A diamond engagement ring in the display case of Tiffany and Co. in Boston. (Photo by Jennifer Smith | CommonWealth Beacon)
Eye-popping dollar amount aside, the case now before the state’s highest court has implications for any couple considering marriage – given the possibility that the relationship could go up in flames.
Usually, the question of keeping the ring is settled in Massachusetts by who was “at fault” for a broken engagement. Yet, determining fault in the case of Bruce Johnson and Caroline Settino is not a simple matter, befuddling lower courts and sending the question up to the Supreme Judicial Court, which is expected to hear the case next month.
According to court filings, Johnson brought suit against Settino, his former fiancée, in January 2018 to recover an engagement ring he purchased from Tiffany’s in Boston for over $70,000 and two wedding bands that he bought later. The two got engaged in August 2017, at the Wequassett Resort and Golf Club in Harwich, and planned a wedding for the next September.
Prior to the wedding, Johnson began to notice “some disconcerting traits” in his fiancée, he asserts. In his complaint before the SJC, he claims Settino would verbally harass him in public, call him a moron, and “treat him like a child.”
Less than three months after the engagement, the filing states, the two got into an argument in which Settino said “I’m a good looking woman. I can get a guy any time I want.” Johnson looked through Settino’s phone and found a text to a man he’d never met that said: “My Bruce is going to be in Connecticut for three days. I need some playtime.” Several voice messages lamented that Settino did not see the man enough, according to filings.
When Johnson accused Settino of having an affair, Settino told him the man was her best friend of four decades and “play” was a euphemism between them for getting drinks. Several weeks later, Johnson called off the engagement in a voicemail. He filed suit to reclaim the rings, and she counterclaimed for money to complete dental implant surgery Johnson had promised to finance.
Engagement rings are a specific type of “conditional gift” – that is, gifts that are given upon the agreement that something is going to happen – and fall into murkier territory than a general “no takebacks” policy when something is given outright. Massachusetts courts tend to look at both parties and determine that if the engagement is broken “without fault” by the gift giver, that person can reclaim the ring.
The trial court concluded that Johnson’s decision to break the engagement was “based predominantly on his belief, albeit mistaken, that Settino was having sexual relations with another man behind his back.” So the breakup was his fault, according to the trial court, which let Settino keep the engagement ring and the one wedding ring bought for her, along with an award of about $43,000 for the dental surgery plus over $20,000 in interest because she was unlawfully denied the promised funds.
But the Appeals Court disagreed on the rings. The question wasn’t if Settino was actually having an affair, the court wrote, but whether Johnson may have been justified or had adequate cause to break off the engagement. “Sometimes there simply is no fault to be had,” the Appeals Court wrote. One justice dissented on the question of how to define or determine fault in a broken engagement, calling for the Supreme Judicial Court to resolve it.
Johnson was obligated to pay for the dental surgery, the Appeals Court concluded, but the interest was improperly calculated and should be re-calculated from the time that Settino filed the counterclaim.
The SJC is set to hear arguments in the case on September 6.
The question before the high court, according to a request for amicus briefs, is whether Massachusetts courts should continue applying a “fault-based approach” in determining whether an engagement ring must be returned to the giver after a broken engagement. If not, the court asks, what’s the better rule?
Most states, according to the Appeals Court, now use a no-fault calculation where a ring is a conditional gift that has to be returned if the agreement is broken. Some states using this approach include Iowa, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. A minority of states, like Washington, use the traditional fault-based approach. At least one state – Montana – considers engagement rings to clearly be irrevocable unconditional gifts. In the remainder of states, like Rhode Island, what happens to the ring is an open question.
Settino argues that judges shouldn’t be delving into who was at fault or not in a broken engagement. A gift is a gift, even when it’s an engagement ring, according to her filing. Using a no-fault rule, plus assuming that the ring is an unconditional gift, “would eliminate judicial review of personal breakups and remove outdated and sexist stereotypes from the legal review of engagement gifts.”
Even if the court does decide to go with the fault-based conditional gift calculation, she argues, Johnson gave her the ring receipts and signaled “an intent that the gifts be unconditional.”
She bristles against the justification analysis applied by the Appeals Court, quoting the one dissenting justice who felt there was an “inherent unseemliness” to judges or juries “sitting in judgment of matters of the heart.” Courts are moving away from both a fault and justification analysis when it comes to divorces and breakups before marriage, Settino argues.
Such a rule, counters Johnson in his filings, “would eviscerate the significance of an engagement ring and it is not equitable. The most equitable approach is to adopt the no-fault conditional gift rule where the donor gets the ring back if the engagement ends.”
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.