“Laurene Powell Jobs pushes back on her stepdaughter’s memoir” (CNN):
Steve Jobs’ widow and his sister are pushing back against a new blistering memoir written by the Apple cofounder’s daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
Her book “Small Fry” ignited controversy because it portrays Jobs as a cold and sometimes inappropriate parent.
Brennan-Jobs’ mother, Chrisann Brennan, defended her daughter’s recollection. She told the Times’ that she “got it right.”
“She didn’t go into how bad it really was, if you can believe that,” Brennan told the Times.
Powell Jobs inherited more than $20 billion when Jobs died in 2011 and now runs the Emerson Collective, a philanthropy and social action organization. Last year, the organization bought a majority stake of The Atlantic.
It is difficult to evaluate any of the emotional issues since the father is dead and didn’t write about his feelings or actions for public consumption. The main financial issue is that Lisa Brennan-Jobs, born in 1978 (13 months after the introduction of the Apple II), aged out of the California child support system in 1996. So Chrisann Brennan was able to sue a rich defendant, but not a billionaire.
“When Steve Jobs’ Ex-Girlfriend Asked Him to Pay $25 Million for His ‘Dishonorable Behavior'” (Fortune):
But one till-now-unrevealed chapter of their tortured history unfolded after the period covered by Brennan’s book, during the time when her ex- was achieving his highest renown and wealth. It’s the story of how she asked Jobs, by then a billionaire, to repent for his “dishonorable behavior” with a $25 million payment to her—and another $5 million for their daughter, then 27.
In other words, the parent wanted 83 percent of the cash for herself rather than for her child. The article continues…
After a lawsuit forced Jobs to take a paternity test, leading to a court order to provide child support and reimburse the state for its welfare costs, Jobs began paying $500 a month. …
I.e., mom sued dad.
After developing a closer relationship with his daughter—who legally changed her name to Lisa Brennan-Jobs at age nine—he increased his support “in small increments,” eventually to $4,000 a month, says Brennan. “He was cheap as he could be. He under-provided for everything. It was always like pulling teeth to get him to step up.”
Over the years after their daughter’s birth, Jobs bought Brennan two cars and a $400,000 house, paid Lisa’s private school tuition, and at times offered other financial help. Despite this, Brennan filed for bankruptcy in 1996. During high school, Lisa lived with her father (and his family) for the first time.
($400,000 for a house in Silicon Valley! Good thing that our government assures us there is no inflation!)
When the child was 9 it would have been 1987 and $4,000 per month would be $109,000 per year in today’s money. So with no mortgage or car payments, the mom/plaintiff went bankrupt on $109,000 per year tax-free.
The Fortune writer displays a poor understanding of family law…
Jobs’ money—and his favor—could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.
To the extent that the cash was flowing pursuant to a court order, withdrawing it would not have been practical for Mr. Jobs.
Stepmom got $20 billion and stepdaughter got “millions”:
In his estate, Jobs left their daughter a multi-million-dollar inheritance, which Lisa has used to help support her, according to Brennan.
On the one hand this seems unfair. Why do the children from Mom #2 get $billions and the child from Mom #1 gets only $millions? (assuming that we believe the numbers; we are getting the story only from the disappointed plaintiff and her daughter; “$millions” might be anything less than $1 billion) On the other hand, Mom #1 went to court and got whatever she was entitled to under California law, which is “justice” by definition. Most parents, once they are sued and under various court orders, don’t volunteer additional effort and money. (See the discussion of “Parental Responses to Child Support Obligations: Causal Evidence from Administrative Data” and “Child Support and Young Children’s Development” within “Children, Mothers, and Fathers” for how court activity tends to extinguish ordinary parental volunteerism.)
Despite the seemingly obvious unfairness, most U.S. states’ family law systems make no attempt to equalize cash flowing out to plaintiffs who have obtained custody of children with the same biological co-parent/defendant. From the California chapter:
As in most other states, because existing child support orders are deducted from income that can be tapped for additional child support orders, different children from the same parent have different cash values. The first person to sue a parent will get the most money and each successive plaintiff will get less. There is no formal equalization process, according to Wagner, but “if dad could cause a motion to be filed against all the mothers at the same time and consolidated and heard by the same judge, there could be discretionary equalization.” Is that likely to prevail? “Res judicata governs child support orders,” says Jaffe, referring to the fact that reopening a court decision is discouraged in our legal system. “Child support cannot be revisited unless there is a material and substantial change in circumstances and then you’re trying new facts. An award for an additional child is probably not not material or substantial.” Wagner adds that any equalization attempt would have to be initiated by the payor: “Mom #5 has no standing to try to get Mom #1 reduced.”
From New York:
As with other states, children of the same parent will have different cash values depending on the sequence in which that parent has been sued for child support. The co-parent of the first child is entitled to 17 percent of the defendant’s income. The co-parent of the second child is entitled to only 17 percent of the remaining 83 percent. The co-parent of the third child is entitled to only 17 percent of the remaining 69 percent. At this point the defendant has been reduced to poverty by a combination of child support orders and taxes. A fourth plaintiff would be unable to collect anything for a fourth child, even if the previous three plaintiffs had all married into households with high incomes.
From Massachusetts:
The defendant [sued by Jessica Kosow] had a daughter from a previous marriage, a 16-year-old girl. That child had a cash value of $20,020 per year, determined by a different judge, compared to the 2-year-old’s nearly $94,000-per-year cash value.
The attorneys whom we interviewed for Real World Divorce say that the typical family law system has to be understood in the context of the 1950s. The assumption is that litigants knew each other for 20 years, not for the 20 minutes that is becoming more typical. So the defendant is supposed to be a middle-aged guy whose long-term wife has sued him and his first obligation is to continue to support the former wife and kids in whatever lifestyle they had grown accustomed to. If he has any additional kids, they will get whatever is left over. If the defendant gets a pay raise, the plaintiff can come back to court to maintain her proportional share of the extra funds. So by design there will be inequality in the lifestyles of children from different mothers, though the idea is that the later-born kids will have much less (the popularity of the iPhone after the first batch of children has aged out is a Black Swan-type event not contemplated).
Having chosen litigation and having been the first plaintiff, Chrisann Brennan had priority access to Steve Jobs’s income (ahead of the wife and later-born children) and got everything to which a California plaintiff is entitled. Due mostly to the fact that Jobs got crazy rich after Mom #1’s child turned 18, it turned out to be ridiculously less than what Mom #2 gained. But it was vastly more than what Ms. Brennan would have obtained had she sued under neighboring Nevada’s family law (capped child support at roughly $13,000 per year per child) and it might have been 30-100X what she could have gotten in Sweden or Germany.
My friends on Facebook are expressing outrage at how they assume Jobs treated his daughter (based on hearing one side of the story plus correlation with Jobs’s reported treatment of co-workers). But shouldn’t we expect there to be conflict when there are billions of dollars potentially up for grabs and a stepmom is right there next to the bucket? And, even if the cashflow was smaller than hoped for, is it okay for someone to write a book about what a bad person her father was? Most children would presumably let others write those books (see filial piety for the Chinese perspective).
[Is it meaningful to ask whether Jobs was actually a bad “father”? The only role assigned to him under California family law was to pay the bills for a plaintiff mother. This was in the relatively early days of no-fault divorce and middle-class women having children without the intention of living with the father. How could Jobs have provided traditional 1950s-style parenting to a child with whom he did not live and had never lived?]
[Note that Chrisann Brennan would have been in a much better litigation position if she’d been able to persuade Jobs to marry her. From the California chapter:
How long does the alimony last? Jaffe: “By statute anything more than 10 years is a ‘long marriage’. Thus the court may not terminate jurisdiction over spousal support until death or remarriage. If the parties divorce at age 30, the court has jurisdiction to award support until the woman turns 100.
As is also common in Massachusetts, a plaintiff may re-open a decades-only alimony decision in light of a defendant’s newfound wealth. So if Brennan had divorced Jobs in 1980, at the time of her child support lawsuit, she could have come back in 2010 to ask for additional alimony based on the success of the iPhone.]
Related:
- “Litigious Minds Think Alike: Divorce litigators react to the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit” (profit calculation if a Silicon Valley billionaire were to be sued for child support)
- “Brad Pitt strikes back, claims he’s given Angelina Jolie $9 million since split” (Mercury News) showing the difference in perspective that is typical in family court litigation (Angelina Jolie claims to have received nothing in the two years since she sued the father of her potential cash fountains; Pitt says he gave her $9 million)
- Steve Jobs and the Age of User Experience (my post from October 2011)
http://fortune.com/2015/08/06/steve-jobs-apple-girlfriend/ “He got her pregnant at age 18—by their agreement, she had an abortion—then again, when she was 23.”
Single Mom chose abortion before Baby Daddy got rich.
What could be more central to humanity than having sex and having children? Yet the U.S. “child support” system is a complete travesty of reason. If any research is publicly important, it’s the research you’ve done on child support law. You truly deserve a Nobel Prize in Economics. You should be made omnipotent Child Support Policy Czar.
Thanks, Bill, for your vote of confidence. There is definitely no way to make a system that everyone would regard as fair. Sweden caps profitability at about $2,500 per year per child and says “get a job or get married and stay married if you want to earn money.” Germany does the same thing at a slightly higher number (about $5,000 per year per child and no alimony). But a lot of folks will say that is grossly unfair. The child of a billionaire lives only a middle class lifestyle when with one parent? So they say “the child should live like a court- or formula-determined hypothetical child of a billionaire” (i.e., watching the parent spend money like crazy for stuff that has value almost exclusively to the parent?). But then they ignore the issue that if children of the already married high earners are cash cows it is irrational either to work or to marry a middle-income person. The financially rational and young-enough-to-be-attractive-and-fertile citizen would devote 100 percent of effort into having sex with a high-income partner, even if that partner is already married to someone else, and obtaining custody of the resulting child.
Finally, in the U.S., you have the interaction with the welfare system. We say that anyone who can get custody of a child and who doesn’t work gets (1) free house, (2) free food, (3) free health care, and (4) free smartphone. But then when millions of Americans take that offer we freak out and say “let’s hunt down the biological co-parents and make them pay instead.” So you have the world’s largest welfare state supported by voters who are upset about having to work so that citizens with children can kick back and watch TV with their friends all day. Americans are simultaneously incredibly generous (putting $1 trillion annually into welfare) and shockingly stingy (hunting down an inner city resident who earns minimum wage and imprisoning the defendant if $50/month cannot be extracted to defray part of the taxpayers’ $65,000/year in welfare).
http://www.realworlddivorce.com/WestVirginia is perhaps the most interesting U.S. state. Beyond about $24,000 per year per child the money will probably (but not definitely, which is why both sides have to pay lawyers to argue about this!) go into a trust fund. The prevents the $25 million for mom and $5 million for the kid situation that Steve Jobs’s plaintiff tried to set up. We didn’t hear about any other state that had a mechanism enabling a judge to take money from a parent and actually give it to a child (as opposed to giving a plaintiff parent money from a defendant parent). On balance, however, I think kids are likely to get the most financial and emotional support if there is no possibility of litigation. The West Virginia court can order a defendant to pay $1 million into a trust, but without the court setting the just-by-definition price maybe the rich defendant would actually have done more for the child. The typical parent does a lot more than the bare minimum of providing food and shelter. The child support system assumes that the typical parent will do nothing unless ordered and, as noted above, research psychologists have found that the result is extinguishment of ordinary parental effort. So the court system provides some uniformity and a minimum level of profitability, but with an enormous financial transaction cost (lawyers paid to argue for years) and with a huge amount of damage to child-parent relationships (low-income kids are worse off even when child support ordered is actually paid than if the plaintiff parent had never gone to court).
ok so different US states have different child support and alimony rules.
Do these rules for any state change depending on where coitus took place? Do these rules change depending on which state the divorce lawsuit is filed? Which is more important – state where coitus occured OR state where divorce lawsuit is filed?
I have a few questions from a US defendant’s perspective:
1) Which is the best state(s) to reside in to minimize liabilities in case your ex sues you?
2) Which is the worst state(s) to reside in to minimize liabilities in case your ex sues you?
3) Which is the best state(s) to have coitus?
4) Which is the worst state(s) to have coitus?
When they say “child support”, does that include adopted child during OR after marriage? Could a divorced ex adopt a kid and have another money bag?
Townie: Your last question is the simplest. In most U.S. states the pathway to additional post-divorce revenue via an additional child has two forks: (1) the additional child creates additional “need” and therefore justifies an alimony increase, (2) the additional child was produced via a frozen embryo or sperm and therefore has a genetic connection to the defendant and therefore leads to an additional child support entitlement.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/06/27/sofia-vergara-custody-battle-frozen-embryos-nick-loeb/739250002/
is an example of a guy trying to profit from embryos where the egg came from a rich woman.
https://nypost.com/2018/03/31/man-sues-ex-to-stop-her-from-taking-frozen-embryos/
is a similar issue with the sexes reversed.
The surest paths to cash are (a) through production of a child with a provable genetic link, (b) production or adoption of a child during a marriage. In many states, the fact that a child is produced with a different sex partner does not change the spouse’s obligation to pay child support following the filing of a divorce lawsuit. Certainly if a child is adopted during the marriage by both spouses the cashflow from that child would be the same as from a biological child.
Townie: Your first question is tough to answer. http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Relocation covers some of the issues in venue litigation. The disparity in the profitability of children from state to state led to a huge amount of “venue shopping” that the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act was an attempt to cut down on. As noted in the chapter, one factor is “the nonresident engaged in sexual intercourse in the state and “the child may have been conceived by that act of intercourse,””.
On the marriage and divorce question, you really have to go state by state through http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ and look at the particulars.
Generally, though, Nevada is a bad state for plaintiffs. Child cash value is capped at about $240,000 (compare to unlimited in neighboring California). On the plus side, the law defaults to 50/50 parenting time so child-damaging custody litigation isn’t common.
New York is kind of a bad state for plaintiffs suing rich defendants. Cash value is limited by judges to roughly $2 million per child. Custody litigation is intense and expensive. I heard of one guy who spent $3 million on lawyers to be the winner in the winner-take-all New York family court (he was ordered to pay both his own bills and those of the wife who had sued him). The mom was obviously substandard so he “won” at the USDA-estimated cost (in legal fees) of rearing 15 children to adulthood. His friend said that he also lost roughly $10 million by being distracted from his Wall Street Job during this time.
California is ideal when suing a super high income defendant. The formula is rigid and goes out to infinite levels of income.
New England has a reputation as being good for women. 98 percent of people collecting child support in New Hampshire are women. Child support is unlimited and can be far more lucrative than working at the median college graduate wage. Massachusetts provides even more profits from a typical child. 97 percent of people collecting child support in MA are women. Connecticut may be the best alimony jurisdiction on Planet Earth. Judges there have a doctrine that a woman who was once married will never be able to work.
On the other hand, even in New England, a woman may not be able to survive if she can be categorized as the “breadwinner”. As covered in http://www.realworlddivorce.com/MassachusettsPrenuptialAgreements , the man who relaxes at home while his wife works can go to the courthouse and get a warm reception for saying “I want to get rid of this 50-year-old and be paid to have sex with multiple 25-year-olds.”
Given the potential transaction costs of an American divorce lawsuit, which can easily consume 100 percent of a couple’s assets, arguably the best states for middle class couples are the ones where divorce is the most formulaic and therefore can be done without litigation (whenever something is subject to judicial discretion there is a tendency for one partner to be sold on litigation by an enthusiastic lawyer painting a best-case picture). Those tend to be the western states, such as Nevada. I would say that for a middle class family hoping to preserve a marriage and hoping to preserve their assets and sanity following a split… Nevada. The kids’ time will be split 50/50 by default. The kids will be much more lucrative than in Germany or Sweden, but not so vastly lucrative that parents have an incentive to become full-time child support profiteers. Arizona is also pretty reasonable, due to its 50/50 shared parenting time default and generally formulaic nature. If you don’t want to live out West… Pennsylvania and Delaware are much less litigious on custody and child support issues than neighboring winner-take-all states.
Wow, thanks for the detailed response, Phil!
1) When it comes to divorce rules, how does it affect a Canadian defendant who is sued by their American plaintiff?
I’m guessing the family law of the venue is the only factor (a given US state/ CA province)?
2) There are people like Eva Mendes who had sex in every state: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/09/leno-sex-in-all-50-states-beats-my-magnet-collection
How is “state of intercourse” determined?
*State of intercourse that resulted in conception, to be precise.
—–
Even if there was a witness like in medieval times for royals, not every coupling will result in fertilization.
Even pregnancy kits are imprecise in predicting when conception occurred:
Also compounding the problem:
> Pregnancy actually doesn’t start the day a couple has intercourse. It can take up to six days after sex for the sperm and egg to join and form a fertilized egg.
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/teens/ask-experts/how-soon-after-unprotected-sex-can-i-take-a-pregnancy-test
Townie: The great news is that never-married Walmart cashiers and faithfully married tire shop workers get to pay family court judges and other court officials to sit and listen to litigants with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (see Angelina Jolie!) argue about how they can’t support their children, where they should be considered resident (given the 7 houses that they own), and where they had sex.
Lawyers describe family court as “outcome-driven”: a judge decides what his or her desired outcome is and then justifies it. So the judge can simply find that a plaintiff’s testimony about where sex occurred was “credible” and everything flows from that. It is not like criminal court where there is a jury and facts have to be proven somehow.
To your Canadian question… the international stuff creates wonderful bonanzas for lawyers. The France/US choice is particularly critical since the potential profits in the U.S. are vastly higher, but French courts will assert jurisdiction when a French citizen is involved. The US/Canada choice would become critical if the Canadian-American sex occurred in Nevada (capped child support profits) but a plaintiff sought to obtain the unlimited child support profits that are offered by Canada. I’m not sure how it would all shake out. If the plaintiff moved up to Canada with the cash-yielding child that would probably help a lot in terms of getting Canadian courts to handle the matter in accordance with Canadian law. If the plaintiff stayed in Nevada with the child the result might be getting stuck with Nevada law, Nevada courts, and Nevada profits.
Gotcha. Thank you, Phil!
Chrisann Brennan’s letter to Steve Jobs requesting that he give her 25 million is a real hoot. You should read it if you haven’t. I can only imagine what crazy Angelina Jolie writes to Brad Pitt.
Steve Jobs is by all human measures though a real jerk. And no he didn’t invent anything, he just yelled at people to integrate technology for him. For him it worked out, for Elizabeth Holmes it didn’t
It’s ironic that Mona Simpson is defending Job’s memory here. When she wrote her own book, the very unlikeable protagonist was a thinly veiled clone of Jobs.