A Lesson in Trust Law, or, What Happens When a Guy Makes His Girlfriend His Daughter to Avoid Paying the Parents of the Guy He Killed

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Most days, this blog is all about analyzing entertainment news stories.  Today, it’s just about analyzing an entertaining news story.

Forty-eight year old Florida billionaire John Goodman (owner of the International Polo Club Palm Beach, not Roseanne’s TV husband) recently shocked courts and bloggers alike with the headline-grabbing adoption of his 42-year-old girlfriend, Heather Hutchins, making Heather his eldest (and creepiest) of three children.  But if the fact of a 48-year-old man adopting his adult girlfriend as his daughter doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, here’s betting the reason he did so will.

Goodman is currently facing both criminal DUI manslaughter charges and a wrongful death civil action for causing the death of 23-year-old Scott Wilson, who drowned when his car overturned and plunged into a canal after being struck by Goodman’s Bentley in February 2010.  (Of course he was driving a Bentley.)  Goodman could forfeit a significant portion of his net worth should the jury find against him and award punitive damages in the wrongful death case.  But even if Wilson’s family wins a massive judgment against Goodman, they can’t take from what he doesn’t own — and “what he doesn’t own,” says Florida Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley (who is presiding over the wrongful death suit against Goodman), includes a $100-million irrevocable trust, created all the way back in 1991, for the benefit of Goodman’s “children.”

Observers have speculated that Goodman — knowing that his money may soon become the Wilsons’ money once their lawsuit is finished — adopted Hutchins as a way to indirectly access a fortune which the Wilsons cannot.  In other words, Goodman’s maneuver seemingly isn’t so much about making Hutchins a wealthy woman as it is about keeping himself a wealthy man.  The head-spinning development caused even Judge Kelley to observe that the court was entering a “legal twilight zone.”  So what is really going on here?

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