought their acrimonious divorce fight to a bruising end, laying bare allegations of control, financial exclusion and post-separation retaliation.
The couple, whose identities were partially redacted, moved in together in 1993 and were married in 1999. Their relationship lasted more than 30 years before collapsing in 2023. They were married out of community of property and without accrual, meaning if the wife chose to leave the marriage she could take with her only assets registered in her name.
The court was unimpressed, finding this arrangement to be unfair. The court heard that the woman began working for the lawyer when she was 18, immediately after leaving school. She was appointed as a receptionist in 1987, and at the time he was 31, married and involved in legal work.
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He started divorce proceedings against his first wife and in 1990 he asked his second wife out on their first date. She moved in with him in 1993, and they lived together until their marriage ended in 2023. Over the years the woman rose in her job, eventually becoming a legal secretary in her husband’s practice.
She became central not only to his work life, but to the running of his home, the care of his children from a previous marriage, and even his hobbies. He took up skydiving, and she packed his parachutes and attended drop zones. She backed him when he took up motorcycle riding and was involved with entertaining clients.
“She spent the prime period of her life being with [her husband] all the time,” Bezuidenhout said. Though the lawyer employed domestic workers and gardeners, the judge found that it was the wife who ran the household, supervised staff, paid municipal accounts from her salary and handled the logistics of their multiple properties. In my view such conduct is not what one would expect of parties to a marriage where people have lived together for over 30 years. Crucially, the court accepted her version that she had no independent financial freedom, was discouraged from holding cash and was repeatedly assured that she did not need a pension because her husband would “look after her”.
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