69 Am. U. L. Rev. 253 (2019).

* Senior Staff Member, American University Law Review, Volume 69; J.D. Candidate, May 2020, American University Washington College of Law; B.A., Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics, and Government, American University. I dedicate this Comment to survivors of domestic violence. To those survivors: you are strong, you are brave, and you are not alone. Your stories matter and your voices are heard. #MeToo.

In 2017, the #MeToo movement took social media by storm when individuals from all walks of life began openly sharing their experiences with sexual violence and gender-based harassment for the first time. Starting in the employment space and moving to other areas, the movement encouraged legal changes that improve gender equality. Alimony, which has received little scholarly attention in recent years, became of interest to #MeToo reformers who discovered current laws failed to adequately serve survivors’ interests by forcing them to pay spousal support to their abusive ex-spouse. Instead of a uniform system that removed the possibility of survivors being required to pay spousal support to their abusers, lawyers and clients face a patchwork of statutes that vary wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some jurisdictions prohibit considering any evidence of marital misconduct, while others leave it solely to the court’s discretion. California is the only state that has affirmatively enacted legislation disqualifying alimony payments from survivors to abusers.

As state legislatures continually fail to implement proper laws, survivors’ only hope in having alimony provisions in divorce settlements invalidated lies in judges’ hands. Courts have used contract law for centuries to protect vulnerable people from being taken advantage of in their dealings with more powerful individuals. Particularly, the doctrine of unconscionability began as an equitable doctrine that courts invoked as a way to restrict enforcement of harsh, biting, and unreasonably one-sided agreements. Judges today can continue to use the doctrine of unconscionability as a way to deny enforcing divorce settlements that require survivors of domestic violence to pay spousal support to their convicted abusers because those payments represent a continuation of abuse and control. Survivors’ freedom from abuse should not be obtained at such an unreasonably steep price and judges have the power to end that once and for all. Allowing this practice to go on creates fresh wounds on top of barely healed flesh, adds insult to indescribable injury, and prevents survivors from ever truly being free. In the #MeToo era, that is not acceptable.