A litigant in person in a divorce case has been penalised with £10,000 costs for directing ’threatening’ emails to his wife’s solicitor’s trainee.
Deputy District Judge Mark Harrop said it was a ‘particularly disturbing’ aspect of proceedings that the husband in KA v LE repeatedly targeted the most junior lawyer for communications.
The judge said that the husband wrote to the court about his ‘positive interactions’ with the trainee and on numerous occasions proposed to her that the two of them meet to discuss the case or just ‘chew the fat’.
‘A party’s lawyers cannot avoid communications from the other party just because their contents might be unsavoury,’ said Harrop. ‘Deliberately sending all his emails only to the most junior, female, member of the wife’s team, even when she was on holiday, suggesting private meetings and asking her not to share his messages with her employer, strikes me as an egregious abuse of the obvious power imbalance between them; one which I can only imagine made her deeply uncomfortable.’
The case heard at Luton Justice Centre was a two-day final hearing of an application for a financial order on divorce.
The couple in the case separated in mid-2020, at which point the wife refused the husband access to the family home and stopped him seeing their two children. Following a seven-day fact-finding hearing in 2021, Deputy District Judge Leigh-Smith found that the husband had bullied, coerced and controlled the wife throughout the whole of their 10-year marriage.
A few days before the financial remedy hearing, the husband emailed the court saying he could not attend on medical grounds. He then emailed the wife’s solicitor’s trainee, who he knew was on holiday, saying he would be unable to attend.
The night before the hearing, at 2.37am, he sent a further email to the trainee to ‘implore’ her to prevent the wife from attending. The husband said he had heard the wife’s solicitors ‘described in an unsavoury way, which I won’t share in text… maybe when we next meet’.
The judge said the husband’s communications in the proceedings had ‘crossed the line’ and were controlling, undermining and threatening. He said the wife would experience them as a continuation of the abuse that she suffered throughout the marriage and added it was ‘quite likely that they will have taken an emotional toll on her lawyers too’.
He expressed the court’s disapproval of the way the husband conducted the litigation by ordering him to pay the wife 25% of her legal fees, assessed at £10,000. This was deducted from the £140,000 lump sum she was due to pay to buy the husband out of his interest in the family home.
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