Q. My husband and I are getting a divorce after 20 years of marriage, and I have trust interests from my grandparents but had no access to anything until they passed away last year. Unfortunately, I did not sign a prenuptial.  My husband is interested in the value of the trust and is demanding I show him all of the bank statements and the trust documents.  My brother and sister are furious about all of this because the trust is for them too.

Our trustee is elderly – he was my grandfather’s accountant for years – and he is very protective of the trust funds and is not super generous with distributions.  He says my husband isn’t entitled to anything. How does a trust get divided in this situation and is there anything I can do to protect my future distributions?

My husband says he is going to depose my brother and sister and our trustee – can he do that?

A. Your husband’s ability to get anything from your trust depends, in part, on the trust instrument itself.  He is entitled to see the underlying trust instrument so that his lawyer has the needed information to decide if he is going to try to get a piece of the trust.  You have an obligation to provide a copy of the trust. There is no value in trying to hide it. The same is true of the bank statements.

Providing the documentation he wants might be the quickest path to shutting down his attempt to get a piece of the trust in the divorce.  If you received zero distributions until the death of your grandparents which was the same year as the divorce got started, you clearly did not rely on the distributions to fund a marital lifestyle. To the extent you have joint accounts holding the distributions made last year, you can argue for an unequal division of those accounts but if you kept the distributions in your own name, you have a good argument to keep the distributions.

It also helps that you have an independent trustee who is holding the purse strings tight. I suspect your husband will not be able to get anything from the trust but if so, it will only be a portion of what you receive when you receive something. That said, he does have the right to ask questions of your siblings and the trustee under oath in a deposition.

Email questions to whickey@brickjones.com