The recently decided Rudolph F. Pierce vs. Carneice G. Pierce, 455 Mass 286, 916 N.E. 2d 330 (2009) was one of the most closely followed family law cases in recent years. The case generated significant interest because it directly addressed whether a payor's retirement from employment created a rebuttable presumption that alimony payments should be terminated. In this case, the parties' 32 year marriage ended in divorce in 1999. Rudolph was initially obligated to pay Carneice $110,000 in alimony per year. Nine years later, after a long and successful legal career, Rudolph voluntarily retired at age 65. He had remarried and his current wife was still employed. Carneice was unemployed at the time of the trial (though she had become employed after the divorce at a significant salary and left her position shortly before the trial) and was a few years short of access to social security. Rudolph asked the court to terminate his alimony obligation. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ("SJC") denied his request. While acknowledging that retirement was an important factor to be considered in deciding whether to terminate alimony, the SJC ruled that standing alone, retirement did not provide an automatic termination to an alimony obligation. Additional factors including: (i) the financial impact of the termination of alimony on the recipient spouse; (ii) the opportunity for continued employment income available to the payor spouse; and (iii) the inclusion of "retirement" as an event that would entitle the payor to termination or modification of alimony as a term in the original agreement between the parties, would need to be considered in any decision to terminate alimony upon retirement. After considering these additional factors, the court granted Rudolph a significant decrease in his alimony obligation, but it denied his request for a termination of that obligation.
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