Opinion
No. 47/306.
08-26-1920
ZUSI v. ZUSI.
Samuel R. Kleinmann, of Newark, for petitioner. John P. Manning, of Newark, for defendant.
Petition for divorce by Joseph Zusi against Ellenor Zusi. Divorce granted.
Samuel R. Kleinmann, of Newark, for petitioner.
John P. Manning, of Newark, for defendant.
BACKES, V. C. The wife is charged with adultery with one Henry. She entertained Henry in her apartments, afternoons, while her husband was away at work, frequently, for a long spell. Fellow tenants of the apartment house complained to the landlord of the visits, and he warned the defendant, and she promised they would cease, and as they did not he gave notice to quit the premises. To the landlord's inquiry the defendant admitted that her husband knew nothing ofHenry's call. She introduced Henry to two of her girl friends, and seemed proud of her conquest, and flattered by his attention. She spoke freely and boastingly to them of her criminal intimacies. On the witness stand she claimed that the visitor was her brother who, she said, came afternoons to take a bath, or that it might have been her brother-in-law, who sometimes came to the house in the evening, accompanied by his wife. She denied that it was Henry, denied that the landlord had called her to account, and that she had promised him that she would not receive Henry again, denied introducing Henry toiler two girl friends and that she ever told them of his visits, or what bad then taken place. Her testimony stands alone in the explanation and denials. Neither the brother or the brother-in-law was called, nor was Henry, though, undoubtedly, available. Their absence counts powerfully against the defendant. I must assume that the brother could not have truthfully supported her, nor could Henry, and that their presence in the courtroom would have enabled the landlord and the tenants to identify Henry as the visitor and to say that it was not the brother. I believe the landlord's testimony and that of the tenants as to the visits, and that the landlord warned the defendant, and that she promised to mend her ways.
The story of the two girl friends that the defendant spoke unblushingly of her shame is, to say the least, unusual. It is not the way of the transgressors of the moral code. But these witnesses come, apparently, with no ill motive, and speak without prejudice. They are disinterested, and no effort was made to impeach them. It is the unusualness of their testimony—the improbability of the sin being gossiped about by the sinner— that causes the mind to pause. As improbable as their stories would ordinarily be, I cannot reject them in this case as not worthy. A married woman who, blind in her infatuation, defiant of warning, and reckless as to exposure and consequences, would receive a lover in the privacy of her home, would not always stop there in her indiscretions. It is more likely that the defendant in her abandon boasted of her escapades than that these two witnesses committed deliberate perjury. The defendant's denial of Henry's visits, so overwhelmingly established by the proofs, and her false explanations that the visitor was her brother, tends strongly to discredit the veracity of her denial that she flaunted her illicit pleasures to her two girl friends.
The repeated clandestine visits of Henry to the apartment, in the absence of explanation, and more particularly if denied in the fade of indubitable proof of their happening, are alone enough to condemn the defendant; and, when we add her admissions of wrongdoing, the conviction as to her guilt is unescapable. There will be a divorce.