“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.]
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