Guggenheim v. Wahl

• Decision Date: 28 November 1911
• Citation: 203 N.Y. 390,96 N.E. 726
• Parties: GUGGENHEIM v. WAHL.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

203 N.Y. 390

96 N.E. 726

GUGGENHEIM

v.WAHL.

Court of Appeals of New York.

Nov. 28, 1911.

Appeal from Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department.

Action by Aimee Steinberger Guggenheim against Grace B. Wahl. From a judgment of the Appellate Division (139 App. Div. 931,124 N. Y. Supp. 1116) affirming a judgment of the Trial Term in favor of defendant, plaintiff appeals. Affirmed.Samuel Untermyer, for appellant.

John J. Lordan, for respondent.

GRAY, J.

The complaint of the plaintiff in this action prays for a judgment, which shall restrain the defendant from prosecuting an action or proceeding, in the circuit court of Cook county, in the state of Illinois, against William Guggenheim, this plaintiff's husband; which action or proceeding has for its object the review, impeachment, and annulment of a judgment theretofore rendered by that court at the suit of this defendant against said William Guggenheim, at that time her husband, dissolving their marriage. At the trial, the complaint was dismissed upon the pleadings, and the judgment thereupon entered in favor of the defendant has been affirmed by the Appellate Division. 139 App. Div. 931,124 N. Y. Supp. 1116. In the review of the case, therefore, the sole question presented is whether the complaint, its allegations of facts being deemed to be admitted, states a cause of action, entitling the plaintiff to the relief prayed for. That pleading is very full in its narrative of facts, and, with its numerous exhibits, resumes the acts of these three persons, in and out of the courts, for the previous nine or ten years.

In November, 1900, this defendant was married to William Guggenheim, in the state of New Jersey, and in February, 1901, she commenced an action to obtain an absolute divorce from him, in the circuit court of Cook county, state of Illinois, a court of competent jurisdiction, upon the allegation of his adultery, committed in the city of Chicago, in that state. In her bill of complaint, she alleged her actual residence in Cook county then and at the time of the commission of the act of adultery. Guggenheim appeared in the action and made answer, denying the allegation of his adulterous act. There was replication to the answer, and the case, being at issue, came on in due form to be tried, when a decree was entered which dissolved the bonds of matrimony existing between the parties. The decree recites that the court had heard the testimony in support of the complaint, and finds that the complainant was an actual resident of Cook county at the time of the commission of the alleged act of adultery; that for a long time she had been a bona fide resident of the state; and that the defendant had been guilty of adultery, as charged in the complaint. The circuit court was a constitutional court, whose jurisdiction extended to the case presented by the pleadings and proofs, and to the granting of the decree. Subsequently the alimony of $500 a month, which the decree had ordered to be paid to the plaintiff in that action, and all dower rights, were released by her to Guggenheim upon the payment by him of $150,000 in money. She then resumed her maiden name, and later, in the same year, remarried. Some three years afterwards, in 1904, the plaintiff in this action, a resident of this state, went to Chicago, and was married there to Guggenheim, and they have since then been living here as husband and wife. In 1908 this defendant, whose subsequent marriage, after obtaining her divorce from Guggenheim, had resulted in a separation, for reasons quite immaterial here, commenced an action in the Supreme Court of this state, suing in the name of Grace B. Guggenheim, wherein, alleging her marriage to Guggenheim, she prayed for a divorce from him upon the ground of his having lived in adulterous intercourse, in the city of New York, with a woman who, in the bill of particulars, was specified as this plaintiff. Guggenheim appeared and made answer in that action, denying the adulterous conduct charged, and setting up the proceedings in the divorce action in the Illinois court and the decree granted therein; the subsequent marriages, first, of the plaintiff, (this defendant), and then of himself with the woman with whom the complaint alleged he was living in adulterous relations, to wit, the plaintiff in this action, and the birth of a child, the issue of the latter marriage. The co-respondent named in that action (this plaintiff), as she was entitled to do under our practice, also made answer to the complaint, with denials and defenses substantially the same as in Guggenheim's answer. That action came to trial, and resulted in a judgment for the defendant, Guggenheim, dismissing the complaint of the plaintiff therein on the merits. This judgment adjudged, in substance, that the judgment of divorce obtained in the state of Illinois was rendered by a court of competent jurisdiction over the parties and the subject-matter of the action; that the finding of that court as to the residence of the plaintiff in that action could not be disturbed in the action brought by her here; that that judgment was binding and conclusive upon the parties, and had dissolved their marriage; and that the plaintiff (this defendant) was estopped from questioning its validity on any ground. Appeals were taken to the Appellate Division and to this court by this defendant (plaintiff in that action); but the judgment was affirmed by both courts. 135 App. Div. 914,119 N. Y. Supp. 1127; 201 N. Y. 602, 95 N. E. 1129. Having been defeated in her action here, this defendant, under the name of Grace B. Guggenheim, subsequently filed, in the circuit court of Cook county, state of Illinois, an ‘original bill in the nature of a bill of review,’ making William Guggenheim sole defendant in the proceeding, wherein she prayed that the previous decree of that court, dissolving her marriage with Guggenheim, might be ‘revoked, declared to be a nullity and expunged from the records .’ The grounds for asking this relief were, in brief, that she was not domiciled within the state of Illinois when she commenced her action there for a divorce; and that that action was instituted pursuant to a conspiracy between her husband and other persons to accomplish his divorce from her, of which she was ignorant, and which fact, with others relating to the institution of that divorce suit and bearing upon the lack of jurisdiction in the court from the fact of nonresidence, she had not been permitted to show in the divorce action brought by her in the state of New York by reason of the conclusiveness of the Illinois judgment. The facts alleged in the complaint have now been stated, sufficiently for this review, upon which the appellant bases her right to the intervention of a court of equity. She asserts that she has no adequate remedy at law, and that the conduct of the defendant is unconscionable, ‘in harassing and vexing her by means of suits intended to affect her status and property rights,’ meaning by the latter statement the rights derived through her marriage with Guggenheim.

[1] It will be observed that this defendant, notwithstanding the judgment of divorce granted by the Illinois court, whose jurisdiction she had invoked, and notwithstanding...