Kentucky Case Law Review by Topic: December 1, 2025 through January 31, 2026

Cornett v. Cornett, Nos. 19-CI-01062, 2024-CA-0028-MR (Ky. App. 2025)

Marital Property: burden of proof, disclosure, prenuptial agreement

Dated: December 12, 2025
Affirming
Not to be Published

Prior to the parties’ marriage, they discussed Husband’s ownership interest in an inherited family business which he felt necessitated an antenuptial agreement, based on his experience in a previous divorce. Several days before the 1995 marriage, Wife executed an agreement excluding Husband’s business interest from the marital estate. The parties began divorce proceedings in 2019, during which—following a separate hearing—the trial court found the antenuptial agreement enforceable. A decree was entered in 2023, incorporating this finding, and awarding Husband the business interest as his separate, non-marital property. Wife appealed.

In her appeal, Wife argued that the trial court (in determining the agreement was valid) erred in its reliance on the term “fully apprised” in place of finding “full disclosure” was made prior to the agreement’s signing. The Court disagreed, finding Wife’s argument “semantic” and “no legally meaningful distinction” between the terms. Full disclosure, Wife alleged, requires an agreement’s listing of assets, absent which a party arguing the validity of an antenuptial agreement fails to meet their burden of proof, citing King v. King and Luck v. Luck. The Court again disagreed, noting that the listing of assets requirements in Luck predated the burden of proof clarification later articulated by the Kentucky Supreme Court. There is no single required method, the Court continued, for trial courts to use when determining whether a full disclosure was made. In this case, Wife’s knowledge of Husband’s business interest prior to the agreement was undisputed. In her testimony, Wife acknowledged reading and voluntarily signing the agreement, and further that she and Husband had discussed the asset beforehand.

In her second argument, Wife asserted the agreement should be found unconscionable. Shortly before entry of the trial court’s decree, Wife was involved in a car wreck which she alleged caused traumatic brain injury. This change in circumstances, she argued, went so far beyond the parties’ contemplation at the time of the agreement that its enforcement now would work an injustice. The Court again disagreed. The trial court referenced her accident in its findings related to enforcement of the agreement, and had broad discretion doing so. Further, a party arguing unconscionability—and that an agreement’s enforcement would create an injustice—bears the burden of proof, the Court wrote. Wife’s limited arguments and general references to medical costs, the Court wrote, failed to establish injustice.

Mitchell v. Mitchell, Nos. 17-CI-00525, 2024-CA-0057-MR, 2024-CA-0746-MR (Ky. App. 2025)

Attorney Fees
KRS 360.040: interest on judgments
KRS 403.190: presumption increase in value is marital
Marital Property: appreciation (stock)(home)(passive), de facto date, investment account, house, real property, retirement benefits, tracing, valuation date
Witness: expert

The parties married in 2011, and in 2013 relocated to a horse farm in Kentucky purchased in part with $140,000 downpayment by Husband. Wife split her time between the Kentucky farm and Minnesota, where her children and ex-husband lived. The parties separated and reconciled several times during the marriage (Husband filed a petition for dissolution in 2013, which was later dismissed). Wife invested $500,000 in an investment entity to be run by Husband, and started a business boarding horses on the farm. Wife sought, and was briefly granted, license to practice as a pharmacist in Kentucky, until deciding to stay in Minnesota and purchase a home there. Husband filed a petition for dissolution of the marriage in October 2017, and Wife filed a response in May 2018 after discovering Husband had drained the investment entity’s funds. The parties continued communicating, and made limited reconciliation attempts as late as July 2019.

In September 2019, Husband began directing funds in one of his retirement accounts to purchase substantial shares in a battery metals company, and in March 2020 he began taking distributions from a separate retirement account. The trial court issued a bifurcated decree in November 2020, reserving on issues including the division of property. No status quo orders were entered. Immediately after entry of the bifurcated decree, Husband’s battery investments (which he had since moved to a rollover IRA) began to rapidly increase in value, reaching a height of $16.6 million in January 2021. The investments dropped precipitously, losing over half their value, the following month.

Husband began transferring funds from his rollover IRA to different accounts, amounting to $1.47 million, which—combined with his investments’ decline—left a $7.3 million remaining balance as of April 2021. With the disposition of property unresolved by the bifurcated decree, extensive and contentious discovery ensued until December 2023, when a final hearing on the parties’ property and assets was held.

During the hearing, the parties agreed to the sale of the farm, and to an overall equity amount (including Husband’s downpayment, and mortgage payments made during and after the marriage) of $432,130. Husband testified as to the parties’ businesses, his investments, and withdrawal-related taxes he paid for retirement distributions taken without Wife’s knowledge. His claim that the parties had separated in 2013, following his first (later dismissed) petition for dissolution, was rebutted by a recorded 2019 phone call played for the trial court, in which the parties discussed reconciliation, and Husband disparaged Wife’s ex-husband and the judge handling her custody case.

Husband presented a financial expert, whose testimony concerned tracing retirement accounts held by Husband, from the date of the parties’ marriage through July 2019. Husband’s expert was unable to trace retirement funds once Husband began transfers and distributions in late 2020.

Wife’s financial expert testified to tracing seven retirement accounts held by Husband, but was likewise unable to continue her analysis once Husband began transfers and taking distributions. Wife’s expert calculated that from the November 2020 entry of the bifurcated decree, through Husband’s transfer of the investments to a rollover IRA, their value grew by $6 million. By the end of January 2021, the investments amassed an additional $10 million in value. Wife’s expert used this last figure to calculate a marital investments value of $9.528 million as of 01/31/2021. Notably, Wife’s expert analysis did not include further accounting after this date, when the investments quickly lost half their value.

Following the 2023 hearing, the trial court adopted Wife’s expert’s valuations for the marital portion of Husband’s retirement accounts, and awarded Wife $4.8 million as her share from the assets, with statutory interest applied. In its order, the trial court also determined that Husband retained a $140,000 non-marital interest in the parties’ farm, and ordered the proceeds from its sale to be split accordingly. The trial court rejected Husband’s claim for mortgage payments made during the pendency of the dissolution proceedings, based on his exclusive occupancy and income from horse breeding during that time. The trial court denied Husband’s subsequent Civ. R. 59.05, motion, and granted Wife’s motion for attorney’s fees. Husband again sought Civ. R. 59.05 relief, now on the judgment granting Wife attorney’s fees, which the trial court again denied. Husband’s appeal followed, in which he challenged the trial court’s marital/non-marital characterization of the farm equity and his retirement accounts, the valuation date used for the latter, award of post-judgment interest and attorney’s fees, and application of KRS 403.190 in dividing the parties’ property.

In his appeal, Husband argued that the trial court erred in finding his mortgage payments (amounting to over $90,000) after the date of dissolution, and associated equity in the farm, were marital. In making this determination, the trial court relied on testimony from Wife in which she speculated that Husband “most likely” used funds from the marital horse boarding business toward mortgage payments during the time in question. No evidence for this or valuation of the business, however, was provided. Thus, the Court agreed with Husband, and found the trial court erred in its marital characterization of equity from Husband’s post-decree mortgage payments, despite insufficient evidentiary support for doing so.

Husband also contested the trial court’s determination that increases on his retirement accounts after the decree were marital, and application of a 01/31/2021 valuation date. In any division of property, the Court wrote, a trial court must first characterize property as marital or non-marital. As part of this assessment, a trial court determines whether any increases in a property’s value were passively earned, or attributable to one or the other party’s efforts. Husband argued that the increases in his retirement accounts after 11/19/20 (the date of entry of the bifurcated decree) should have been awarded to him as his separate, non-marital property. Said increases, however, resulted from the investment gains on assets acquired pre-decree, using marital retirement funds. The Court thus affirmed on this point.

The trial court’s application of the 01/31/2021 valuation date, the Court found, was an abuse of discretion and contrary to the weight of the evidence. By awarding Wife a share of the accounts as of that date, and applying statutory interest (Husband’s subsequent myriad transfers precluded an ‘as of’ with gains/losses assignment), the trial court in effect relied on a snapshot of the property at its highest value, and left Husband to absorb significant losses thereafter.

The Court rejected Husband’s assertion that the trial court improperly applied KRS 403.190 factors in its division of property, finding that while the trial court’s initial order didn’t explicitly cite the statute, the record supports its consideration in the division of property. The Court likewise rejected Husband’s argument of undue emphasis on an inappropriate 07/2019 phone call in the trial court’s decision, noting that the call and statements therein were used to establish a marital end date, and there being no apparent prejudicial harm to Husband given the trial court’s equal division of marital property.

As KRS 403.190 states, the [trial] court shall “divide the marital property without regard to marital misconduct in just proportions.” (Emphasis added.) While we agree that [Husband’s] statements are not to be directly considered in the division of marital property, we recognize that they do provide a general background to the circumstances of the parties’ marriage and are relevant to the date the parties separated, which was why [Wife] initially introduced the conversation. Considering the [trial] court ultimately divided all marital property equally to both parties (after apportioning the nonmarital portions), we are not convinced that the [trial] court failed to follow its duty to divide the marital property in just proportions.

Turning to the trial court’s award of post-judgment interest, the Court affirmed the trial court’s finding that Wife was entitled to 6% annual interest under KRS 360.040(I), and that its use of statutory interest was appropriate, particularly given both expert witnesses’ testimony that valuations of the retirement accounts was not feasible after early 2020.

The Court also affirmed the award of attorney’s fees and expert costs to Wife. It found no abuse of discretion under Civ. R. 37.02(3) or KRS 403.220, emphasizing Husband’s discovery deficiencies and the trial court’s obvious familiarity with the parties’ respective financial circumstances.

Tucker v. Tucker, Nos. 23-CI-00070, 2024-CA-0997-MR (Ky. App. 2026)

Marital Property: separate property, gift, burden of proof, house, real property, standard of review

Dated: January 16, 2026
Affirming
Not to be Published

Two parcels of residential real estate were at issue in the appeal. Wife resided in property located on Breckinridge Street, and Husband resided in property located on Liberty Street. Husband’s father transferred the Breckinridge property to Husband in 2014, while the parties were married. Husband’s father died before the dissolution trial. The Liberty property was owned by Husband’s father’s estate at the time of trial.

Breckinridge

The trial court determined that the Breckinridge property was marital and divided the equity equally between the parties. Husband argued on appeal that the trial court erred in determining that this property was marital. He contended that the transfer of the real estate from his father to him was a non-marital gift.

Husband raised this issue for the first time on appeal. Further, Husband did not request “palpable error review.” Out of an abundance of caution, the Court reviewed the disposition of the Breckinridge property for palpable error. Under Civ. R. 61.02:

A palpable error which affects the substantial rights of a party may be considered by the court on motion for new trial or by an appellate court on appeal, even though insufficiently raised or preserved for appeal, and appropriate relief may be granted upon a determination that manifest injustice has resulted from the error.

In Kentucky, all property acquired by either party during the marriage is presumed to be marital. KRS 403.190. Gifts are one exception. KRS 403.190(2)(b).

The Supreme Court of Kentucky addressed the four factors applicable to cases involving gifts between spouses in Sexton v. Sexton, 125 S.W.3d 258 (Ky. 2004): (1) the source of the money with which the “gift” was purchased; (2) the intent of the donor at that time as to intended use of the property; (3) status of the marriage relationship at the time of transfer; and (4) whether there was any valid agreement that the transferred property was to be excluded from the marital property.

The donor’s intent is the primary factor in determining whether a gift is made jointly to spouses or individually to one spouse. The donor’s testimony is highly relevant to the donor’s intent, but the intention of the donor may not only be expressed in words or actions, but also it may be inferred from the surrounding facts and circumstances, including the relationship of the parties and the conduct of the parties. Sexton at 268-269.

Whether property is considered a gift and thus may be characterized as non-marital is a factual issue subject to the clearly erroneous standard of review. A party claiming that property is non-marital by reason of the gift exception has the burden to prove it.

The Court held that while some of the Sexton factors may have weighed in Husband’s favor, they were “presented with no clear legal or factual dictate that necessitates reversal.” Finding thus, the Court continued: “there was certainly no palpable error.”

Liberty

The Liberty property was owned by Husband’s father’s estate at the time of the dissolution trial. The trial court concluded that Wife had no marital interest in the Liberty property other than the value of labor she contributed to improve it. The trial court ordered Husband to pay Wife $4,800 for the value of this work.

Wife argued on appeal that the trial court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction to dispose of any issue related to the Liberty property.

The issue of subject matter jurisdiction can be raised at any time, even sua sponte, and it cannot be acquired by waiver, consent, or estoppel. Doe v. Golden & Walters, PLLC, 173 S.W.3d 260, 270 (Ky. App. 2005).

The Court held that subject-matter jurisdiction was proper. The Court noted that the trial court found Wife had no marital interest in the Liberty property, but that the value of her labor in improving the property was appropriately considered.

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