Hello, and welcome to Ask the Attorney Anything, my live stream. I'm so happy to have all of
you here. I see I have lots and lots of questions already. I'm Rebecca Zung. And if you haven't
already subscribed to my YouTube channel, make sure you do that now. Subscribe and hit
that notification bell so that you'll get notified when I go live just like this right
now. So I'm going to just pop into some of the questions that I've already gotten.
I have a question from Elizabeth about giving your stuff back. "I have gifts I asked him
to give back and he's ignoring me. Is there anything legal I can do?" So if it's in the
context of a divorce, depending on where you are, and I do need to say that even though
I am a licensed attorney, I am not licensed in every jurisdiction in the world, obviously.
So anything I give here is not to be construed as legal advice, but rather general advice
or thoughts, my thoughts. So with regard to gifts, they are usually, if they're given
in the context of a marriage, either community property or marital property, and they're
really just something that is dealt with when you deal with the property division or the
asset division, either in mediation or at trial. So if there's something specific that
you want, you can put that into your request at trial or you can put that into your requests
at mediation as well. If you get somebody to agree to return something,
either through an agreement, or maybe you get a court order, then the legal recourse
that you have in getting it back is through enforcing that agreement or enforcing that
court order. Without having a written agreement or a court order the only other way that you
can do something is through the judge, because remember that the only person that has any
power to order somebody to do something is the judge, not you, not your lawyer, not his
lawyer, her lawyer, whoever it is that you're dealing with. No one has the power to order
somebody to do something other than a judge. So if you don't get them to just give it back
to you out of the goodness of their heart, then you'll have to put it in front of a judge
through a request, such as like a motion or something like that. And then you have to
set it for hearing and then tell the judge why it should be yours. And then the judge
will make a decision. Okay? So that's what to do if you have some things that a narcissist
still has and you want back. So I would love to know where all of you are
tuning in from today. And let me take a look at some of the other questions that we have
here. "What can I do if my ex bribed me to walk away?" So anytime you want to modify
an agreement, you have to ask for a modification. So there's kind of basically three different
types of cases that will be taking place in any sort of a divorce. It's like the original
action. And then there is modification actions, which modifies anything that you've already
agreed to. And then there's enforcement actions where you're trying to make somebody do what
they said they were going to do. So it's either the original action, a modification action,
or an enforcement action. Those are generally the three types of actions that you see going
on in any sort of a case. So if you don't like what you have agreed
to already, then you have to try to modify it, or you can try to get it set aside. Any
kind of contract law that surrounds the agreements can be applied. So setting aside contracts,
normally the way you can set aside a contract is through saying things like that the contract
isn't valid for some reason, because maybe of fraud or duress or coercion or incapacity,
or maybe it's an impossible to get it done for some reason. Those are the types of reasons
why you can generally set aside agreements and agreements, even those made in the context
of a marriage or a divorce, are considered to be contracts. So contract law would apply
whatever the contract lies in your particular jurisdiction.
So I see people here from England and Arkansas, Indonesia, Robert from Indonesia. That's pretty
cool. Judith. Hi, Judith from Alabama. Hello, Nancy from Illinois. So, all right, so let
me see if I can answer a couple more questions for you. I see that some people are going
no contact. That's always the best thing to do when you're dealing with a narcissist,
at least to the extent that you can. If you are, if you have children together or things
like that, sometimes it's not the easiest thing to do. And in those cases, you're going
to want to create the most steel boundaries that you possibly can just so that your emotions
can stay in check and you can deal with them in an effective way, because they do get narcissistic
supply from setting off your emotions, from getting you upset, from threatening you, from
intimidating you, all of that. They get narcissistic supply from all of that.
So the key to disarming them is going to be not giving them that supply. They're going
to want to continue to get that supply source from somewhere. So let it not be from you.
I mean, honestly, that's how they're built, that's how they're wired. So they're going
to go find it from somewhere else and until you can stop giving them that supply, they're
going to keep coming back to you to get it. So the less contact that you can do the better
it's going to be for you, to be honest with you.
So I actually have a lot more about this in my webinar, my free webinar, which is The
Three Must Have Secrets to Communicating with a Narcissist and I'll put a link to that in
the description below when this is over, so that you can sign up for that if you want
it a lot more information on that. And I also do a more extended version of the Ask the
Attorney Anything in that as well. "So let's see if something isn't written in
the agreement, but we agreed to, can we bring it up?" So the thing about agreements is they
normally have something that we call a merger clause, which basically says that anything
that isn't in this agreement isn't part, that's it, you're done. All claims that you could
have brought in the past are now done. So my guess is that if there's any side agreements
or anything like that, it's not going to be allowed to be presented in court. It would
probably be precluded from being presented. Normally whatever's in the agreement is presumed
to be what you wanted to be in the agreement. They don't allow you to have any outside information
or present outside proof of other side verbal agreements, things like that, unless there's
some good reason. Maybe there's a spot in your agreement that is ambiguous. And sometimes
if it's ambiguous, then they allow what we call parole evidence. I'm giving you lots
and lots of legal terms today, but parole is not the same as parole like if you're getting
out of jail, it's a certain type of evidence that they allow just to resolve ambiguities
in an agreement, but for the most part, they just assume that whatever is written in the
agreement is what you've agreed to. So, that's that. Let's see what else we've
got here. "Trying to settle out of court. How would you recommend documenting our financial
agreement and what are the most important things to have in it?" So you will want to
have a marital settlement agreement. And actually in my slay course, I do go through every single
section of the financial piece of it. But in general, you're going to want to look at
real estate. You're going to want to look at bank accounts, retirement accounts, whether
there's going to be any alimony paid. If one person is keeping a house, then is there
a mortgage on it? Do you need to refinance to get the other person's name off the mortgage?
You also want to look at transferring of deeds and titles and make sure you put timelines
in there for those sorts of things. So, all right. So, that's it for today for
this version of Ask the Attorney Anything. If I didn't get to your question, come on
over and meet me in Facebook, make sure you check out my Facebook page, which is Rebecca
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So I'm Rebecca Zung. I will see you in the next video. Remember, today's a great day
to start negotiating your best life. I'm going right from here to Facebook, so if you want
to catch me over there, I'll be there in one minute.