Landmark verdict shapes ‘alienation of affection’ debate
This story was published on June 3, 2001
When high school sweethearts Debby Tyson and Jeff Presser reunited at a Charlotte hotel in 1999 after several weeks of furtive phone calls and secret e-mail messages, the lovers felt as if destiny had brought them together again.
As Jeff would write Debby in an e-mail message the next week, “life seemed so marvelously full of possibilities this past weekend. Debby would respond, “Six weeks have wiped away 15 years.”
And two marriages.
Debby and Jeff were married, but not to each other. Their passionate reunion was the beginning of an affair that prompted them to separate from their spouses, split two families with four young children and led to a landmark lawsuit.
Debby’s husband, Davidson College wrestling coach Tom Oddo, sued Presser, a Florida family doctor with a wife and young son, for having sex with his wife and breaking up his marriage and family. The lovers have since married.
Last month a Charlotte jury ordered Presser to pay Oddo $1.4 million. It was the biggest verdict ever in a North Carolina lawsuit over adultery and “alienation of affections,” eclipsing a $1 million award four years ago against a Burlington woman.
As the General Assembly considers banning such lawsuits, the story of the Oddos and Pressers illustrates arguments on both sides of the debate. A bill to abolish suits for adultery and alienation of affections has passed the state House after fervent debate. Its chances in the Senate are uncertain.
Supporters of the laws allowing such suits say they uphold marriage and good morals. Opponents of the laws say they are crude, archaic and destructive tools of greed and revenge.
The question for the legislature is whether the lawsuits are good or bad for families, a point on which family lawyers, like the lawyers involved in the Oddo case, disagree.
Oddo’s lawyer, Stan Brown, a former Charlotte trial judge, says the laws help protect families.
“It is a way for society to say we have certain standards, we want to preserve the family, and this is how we are going to punish wrongdoers,” Brown said. “The jury decided that this marriage was of value, and three children growing up in their home with both parents was of value and should be protected. And that an adulterous affair that destroys two families is wrong.”
Presser’s lawyer, Tom Bush of Charlotte, says the lawsuits are dangerous and hurt families. In this case, he says, the initial marriages were already doomed, Debby Oddo had the right to leave Tom Oddo, and his lawsuit has done nothing to protect families in general or help his children in particular.
“An angry husband has sued the stepfather of his children,” Bush said. “Now you have a verdict that could bankrupt Debby and Jeff or severely restrict their ability to care for Tom’s children.”
Bush says Oddo’s lawsuit has only made a bad situation worse by amplifying the conflict and pain. Although Jeff Presser last year got a North Carolina medical license, Debby Presser hopes to move to Florida - with her children - to escape Oddo’s degradation.
“His vicious attitude has kept Jeff from having any kind of life in North Carolina,” Bush said. “And Debby feels that it is impossible for her to keep living here.”
The parents involved have tried to shield their children from the lawsuit’s effects. But they felt strongly enough about it that they put each other through a three-week public trial airing lurid details about how both sides misbehaved.
“The whole courthouse was interested in it,” said Brown, who has handled about 50 such cases as a lawyer in the past decade. “This case rebuts the claim that third parties can’t break up a marriage. It shows that juries can see that there can be real damage from alienation of affections and adultery.”
Presser’s lawyers plan this week to appeal the record verdict to the state Court of Appeals.
By last summer, Debby and Jeff had divorced their former spouses and married each other - first on a transatlantic airplane flight, then later at the magistrate’s office next to Charlotte’s jail.
For now, while custody is sorted out for the three young Oddo children, ages 10, 7 and 3, the reunited couple live three states apart and visit every weekend.
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Young love:
Debby Tyson Oddo and Jeff Presser’s attraction for each other was older and more enduring than either of their first marriages.
They met in the seventh grade in Jacksonville, Fla. At the last dance of the eighth grade, they started dating. All through high school -the proms, the homecoming dances, the ups and downs of teen life - they dated. They went to different out-of-state colleges - she to Davidson, he to Tufts - but kept dating until they were sophomores.
But then they both got restless and started dating other people, secretly at first. She told him she wanted to date other men, if only to know where she and he really stood with each other. He admitted that he, too, had strayed.
They had another problem: She was Christian, he was Jewish, and their parents didn’t like the idea of an interfaith marriage. They broke up in the spring of 1984.
During a college study program in Europe that year, Debby Tyson met and began dating Tom Oddo. She and Presser saw each other in Jacksonville over the summer, and he tried to win her back, but failed.
At Tufts, Presser met and began dating Debbie Spungin, who also was Jewish. He graduated in three years and went to medical school at the University of Florida, where he and Spungin kept dating.
Tyson married Oddo in 1988, settled in Davidson, and went to work for Bank of America. The Oddos had daughters in 1991 and 1993 and a son in 1997.
Presser married Spungin in 1990, and they settled in West Palm Beach, Fla. They had a son in 1995.
But, according to court records, the former sweethearts, Debby Oddo and Jeff Presser, kept in touch sporadically until 1995.
Outwardly, the Oddos’ marriage seemed happy and secure. Friends didn’t detect major trouble, though some later said they saw little affection. In 1998, Debby Oddo noted in her journal that she was writing a 10th anniversary letter to Tom.
“Today I am thankful for a husband that is a great father, allowing me to go to Atlanta for three days worry-free,” she wrote. “I am thankful for free time to record in this journal. I am thankful for bright, beautiful children to return home to and a life overflowing with blessings. I have unlimited options.”
But about the time of the Oddos’ 10th anniversary, things changed.
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‘Suddenly sneaky’:
Later, during the lawsuit trial, supporters would say Debby Oddo had been a Pollyanna. That things weren’t right in her marriage, but she didn’t want to admit it.
Debby Oddo told the jury that disappointment surrounding the anniversary led her to reevaluate the marriage and her life. She said her husband treated her like a child instead of a woman, disrespected her, controlled her time and their money, insulted her in front of friends and never told her he loved her. They began sleeping apart.
By the time she reconnected with Presser, she maintained, there was little affection left to alienate.
Four months later, in February 1999, Debby Oddo called Jeff Presser out of the blue, and they had a friendly chat. She called him a second time a few days later, and they unloaded their feelings. They said they felt trapped in loveless, hopeless marriages. And they confessed feelings for each other.
They called more and more, and began e-mailing. Their renewed attraction was fierce. Presser set up new e-mail accounts so they could send each other flirty messages and love notes surreptitiously.
“Why do I suddenly feel sneaky?” he wrote to her in a March 16, 1999, e-mail message, one of many in the lawsuit court record.
Then, in March, she persuaded him to fly to Charlotte for a weekend rendezvous at a hotel.
“Whatever happens these next few days, I want you to know that you have made me really, really happy,” he e-mailed her before the trip. “I can’t wait to see your face, so I can put those feelings together with your smile. ... Now, go pretend everything is normal, and don’t forget to smile - it makes people wonder what you are up to ;-) “
When they met in person the next weekend, she was the main pursuer at first. He finally accepted her sexual advances - committing the adultery, called “criminal conversation,” for which he was sued.
“I love you,” he told her in an e-mail message the next week. “Now and always, for ever and ever. I want you all to myself. I want to be only yours.”
But Debby Oddo had second thoughts. She told Presser she couldn’t continue the affair and her marriage, and she wanted to work on her marriage. Presser told her he had a hard time accepting that.
“I will not stop writing, even if you don’t write back,” he told her in an e-mail. “I will not stop thinking about you, even it you can’t hear my thoughts. It’s not that I want to put any pressure on you, it’s just that I can’t think of any other way to show you how much I care about you. And your family. And yes, your husband. Try as I may, I just can’t bring myself to hate Tom.”
At trial, that e-mail message would come back to haunt Presser. The next weekend, Debby told him she would leave her husband.
“When I think about us getting divorced, about my only worries are financial,” she wrote. “I don’t even worry about the kids, because as much as I know they love me, they don’t know how much better everything can be when I can be me and not the wife, mom, employee, that everyone expects me to be.
“I anticipate a much more messy life, but one that is a hell of a lot of fun - the kind that wakes up all of your senses. ... I’ll love you no matter what direction all this goes. It appears that I can’t help it!”
By May, they were separated from their spouses and heading for divorces. They would be married in the summer of 2000, first by an airplane captain for fun, and then by a magistrate to make it official.
Meanwhile, Tom Oddo, who had intercepted phone calls and e-mail messages between his wife and her lover, hired private investigators to help him prove their affair. He tried to talk his wife into quitting it. When she refused, he sued Presser in 1999, eventually seeking up to $2.6 million for his loss.
In e-mail messages to relatives, Tom Oddo referred to Presser in vulgar terms, ridiculed his ex-wife’s pudginess, and said any settlement of the lawsuit should be based on her weight.
“If she is going to behave like a pig,” he wrote in one e-mail message, “she shall be treated as a pig.”
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Who’s to blame?:
If not for Presser’s persistence, lawyer Brown argued to the jury, Debby Oddo would have quit the affair, salvaged her marriage and preserved her family.
“While this marriage wasn’t perfect - and no marriage is - it was an ongoing marriage with love and commitment,” he said later.
Bush argued that the situation wasn’t nearly that simple.
“This was not an office interloper seducing a woman away from a marriage,” he said. “They were high school sweethearts. They dated from the eighth grade through the second year of college and continued to see each other through the years.”
Following Superior Court Judge Robert Johnston’s instructions on applying the law, the jury decided for Oddo, finding that Presser committed adultery with Debby Oddo and destroyed the Oddos’ marriage.
The jury awarded Tom Oddo $910,000 compensation for his suffering and loss of his wife’s domestic services, added $500,000 to punish Presser, and subtracted $252 because of Tom Oddo’s slander and intrusions into Presser’s life.
The net cost to Presser: $1,409,748. He has not paid it, pending appeals, which could last months or years.
Bush said he thinks that after all that Debby and Jeff have experienced, their marriage is permanent.
“It is a love story,” he said. “It is a genuine love story that began in the eighth grade. I don’t think there’s any question that Debby and Jeff are forever entwined. They will always be together.”
This story was originally published June 3, 2001 at 12:00 AM.