Man must pay jilted fiancée $130K for reneging on engagement

A McDowell County jury has awarded $130,000 to a woman who was dumped by her fiancé in a breach-of-contract-to-marry claim, a common-law tort that is rarely seen today.

The case involved a young woman who worked in her older boyfriend’s convenience stores. He asked her to marry him, she accepted, and he told her that they would eventually sell the convenience stores and she would never have to worry about money, according to the plaintiff’s attorney, Steven Kropelnicki Jr. of Asheville.

The case is Dellinger v. Barnes (No. 08 CVS 1006). Judge Alan Z. Thornburg presided.

Breach of contract to marry is “incredibly, incredibly rare,” said Heidi Bloom, a family law attorney with Wyrick Robbins in Raleigh. “Most of the cases are from like the late 1800s.”

Kropelnicki said he knew from the time his client approached him that it would be challenging. “You always have questions anytime you have a case in which it’s one person’s word against another,” he said.

He said he believes one reason his client prevailed is that he was able to present the case as a narrative to the jury. “There’s a story here. A young impressionable mountain girl had been dating a man much older than she was,” he said. “You do what any trial lawyer does: You try to tell a story.”

The story began when the plaintiff was still in high school and dating the defendant. She enrolled in a two-year community college program, but when the defendant purchased a convenience store, she helped him run it in addition to her schoolwork and regular job. In 1998, after she had completed her degree in medical office technology, she began to seek work, but the defendant purchased a second convenience store, and she agreed to help him open it.

Instead of using her degree to get a job, the plaintiff helped the defendant establish a total of four convenience stores and worked without pay for the first year, with the defendant telling her he could not afford to pay her because he needed to put the profit back into the business.

In 1998, the defendant asked her to marry him and began paying her a small salary – about $900 a month – for her work, which involved more than 40 hours a week and duties ranging from running the register to taking money to the bank.

During that time, the defendant purchased an old grocery store, and the plaintiff spent months helping him rehabilitate it. And he kept putting off the wedding. “He kept telling her, ‘Don’t worry, all this will be ours.’ When she would talk of marriage, he would say, ‘We can’t take that much time off from the stores,'” Kropelnicki said.

In 2007, he began seeing a store employee and broke off the engagement.

Kropelnicki said the defendant’s main defense was that he had broken off the engagement much earlier – more than three years ago, meaning the statute of limitations would have barred the action.

But Kropelnicki said he was able to find a long-term employee who testified that everyone assumed they were engaged and spoke about the plaintiff’s work. Getting the witness was a challenge, he said, because he was in effect testifying against his boss.

Kropelnicki had other challenges as well. Juries in Marion, a recession-battered mill town, are not generally plaintiff-friendly. “I love trying cases in front of mountain juries. But a mill town mountain jury? That’s a different ethos and culture,” he said.

“These juries don’t tend to be naturally inclined to spend other people’s money. Nobody ever came along and gave them anything.”

Another concern during voir dire was that some jurors might not want to side with his client because she’d been living with her fiancé. “You have a young woman living with a man. Out of 12 people picked at random, you’re going to have at least a couple who have problems with that relationship.”

Although damages for emotional distress are allowed under the claim, Kropelnicki made a strategic decision to stay away from that because he was concerned that on appeal such an award would be overturned. Instead, he relied on damages based on the defendant’s promise that they would be wealthy when they sold the convenience stores.

The jury also considered the plaintiff’s claims of breach of fiduciary duty and constructive trust, but did not find for the plaintiff on those actions.

Charles E. Daye, Brandis Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, said that, like alienation of affection, many jurisdictions have done away with the breach-of-promise-to-marry claim.

“These are kind of quaint actions in which the man can file, but they are filed mostly by women,” he said.

In N.C. Law of Torts, which Daye co-authored with Mark W. Morris, the action is described as “a unique hybrid of contract law and tort-like remedy.” Daye said the authors “devoted about two and a quarter pages to it in an 800-page book. That’s about how important it is.”

Kropelnicki is expecting the case to be appealed, in part because the defense attorney asked the judge to abolish the action, preserving the right to raise that issue on appeal.

“I would be very interested to see what the Court of Appeals would do with it,” Bloom said.

As for the plaintiff, who has since married, “she was pleased that somebody believed her story,” Kropelnicki said.

Verdict Report

Type of action: Breach of contract to marry, breach of fiduciary duty, constructive trust

Case name: Dellinger v. Barnes

Case number: 08 CVS 1006

Court: McDowell County Superior Court

Judge: Hon. Alan Z. Thornburg

Date: Dec. 17, 2010

Amount: $130,000

Expert witnesses: F. Foster Shriner, CPA, evaluation of defendant’s convenience store business

Plaintiff’s attorney: Steven Kropelnicki of Carter & Kropelnicki (Asheville)

Editor’s note: The information in Lawyers Weekly’s verdicts and settlements reports was submitted by the counsel for the prevailing party and represents the attorney’s characterization of the case.