Grogan v. Penza

Citations

• 194 Conn. App. 72

Syllabus

The defendant, whose marriage to the plaintiff previously had been dis- solved, appealed to this court from the judgment of the trial court denying her postdissolution motion for contempt, in which she claimed that the defendant had violated a certain alimony obligation contained in the parties' separation agreement. The separation agreement, which was incorporated into the dissolution judgment, required the plaintiff to pay the defendant alimony based on his annual income from employ- ment, which was defined as line 1 on the plaintiff's annual schedule K- 1 from his then employer, the law firm M. Co., and included a requirement that the plaintiff pay the defendant true up alimony based on his gross income over a certain amount. Subsequently, the plaintiff sold his inter- est in M. Co., where he had been a partner, and became a partner in a new law firm, G. Co. That year, the plaintiff received two schedule K- 1s, one from M. Co. and one from G. Co., each of which listed income amounts on lines 1 and 4. The defendant claimed that the plaintiff's true up alimony obligation for that year must be based on the total of all of those lines and filed a motion for contempt based on the plaintiff's nonpayment of any true up alimony for that year. The defendant objected to the plaintiff's motion and requested statutory attorney's fees and costs. The trial court denied the motion for contempt and did not award attorney's fees to either party. On the defendant's appeal and the plain- tiff's cross appeal to this court, held: 1. The trial court properly denied the defendant's motion for contempt: pursuant to the specific and plain language of the settlement agreement, which the parties freely agreed to use when they drafted the agreement, only income reported on line 1 of the schedule K-1 could be used in calculating the plaintiff's true up alimony obligation, and because the plaintiff's combined line 1 income from both K-1s was less than a certain amount, the defendant was not e