Yesterday, the Third DCA, in a per curiam opinion, denied the Palm Beach Post's motion for rehearing and certification regarding Rush Limbaugh's marital settlement agreement. Read the opinion here.
Rush was represented by froggy-voiced divorce attorney Dirk Lorenzen (who may or may not still be at Al Caruana's law firm) and Bruce Christensen. Martin Reeder represented the Post.
The Third also denied the Post's motion for a written order. Nice.
Judge Cope's dissent makes it obvious that Rush was the beneficiary of yet another outcome-determinative, logic-free 3d DCA opinion. Apparently Rush and his former wife had the trial judge receive the marital settlement agreement, review it, initial it, and make findings about it in the hearing on the petition for dissolution of marriage. This was done, by the way, in the course of the judge's adjudication of the petition for dissolution of marriage -- not while the judge was having lunch at La Loggia. The attorneys, however, purposely did not file the agreement in the court file.
Yet the brain trust of Judges Suarez and Cortinas determined that the settlement agreement was not a public record. Not a public record?
I don't know how Dirk pulled that one off, but that's one amazing victory for his client, one more absurd legal ruling for the rest of us.
