It is not uncommon for divorce proceedings to go haywire and increasingly bitter. This is especially true if infidelity is involved in the separation. Often both parties stoop low as they get into legal fights to divide asserts and claim compensation. Back in 2009, a doctor from New York demanded that his estranged wife either return a kidney that he had donated to her or give him $1.5 million in compensation.
Dr. Richard Batista gave his kidney to his ex-wife Dawnell Batista in 2001, after she had two failed kidney transplants. The couple had met at the hospital where Dawnell was training to be a nurse. As per NBC News, the couple got married in 1990. However, Dawnell filed for divorce in July 2005, four years after she received life life-saving kidney transplant from her husband.
The acrimonious divorce proceedings between Richard and Dawnell gained headlines in 2009 after their divorce stretched up for over four years. Richard Batista, a surgeon at Nassau University Medical Center, decided to go public with his demand for the kidney and the $1.5 million compensation after he became “frustrated with the negotiations”. The surgeon claimed that his wife was preventing him from meeting his three kids for months at a time. He told the media, “This is my last resort; I did not want to do this publicly.”
He said that he gave his kidney to his estranged wife, hoping that it would save their marriage. “My first priority was to save her life. The second bonus was to turn the marriage around,” he said. However, according to the doctor, Dawnell began having affairs “18 months to two years after receiving the kidney transplant”.
Despite sympathising with the doctor, many experts believed that it was unlikely that courts would agree to his demands for the kidney or the big compensation.
Manhattan attorney Susan Moss told NBC News, “The good doctor is out of luck and out a kidney. This is similar to cases where a husband wants to be repaid for the cost of breast implants and the such. Our judges are not willing to value such assets, so to speak.”
Medical ethicist Robert Veatch to The Guardian at the time: “It’s illegal for an organ to be exchanged for anything of value. It’s her kidney now and taking the kidney out would mean she would have to go on dialysis or it would kill her.”
Eventually, the Nassau County Supreme Court rejected the doctor’s request. In the ruling, matrimonial referee Jeffrey Grob wrote, “The defendant’s effort to pursue and extract monetary compensation therefore not only runs afoul of the statutory prescription but conceivably may expose the defendant to criminal prosecution.”
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