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Wife’s Moving to Guesthouse Does Not Compel Conclusion Husband Was Abusive—C.A.
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Div. One of the Fourth District Court of Appeal has rejected the contention of a woman that the fact she virtually moved out of the mansion she shared with her husband and slept in a guesthouse on the premises establishes that she harbored a fear of her spouse, rendering erroneous the denial of her request for imposition on him of a stay-away order.
An unusual aspect of the case is that the warring spouses, both medical doctors, are not divorced, although the wife filed a petition for dissolution of marriage in 2014, and they remained at the same residence during periods of separation up until January 2022 when the wife was granted a temporary restraining order. San Diego Superior Court Judge Sharon L. Kalemkiarian on Dec. 8, 2022, denied her requested domestic violence restraining order (“DVRO”), and the wife appealed.
Justice William Dato authored the unpublished opinion, filed Tuesday, which rejects a barrage of assaults on Kalemkiarian’s order by the wife, pathologist/hematologist Saskia Boisot. The judge found, after an evidentiary hearing—which, Dato recounted, “spanned multiple days and involved many hours of testimony”—no evidence of domestic violence, disbelieving Boisot’s insistence that her husband, pain management physician Keeran Kumar, was causing her psychological harm.
One of Boisot’s contentions on appeal was that “[s]equestering oneself to a 500 [square foot] guesthouse instead of a 4,000 [square foot] luxury home is not the kind of hardship one brings upon oneself absent necessity.”
The $7 million home is in Rancho Sante Fe, an affluent residential community in San Diego County. Residents in that community have included Bill Gates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Murray, and Jenny Craig.
In her brief on appeal, Boisot characterized her retreat from the main house as “objective evidence” that Kumar was “harassing” her, and “disturbing her peace, unreasonably isolating her, controlling her movements, daily behavior and access to the home, and compelling her by intimidation to abstain from using the home as was her legal right.”
In that brief, drafted by San Diego attorney Sondra S. Sutherland, she argued that her departure from the house was “akin to a constructive discharge where intolerability makes an otherwise voluntary act de facto involuntary.”
The appellant contended that Kalemkiarian ignored evidence of intolerability, thus failing to apply the required “totality of the circumstances” test.
The judge did apply that test, Dato responded, and “determined that Wife voluntarily chose to go stay in the guesthouse.” That was, the justice wrote, “mostly because of the dogs.”
He explained that the couple had four dogs and, as Kalemkiarian put, Boisot “felt the environment” of the main house “was unsafe” for them in light of reconstruction work in progress. The judge recited in her order that Boisot testified that one of the dogs “had a bite history” and with “workmen all over the place,” it was necessary “to secure our dogs.”
Dato wrote: “Based on this evidence, the court reasonably found that Wife moved into the guest house of her own volition, and for the benefit of the dogs, not because she feared for her safety or was being controlled or coerced by Husband.”
References to Dogs
The dogs were mentioned prominently in Dato’s 51-page opinion which provides a parade of instances of pugnaciousness, pettiness, profanity and petulance on the part of the parties.
It tells of Kalemkiarian’s conclusion that Boisot had deliberately let the dogs loose in the garden, knowing of their destructive nature, where they destroyed vegetables planted by her husband and their teenage twins.
In light of that incident and an argument the spouses had that day, Dato said, Kalemkiarian “was led to credit Husband’s testimony that he locked the doors to the house…in order to prevent further fighting,” commenting:
“[W]here, as here, there has been a history of heated, loud arguments between the parties, particularly at night when one or both of the parties had been drinking, the locking of the house to try to prevent another incident from occurring must necessarily be considered abuse….”
The opinion recites controversy over the most prized of the parties’ pets—a French bulldog named Teddy—snatched out of the husband’s arms by Boisot one day as Kumar was watching television in the pool cabana and retrieved by her one night from the bedroom of the main house while the husband was sleeping.
Fetching Teddy
As to Boisot fetching Teddy from the main house, Dato said:
“It is unclear why it was at all ‘reasonable’ for Wife to demand possession of Teddy, late at night after Husband and Teddy were already sleeping, when Wife admits that Husband had an equal right to control Teddy and Teddy was already under his control at the time of the incident. Nor is it clear why she places the duty to “avoid[ ] the tussle” on Husband by asserting that he should have given over Teddy merely because she demanded he do so.”
Although Teddy was mentioned by name in the opinion, the parties weren’t. The case is Marriage of S.B. and K.K., D081846.
San Diego attorney Linda Cianciolo represented Kumar.
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