Breaking off an engagement is rarely simple. Past going through the turbulent feelings that sometimes include calling it quits, there are additionally numerous logistical questions to determine, resembling residing preparations, wedding ceremony funds, and, for one Massachusetts-based couple, who will get to maintain the $70,000 engagement ring. Based on court docket filings, Bruce Johnson proposed to his then-girlfriend Caroline Settino on August 24, 2017, at Wequassett Resort and Golf Membership in Harwich, Massachusetts, with a $70,000 engagement ring he bought from Tiffany’s. The newly-engaged couple instantly began planning for his or her massive day, and the groom subsequently bought two wedding ceremony bands from Tiffany’s for just below $4,000.
Nevertheless, this engagement bliss was short-lived for Johnson. He says warning indicators emerged when he started to expertise verbal abuse from his fiancée (and when she refused to accompany him to therapies after he was recognized with prostate most cancers). Court docket filings state that Settino would name him “a moron,” “regulate his clothes,” and didn’t “recognize [his] accomplishments.” In November 2017, after a very dangerous argument, during which the bride claimed “she was a handsome lady, and she or he may get a person each time she needed,” Johnson noticed messages on her cellphone that indicated she was having an affair. (Settino later denied having any extramarital relations, saying that the person she was texting was “her finest buddy.”) Nevertheless, for Johnson, the belief was damaged, and he determined to name off the engagement just some weeks later. That was only the start of the top for the previous couple, as Johnson quickly initiated litigation to reclaim possession of the expensive ring.
In September 2021, Brockton Superior Court docket discovered Johnson at fault for ending the engagement and decided that the engagement ring (and one wedding ceremony band) belonged to Settino. (The trial court docket did state that he may hold the marriage band he bought for himself.) Nevertheless, on July 28, 2022, the ex-groom determined to enchantment the court docket’s choice to award the costly ring to his former fiancée. Lower than a yr later, on March 1, 2023, the Massachusetts Appeals Court docket overturned the decrease court docket’s choice and awarded the ring and wedding ceremony band to Johnson, ruling that the proof offered within the preliminary trial was “inadequate to maintain a discovering that the plaintiff was ‘at fault’ for the events’ separations.”
The problem on the coronary heart of those instances was the court docket’s strategy to fault. Within the state of Massachusetts (up till now!), the one who obtained to maintain the ring was sometimes based mostly on who was “at fault” for ending the engagement. The primary court docket, for instance, awarded the ring to Settino after deciding that Johnson had mistakenly assumed that she was dishonest on him, which resulted in him unfairly ending their engagement—making him at fault for his or her relationship’s termination. Nevertheless, in response to the American Bar Affiliation Journal, nearly all of states say {that a} ring is taken into account a conditional present that must be returned to the purchaser when an engagement ends—regardless of who was at fault. This case (and the broader query) headed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court docket in November 2024. In her filed transient, Settino argued there shouldn’t be “conditional present idea” with regards to engagement rings. In her eyes, the ring, a present, ought to stay hers. However her former groom disagreed, so the choice concerning who ought to personal the Tiffany ring was positioned within the arms of the state’s highest court docket.
On Friday, November 15, the Massachusetts Supreme Court docket got here to a conclusion—and deemed Johnson, who in the end ended the couple’s engagement, the lawful proprietor of the diamond, per 10 Boston. Overturning a precedent set six a long time in the past, the court docket dominated that an engagement ring should be returned to the one who bought it, no matter who is actually at fault within the occasion of a damaged engagement. “We now be a part of the fashionable development adopted by nearly all of jurisdictions which have thought-about the problem and retire the idea of fault on this context,” the judges overseeing the case wrote in Friday’s ruling. “The place, as right here, the deliberate wedding ceremony doesn’t ensue and the engagement is ended, the engagement ring should be returned to the donor no matter fault.”
Naturally, Johnson was pleased with the end result. “We’re very happy with the court docket’s choice as we speak. It’s a well-reasoned, truthful, and simply choice and strikes Massachusetts regulation in the precise route,” Stephanie Taverna Siden, Johnson’s legal professional, instructed 10 Boston.
