Court Opinion

ID: 9529166
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:48:21.703751+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:41.973509
License: Public Domain

WORTHEN, Justice
(concurring in Mr. Justice HENRIOD’S dissenting opinion).
It is impossible to understand what the legislature meant by the language of Section 30-3-9 unless it intended it to mean what the Iowa court concluded a similar statute of that state to mean.
Nor'can I concede the grave consequences suggested by the opinions of Justices WADE and CROCKETT. If we construe the section as contended for by appellant, we will have served notice on these lukewarm husbands who permit, if not en*33courage, the obtaining of a divorce on any ground and with any testimony selected.
In this case, if respondent had a good defense to his wife’s divorce action, he should not have colluded with her to induce the court to grant a decree. If all the facts set out in his complaint for alienation of affection were true, he had ample to support a complaint for divorce against his wife. To avoid the identical conditions here presented is full warrant for the enactment of the section in question. In my opinion it is fraudulent for respondent to permit his wife to take a default divorce, uncontested, on allegations such as were made in her complaint, and permit the court to enter a decree based on findings that the allegations of the complaint were true, and then to file a suit for alienation of affection, predicated on the claimed loss of his wife’s affection through the wrongful acts of appellant, when his wife’s complaint for divorce alleged that his conduct has caused her to lose all respect for her husband and had made it impossible for her to live with him as husband and wife.
The positive statement in the wife’s complaint against respondent that respondent’s conduct had caused her to lose all respect for him is not consistent with the állega-tions of respondent’s complaint in this action that defendant alienated his wife’s affection.
If respondent in this case had contested his wife’s divorce action with the same vigor and with the apparent desire to keep or regain her love and affection that he used in his pursuit of appellant’s cash, respondent would probably not have been the guilty party in the divorce action and would have been free to sue the intruder.