Introduction
A premarital agreement that was signed in 1977 lasted forty-three years of marriage before a court decided that no one could actually determine what it required. On May 14, 2026, a New York Appellate Division affirmed a trial court’s order in Gaudette v. Gaudette, which effectively set aside a prenuptial agreement in full, holding that the agreement remained ambiguous, despite a full evidentiary hearing devoted to its clarification. The agreement had already been through one appeal, and both parties had been given multiple opportunities to explain what they meant when drafting and executing it. For practitioners, this case holds implications regarding the reach of ambiguity within marital agreements, as only two obligations within one single article of the agreement remained ambiguous after the hearing on remand, but the entire document was brought down because of them. A severability clause, which is widely considered standard practice for marital agreements, was absent from this one. That omission, coupled with the agreement’s ambiguity, brought the entire document down.
Facts of the Case
Bruce Gaudette (husband) and Linda Gaudette (wife) signed a prenuptial agreement before getting married in Canada in 1977. In their agreement, the husband detailed that he would contribute a sum of money toward furnishing their marital residence and pay a sum of money to the wife. The couple later moved to New York and spent their last forty years of marriage there. When this case was first appealed, the court determined that the agreement would be governed by New York law. The wife filed for divorce in 2020, and the husband moved to enforce their agreement.
Three provisions in this case became relevant. The first, article II, required each party to contribute to household expenses in proportion to their respective means. Second, article III, stated that the husband would be expected to expend $1,000 on furniture and household effects for their residence within their first year of marriage, which would ultimately become the wife’s separate property. Third, the same article required the husband to pay the wife a total of $10,000 during the marriage as soon as it was convenient for him to do so, or convey property to her at a valuation acceptable to the wife.
The trial court denied the husband’s motion to enforce their agreement, holding it void due to ambiguous and undefined terms. On his first appeal, the Appellate Division agreed that the agreement was indeed ambiguous, but also found that extrinsic evidence did resolve the ambiguities in every article except article III. However, for the two outstanding issues within article III, the court remanded the matter for a new evidentiary hearing in hopes of the parties providing new evidence that might help clear up the remaining ambiguity and further their intent. Following that hearing, the court found that the new evidence did not clarify article III, thus setting the agreement aside. The husband appealed, for the second time.
Legal Issue
The legal issue in this case regards whether the extrinsic evidence produced at the hearing on remand resolved the ambiguities that the court had found in article III, and if not, what would become of the remainder of the marital agreement. Because the Appellate Division had already found the agreement ambiguous once, its review was narrow and confined to that single question.
Court Analysis
The court began by applying Carter v. Fairchild-Carter, which held that “duly executed prenuptial agreements are generally valid and enforceable given the strong public policy favoring individuals ordering and deciding their own interests through contractual arrangements”. In cases in which marital agreements are deemed ambiguous, a court should resort to any extrinsic evidence that may be available in an attempt to clarify the parties’ original intent, as striking down a contract as meaningless is a last resort (Tompkins Fin. Corp. v. John M. Floyd & Assoc., Inc.). When reviewing the merits of ambiguity in such agreements, a court must examine the entire contract and read particular words and phrases in the context of their surroundings, as a whole and not in isolation (Zollo v. Adirondack Lodges Homeowners Assn., Inc.).
The evidence brought forth in the hearing included testimony from both parties as well as the husband’s expert, who was a Canadian lawyer familiar with prenuptial agreements from that time and place. None of this testimony helped the court clear up the agreement’s ambiguity. On first appeal, the court identified the agreement’s failure to define whether appliances as well as other household items were included within household effects. The hearing did not clear this up, but rather confirmed that the parties did not have an understanding of the answer, and had two different opinions on how the agreement should be interpreted, decades later. The husband took this phrase to include furniture and household items such as kitchen, living room, bedroom sets, but not to extend to anything in their garage.The wife took it more literally, arguing that household items meant everything in their house, including the garage contents. A second issue of ambiguity within article III emerged when reviewing the $1,000 obligation alongside article II, as it remained unclear whether the husband’s financial obligation was separate from and thus in addition to his contribution to household expenses, or if it was inclusive of that contribution and represented only his minimum expenditure for that first year of marriage.
The second obligation under article III, concerning the husband’s $10,000 payment, caused its own ambiguity issues. The husband testified that the distinction between what he had gifted his wife and what fulfilled this part of their agreement was not clear, and the court said that it concurred. He testified that he had indeed satisfied the obligation by purchasing a car that was titled in the wife’s name, though it remained unclear whether that gift had counted towards that $10,000 or not. There was additional confusion as to whether the monetary sums were meant to be listed in Canadian or United States dollars, which the husband had brought up in an oral argument. The wife testified that she believed nothing he had purchased across the marriage had satisfied the obligation. The court found that there was such confusion between the couple, and that there had been no prior understanding of how this agreement was supposed to be met.
Having found the prior ambiguities unresolved, the court held the entire agreement unenforceable, because the agreement lacked any severance clause and all of its articles were closely intertwined.
Practical Implications
Gaudette v. Gaudette is a clear example of what happens when a severability clause is left out. The agreement did not contain a severance clause, and all of its articles were closely intertwined. However, a severance clause alone might not have had enough weight to save the agreement when all of its provisions were dependent on one another, so the drafting note here is more broad. The court found only a single article of the agreement to remain ambiguous after the hearing, yet still, the entire agreement was set aside. Nothing in the agreement gave the other articles any basis to stand on their own. For practitioners drafting marital agreements, this case provides an important reminder to include a severance clause, and to draft each provision so that it can be applied without reference to the others. In situations within which an agreement contains terms that are complex or open to more than one interpretation, it is important to include such structure, so the rest of the document is able to survive if one provision fails.
The second note from this case concerns definitions. The term that undid the husband’s $1,000 obligation was “household effects,” which is an ordinary phrase that seemed relatively self-explanatory upon signing. However, decades later, it produced two different interpretations, both of which were understandable. Practitioners should work with their clients to clearly and meticulously define every term in marital agreements so as to avoid any ambiguity claims that may arise later on. Practitioners should also be wary of any phrase that sounds familiar, because familiarity is precisely what can discourage parties from defining terms. A term that appears simple enough to leave alone is often the one that later creates problems when attempting to apply.
Conclusion
Gaudette v. Gaudette confirms that ambiguity in a prenuptial agreement is not always curable. Although courts prefer to save agreements rather than discard them, an agreement that remains unclear even after extrinsic evidence has been heard may be set aside entirely. Two obligations that the parties were not able to come to an agreement upon after forty-three years of marriage were enough to render their whole marital agreement unenforceable, much due to a lack of any severability clause that might have permitted other articles within the agreement to withstand the fall. For practitioners, this case is a reminder of the likelihood that terms without definitions may fail, and they are often the terms that seemed too obvious to define in the first place. This case also displays the importance of building marital agreements with severance clauses that may prevent the failure of one provision from causing the collapse of the entire agreement.