By Pat Murphy
The Daily Record Newswire
This is why we have “The Jerry Springer Show.”
It’s because we have guys like Thomas Sullivan who can’t get it through their thick skulls that the rule is one wife at a time.
Thomas played professional football from 1972 to1978 for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Cleveland Browns. At least that’s the rumor. I never heard of the guy.
As a former NFL player, Sullivan was entitled to pension benefits under the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.
Thomas died in a car accident in 2002, so his wife, Barbara, began receiving benefits from the NFL as his surviving spouse. Thomas married Barbara in 1986 in South Carolina.
The benefits aren’t great, but they helped. From 2002 to 2007, Barbara received $192,900 from the NFL. The benefit is currently $2,700 per month.
Barbara’s world was turned upside down in 2007 when the NFL suspended payments to her.
As it turns out, Thomas had married Lavona Hill in Maryland in 1979 and never bothered to get a divorce. The NFL wanted to know who was legally entitled to the benefits before continuing to dole them out.
Lavona eventually sued the NFL under ERISA and the soap opera landed in the lap of U.S. District Judge Berle Schiller in Philadelphia.
The prospects were dim for Barbara from the outset.
The case was governed by South Carolina law of bigamy. Under South Carolina law, the marriage of Thomas and Barbara was void unless Lavona or Thomas was absent for a period of five years and the one spouse was not aware whether or not the other spouse was living during that time.
Thomas and Lavona stopped living together as husband and wife around 1983 -- three years before Barbara’s marriage. Lavona allegedly last had contact with Thomas in 1985.
Let’s be clear that Lavona is not some evil schemer in all this. Lavona learned of Thomas’s death in 2002 from her son. Lavona applied for Social Security benefits based on her marriage to Thomas.
The Social Security Administration eventually determined that Lavona was entitled to benefits as Thomas’s widow. What’s more, the agency told Lavona to look into the possibility that she was entitled to benefits from the NFL.
It was when she made that inquiry that Lavona learned that Barbara had been receiving benefits from the NFL as Thomas’s surviving spouse.
What a mess!
There was to be no splitting of the baby by Judge Schiller on this one.
Barbara’s marriage to Thomas was void under South Carolina law, leaving Lavona as Thomas’s surviving spouse.
Barbara tried to avoid this result by arguing that Lavona had walked out on her marriage to Thomas.
But Schiller, in a decision issued last week, recognized that the result was the same regardless of which spouse left the other or whether there was a mutual split.
“Although the Court sympathizes with Barbara’s Sullivan’s position, her suggested reading of South Carolina law is inconsistent with the state’s strong stance against bigamy. Two people cannot dissolve a marriage by simply being apart for five years and thus forego the formal avenues created by South Carolina law to dissolve a marriage,” the judge wrote.
In a concluding observation, Schiller recognized that Barbara’s “good faith belief that she was legally married is insufficient to validate her marriage.” (Hill v. NFL)
Talk about a sour outcome! The only bad guy in the whole affair is dead. Thomas’s wives are left to deal with the wreckage of his life.
And the fact that Lavona gets Thomas’s pension going forward does not end the matter. There’s still the issue of the $192,900 that Barbara already received from the NFL as a surviving spouse.
That issue wasn’t before Schiller, so he was probably relieved that he didn’t have to decide it. Let’s just hope that Lavona is happy with her win. Barbara doesn’t need any more grief in her life.
As the now 57-year-old Barbara told The Associated Press, “Everything is gone. I don’t have nothing.”
