Michael Ettinger (Newyork Lawyer)A husband moved $181 million in marital assets into irrevocable trusts, evicted his wife from every home the trusts owned, and then mid-trial decanted those trusts into new entities formed under Delaware law without telling the court or his wife. The judge wrote that the divorce “did not need to be acrimonious” because there was enough money for both of them to walk away comfortable. Instead it turned into a case of first impression that rewrote how New York treats trust assets in equitable distribution.
A mother’s interference with her own daughter was so severe that the court acted before a hearing could even be scheduled because the judge believed waiting would cause more damage.
And a couple who went through a full divorce trial, reconciled, abandoned the entire judgment, and then separated again, leaving the court to untangle whether the marriage itself was even legally valid given the absence of a civil licence and a religious annulment the husband later claimed.
Each one landed in front of a judge who had to figure something out that did not have a clean answer waiting in the statute books.
C.S. v R.H.: Irrevocable Trusts Treated as Marital Property for the First Time in New York
C.S. v R.H., 2025 NY Slip Op 51426(U). Decided September 2025. New York Supreme Court.
The parties met in 1992 and married in 1994. Over the next two decades the husband built considerable wealth and moved the vast majority of it into trust structures. Wife filed for divorce in May 2018 and from that point forward the husband systematically dismantled her access to everything. Removed her from the LLCs inside the trusts. Evicted her from the marital homes the trusts owned. Cut off every benefit she had received from trust assets throughout the marriage. She has not had access to any of it since 2020.
Then in 2023, while the trial was still going on, he decanted the trusts into two brand new trusts formed under Delaware law. No court approval, no notice to wife, no consent sought from anyone.
The legal question nobody had answered before in New York was whether irrevocable trusts that technically belong to neither spouse can be divided as marital property when the grantor spouse kept controlling them as personal assets throughout the marriage. The husband’s position was that the trusts were irrevocable and therefore outside the marital estate. The court looked at how he actually used them, distributions for family expenses, control over the LLCs, unilateral decisions about trust property, and concluded the label did not match the reality.
The ruling: the trusts were marital property subject to equitable distribution. Wife received 50% of the estimated $181 million estate.
A Family law firm handling high-asset New York divorces where trust structures are involved is going to be working with this decision for a long time because it moved the line on what “irrevocable” actually protects when the grantor keeps operating as if the assets never left their control. The Leimberg Information Services commentary from June 2026 called it a landmark and that seems about right given that no New York court had gone there before.
B.N. v J.N.: Custody Intervention Before the Hearing Process Could Even Begin
B.N. v J.N., 2024 NY Slip Op 51029(U). New York Supreme Court.
The parents had signed a stipulation of settlement as part of their divorce and almost immediately ended up back in court over custody of their daughter. The gap between the settlement and the new proceedings was so short that there was no judgment of divorce yet when the custody fight started.
The court’s language in the decision was unusually direct. The judge described what was happening as “a shocking level of parental interference, coaching, threats and involvement of the child in conflict” and said the court was “compelled to act swiftly before more damage to the child can be done, and before any hearing can be held.”
Acting before a hearing is procedurally unusual. The normal sequence in custody disputes is motions, scheduling, testimony, then a decision. This judge bypassed that sequence because the parental conduct, specifically the coaching and the level to which the child was being pulled into the conflict between two adults, was deteriorating the situation faster than the standard timeline could address it.
The decision does not name the specific interventions in detail because the parties are anonymised and the child’s welfare is the court’s primary concern. But the judicial language tells you the severity. Judges do not describe parental conduct as “shocking” in published decisions unless the conduct crossed well past what the court has seen in ordinary custody disputes, and family court judges in New York see a lot.
T.I. v R.I.: A Marriage That May Not Have Been Legally Valid, a Religious Annulment, and a Case That Had to Start From Scratch
T.I. v R.I., 2024 NY Slip Op 24090. New York Supreme Court.
This case has layers that fold back on themselves in ways that would be difficult to invent.
The parties went through a full divorce trial. In August 2018 the court issued a written decision awarding custody to the wife, spousal maintenance, child support, and equitable distribution. The husband had initially refused to acknowledge the child as his own. The court also addressed his refusal to grant a Get, the Jewish religious divorce that DRL § 253 requires parties to cooperate with by removing barriers to remarriage.
The court directed both parties to settle a judgment within 60 days. Neither did. In November 2018 the parties told the court they were reconciling and stipulated to discontinue the entire action. Years of litigation, a full trial, a detailed written decision, all of it abandoned.
The reconciliation did not last. A second divorce proceeding was commenced. But here the central legal question shifted from finances and custody to something more fundamental: was the marriage itself legally valid?
The husband argued that no civil marriage licence existed and that a religious annulment he obtained meant the marriage was void. The court had to determine whether New York continued to recognise the marriage under these circumstances, a question that sat at the intersection of civil family law, religious law, and the procedural consequences of a discontinued first action whose trial record no longer carried legal force.
The complexity here is not about money. It is about the legal existence of the marriage itself being contested after the parties already went through one full trial based on the assumption that the marriage was valid. Everything from the first proceeding, custody, support, equitable distribution, was premised on a marriage that the husband now argued never legally existed.
What Connects These Three Cases
Not the subject matter and not the dollar amounts.
What they share is that each one required the judge to make a ruling in territory that the standard procedural framework was not built to cover. C.S. v R.H. required deciding whether trust assets controlled by a grantor who treated them as personal property could be divided in a divorce when no New York court had ruled on that question before. B.N. v J.N. required acting on an emergency timeline that bypassed the normal hearing schedule because the child’s wellbeing could not wait for the system to catch up. T.I. v R.I. required determining whether a marriage was valid at all after both parties had already litigated as though it was and then abandoned the result.
Family law at this level stops being about applying established rules and starts being about judges deciding what the rules should be when the facts are stranger than anything the legislature anticipated. These three cases all landed in that space and the decisions that came out of them are going to shape how New York courts handle similar situations for years, assuming similar situations even come along, because part of what made each of these cases unusual is that the specific combination of facts in each one is genuinely hard to replicate.
References
- C.S. v R.H., 2025 NY Slip Op 51426(U). New York Supreme Court, September 2025. First impression ruling on irrevocable trusts as marital property.
- B.N. v J.N., 2024 NY Slip Op 51029(U). New York Supreme Court, 2024. Emergency custody intervention.
- T.I. v R.I., 2024 NY Slip Op 24090. New York Supreme Court, 2024. Marriage validity dispute following reconciliation and discontinued first action.
- DRL § 253. Removal of barriers to remarriage in New York divorce proceedings.
- DRL § 236(B). Equitable distribution of marital property.
- Leimberg Information Services, Inc., Issue 3303 (June 8, 2026). Jennifer Belmont Jennings and Paul Hood, commentary on C.S. v R.H.
