Background
Tina Adams filed for divorce from Michael Delong in December 2020 after an approximately fourteen-year marriage. The parties reached a partial settlement agreement but left several issues contested, including the division of rental real estate in Bucksport, the classification and value of a 2009 SeaRey airplane, and the fate of a jointly owned LLC used to operate the Bucksport property as a short-term rental. In June 2022, Adams obtained a protection from abuse (PFA) order against Delong, which barred him from the property. From that point forward, Adams alone maintained and improved the property, prepared it for sale, and operated the rental business, while Delong was found to have misused up to $6,000 from the joint business account for personal expenses.
The Bangor District Court entered a divorce judgment in December 2024. It awarded Adams 60% of the Bucksport real estate proceeds — which had sold for $862,000 — crediting her sole post-PFA contributions. The court found the airplane was marital property used for personal rather than business purposes, valued it at $37,500, and awarded it to Delong with an obligation to pay Adams half its value. The court also ordered the LLC dissolved within two months of the real estate sale. Delong appealed, challenging the real estate division, the airplane’s classification and valuation, and the dissolution order.
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court (the Law Court) accepted the appeal. The panel consisted of Chief Justice Stanfill and Justices Mead, Connors, Lawrence, and Lipez, with Justice Lawrence authoring the opinion.
The Court’s Holding
The Law Court affirmed the finding that the airplane was marital property used primarily for personal purposes, deferring to the trial court’s credibility determination in favor of Adams’s testimony over Delong’s unsupported claim that the plane was solely a business tool of his marine services company. Because the parties’ partial settlement agreement “set aside” Delong’s Marine Service to him, the key question was whether the airplane was part of that business; the court found it was not, and the Law Court upheld that finding.
However, the Law Court found clear error in the airplane’s $37,500 valuation. The trial court had stated it was splitting the difference between Delong’s $35,000 estimate and a $40,000 figure attributed to Adams — but no evidence in the record supported $40,000 as Adams’s estimate of the airplane’s total value. The only financial statements in evidence, both from 2021, showed Delong estimating $35,000 and Adams estimating $55,000. Delong also testified the plane was completely disassembled and damaged at the time of the hearing. Because the $37,500 figure was not grounded in record evidence and did not reflect a reasoned evaluation, the court vacated the valuation and remanded for further findings.
On the LLC, the court vacated the dissolution order on jurisdictional grounds. Relying on Littell v. Bridges, 2023 ME 29, the Law Court reiterated that an LLC is a legal entity distinct from its members and that a divorce court has no personal jurisdiction over it. Maine’s LLC dissolution statute, 31 M.R.S. § 1595, does not list divorce among the circumstances authorizing court-ordered dissolution. The “essentially the same party” exception recognized in Robinson v. Robinson applies to actions such as assigning interests or directing payments — not to outright dissolution. The court remanded with instructions to address the parties’ membership interests in the LLC as marital property rather than to dissolve the entity itself.
Key Takeaways
- A Maine divorce court may not order the dissolution of a jointly owned LLC; the court’s jurisdiction extends only to distributing the spouses’ membership interests in the LLC as part of the marital estate.
- A trial court’s valuation of a marital asset must be grounded in record evidence; splitting the difference between two estimates is error when one of those estimates lacks any evidentiary support in the record.
- A spouse’s unsupported testimony that an asset was used solely for business purposes is insufficient to rebut the statutory presumption that property acquired during the marriage is marital property, particularly where the opposing spouse’s testimony contradicts that claim.
- When the Law Court vacates one component of a property division, it will remand the entire distribution for reconsideration, as changes to one asset necessarily affect the overall equitable balance.
Why It Matters
This decision sharpens the boundary between what a Maine divorce court can do with a jointly owned business entity and what it cannot. Practitioners advising clients with marital LLCs must now plan for the likelihood that the divorce judgment will allocate membership interests — not dissolve the company — leaving the parties to navigate post-divorce co-ownership or a voluntary wind-down under Maine’s LLC statute. Clients who want a clean break from a co-owned LLC need to address dissolution through a separate proceeding or negotiate it in the settlement agreement, not rely on the divorce court to accomplish it.
The airplane valuation ruling is also a useful reminder that Maine’s clear-error standard still has teeth: a trial court cannot manufacture a valuation figure that does not appear in the evidentiary record, even when it is trying to strike a compromise between the parties’ competing estimates. Attorneys presenting asset valuations in contested divorce trials should ensure that every number relied upon by the court is independently supported by testimony or documentary evidence — proposed judgments filed by counsel do not substitute for evidence.