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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1128)	9/17/2006 8:52:08 PM
From: one_less	Respond to of 10087

No fury like a woman scorned or a court in contempt... Man Jailed for 11 Years in Bizarre Divorce Saga MEDIA, Pennsylvania (Sept. 16) - Slight, scholarly and enigmatic, H. Beatty Chadwick is doing this day what he has done for the past 4,093: He is sitting in a county jail outside Philadelphia. H. Beatty Chadwick and his ex-wife Barbara Jean Crowther attended a society dinner in 1988. He has been in jail for 11 years for refusing to turn over $2.5 million, money he claims he doesn't have. It is a place meant for run-of-the-mill crooks just passing through on their way to comparatively luxurious state prisons. Certainly not for anyone to stay 11 years - not for the central figure in one of the most bizarre divorce battles in American history. It hinges on a charge of civil contempt designed to force Chadwick to turn over $2.5 million the courts say he hid overseas all those years ago. Except he won't. Or can't, depending on whom you believe. So Chadwick sits. "He's an anomaly," says his lawyer, Michael Malloy. "They don't know what to do with him." The case has produced an Everest of court papers - a dozen pleas to the Delaware County courts, nine to state appeals courts, nine to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 12 to federal courts, two of those to the U.S. Supreme Court. But before all that, there was a marriage: Chadwick, 39-year-old successful corporate lawyer, to Barbara Jean Crowther, just 22, in 1977. Not surprisingly, they disagree about the very nature of their union. H. Beatty Chadwick insists the marriage was placid, happy - at least until she became depressed in their later years together. He says he loved her very much. He smiled on her newfound hobby of painting. But in past interviews, she has described a home life controlled intensely by her husband, with rationed toilet paper (six sheets per bathroom visit) and sex (7:30 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays). She told Philadelphia magazine in 1994 that he once kicked her and caused her to fall down a flight of stairs and lose a child she had been carrying for 18 weeks. H. Beatty Chadwick says it is all fiction, much of it dreamed up by his ex-wife's high-powered divorce lawyer, Albert Momjian. Barbara Jean Crowther Chadwick is now Bobbie Applegate - she made up the last name - and at her home in Maine she politely refuses to discuss the details of the marriage, for fear of being sued by her ex-husband. But she will talk about the day during a vacation to the south of France when she announced she would leave H. Beatty Chadwick. She says he vowed she would never see a dime. He used a term unfamiliar to her, she says: Scorched earth. "It sounded so comical to me," she says. "It's when you burn everything so that the enemy gets nothing." She filed for divorce in Delaware County on Nov. 23, 1992. This much is undisputed by everyone who knows Beatty Chadwick: He is intelligent, precise, careful with words. Carl Fernandes, a retired North Carolina lawyer who met Chadwick in the Air Force four decades ago, describes Chadwick as an excellent, methodical attorney. "He was always very well-prepared, no hyperbole," Fernandes said. "He had a very good reputation as a lawyer and as a human being. She has destroyed that." Chadwick's son Bill, a 38-year-old data manager in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, who dismisses his stepmother's claims, says his father was also a conservative investor, slowly building a personal fortune of several million dollars. Which is why Chadwick's explanation for what happened to the money seems to strain credulity - and Chadwick himself smiles at the suggestion.