Thread: PA - Loved and left behind

PA - Loved and left behind

BY ED PALATTELLA
ed.palattella@timesnews.com

A desperate walk in the night signaled the end of the marriage between immigrant Martha Ramirez Bell and her husband of seven weeks, local dentist Blaine Bell.

The warmth of their long-distance courtship had chilled. Gone were the hugs and smiles they shared during his visits to her native Colombia, where she was living when they met over the Internet in 2006.

She moved from South America to Erie two years later. She and Blaine Bell married on Aug. 30. The celebration, at the new Erie Sheraton Bayfront Hotel, seemed far in the past now, on this night of Oct. 17.

Martha Bell, 34, and her 13-year-old daughter, Veronica, who primarily speak Spanish, walked by themselves about 10 p.m. along the eastbound Bayfront Parkway, away from the house Blaine Bell owns in the gated neighborhood of Niagara Pointe.

Martha Bell wore a polo shirt in the 50-degree weather. Her daughter wore sandals.

They were crying.

They had no money. They needed a place to stay.

Back at Niagara Pointe was Blaine Bell, 53. He had been married three times before, with one of the wives leaving him after nine days. Before he married Martha Bell, he told U.S. immigration officials that he looked forward to being with her "for the rest of my life."

On this night, Martha Bell said, Blaine Bell had ordered her and her daughter out of the house.

"At first," Martha Bell recently recalled, with the help of an interpreter, "I thought I might have misunderstood him."

The Erie police and SafeNet, the domestic violence shelter, helped Martha Bell and her daughter that night, and the two returned to the Niagara Pointe house two days later.

But the reconciliation between Martha Bell and Blaine Bell failed. He filed for divorce in Erie County Court on Nov. 12.

"I went from a peaceful life, one full of beautiful dreams, to living a daily nightmare," Martha Bell later wrote U.S. immigration officials, explaining her predicament.

The Bells' split carries with it significant ramifications -- for them and, possibly, for other couples in similar situations.

On the personal level, the Bells' divorce represents a bitter and complicated conclusion to a once-intense intercontinental romance. With the marriage over, Martha Bell and her daughter risk deportation.

On the legal level, the collapse of the Bells' relationship is on its way to featuring a protracted and precedent-setting court dispute. The Bells' divorce has the potential to define how much federal immigration law governs marriages and divorces in Pennsylvania -- including prenuptial agreements.

"There is no controlling law in this jurisdiction on this particular issue," said Blaine Bell's local lawyer, Joseph Martone.

In his divorce filing, Blaine Bell claims Martha Bell "willfully and maliciously" deserted him on Oct. 17. He wants the courts to enforce the prenuptial agreement he signed with his wife.

Among other things, the deal gives Martha Bell nothing more than $25,000 in the divorce -- Blaine Bell's annual income, according to immigration records, was $729,385 in 2007 -- and requires her and her daughter to leave the Niagara Pointe house, which he bought in August 2003 for $687,000.

Shortly after suing for divorce, Blaine Bell withdrew the petition he had filed so his wife could get a "green card," or permanent residency status in the United States. With that petition gone, federal immigration officials told Martha Bell in December that she and her daughter would be sent back to Colombia within a month.

A stay in the deportation case has allowed Martha Bell and her daughter to remain in Erie. An Erie County judge has let them live temporarily in Blaine Bell's Niagara Pointe house, which he departed on his own several days after Oct. 17.

Martha Bell is contesting the terms of the divorce. She wants the courts to void the prenuptial agreement, which would require Blaine Bell to pay her alimony regularly; and she wants immigration officials to grant her at least a work visa. SafeNet is also trying to keep her in the United States by seeking a visa available to immigrants suffering physical or mental abuse.

Martha Bell wrote U.S. immigration officials several weeks ago to make her case for a visa despite the divorce filing. She said family members in Colombia have sent her some money, but she would like to be able to support herself in the United States.

"I feel at times that I am losing my clarity for thinking, because there is so much pain inside of me that I can only cry and hope things turn out for the better," she wrote.

The immigration case is proceeding in the federal system as the divorce case moves along in Erie County Court. Underlying both is what Martha Bell's divorce lawyer described as Blaine Bell's unfair treatment of his new spouse and her daughter.

"You can't do what he's doing," attorney Dennis Williams recently said in court. "You can't bring a child over here and then dump her on the street, which is what he's doing.

"It's as unconscionable as anything I've ever seen in my life."

Blaine Bell declined to comment for this story through his lawyer, Martone.

He said Bell is dismayed the marriage fell apart.

"Any relationship has its risks, and, perhaps because of the geographical and cultural differences between them, Mr. and Mrs. Bell could not overcome some of those differences," Martone said.

"Mr. Bell had every intention of making this marriage work. He truly loved this woman and hoped that they would be able to live their lives together."

Martha Bell said she wants to earn a living and avoid being barred from the United States. She knows the hardship such a ban can carry. It happened, under different circumstances, to Blaine Bell's second wife, Johanna Bell.

She is also Colombian.

Blaine Bell went to Congress to get immigration relief for Johanna Bell, formerly known as Johanna Aguillon.

He said the two met by chance in 2000 at a hotel in Bogota, when Blaine Bell was visiting a friend in Colombia. Bell and his first wife, an Erie native he married in 1984 and with whom he has two children, divorced in August 2001, after two years of separation.

Bell and Aguillon married in Spain on Nov. 16, 2001. Johanna Bell was never able to join her husband in the United States. In 1999, while trying to wrongfully enter the country from Mexico, she falsely told Customs officials in California that she was a U.S. citizen.

What was then the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service cited the lie and banned Johanna Bell from ever living in the United States.

The newlyweds' only recourse was to get Congress to pass a private bill that would give Johanna Bell a special exception to enter the country. That didn't happen.

Johanna Bell remained in Spain, where she lived with the couple's son, born in 2003. Blaine Bell visited his wife and son while continuing to live in Erie and maintain his dental practice in Harborcreek Township. He said he was committed to the marriage.

"I cannot picture my life without her," Blaine Bell told the Erie Times-News in a September 2002 story on the plight of his then-35-year-old wife.

Blaine Bell and Johanna Bell divorced in August 2003.

Forty minutes northwest of Mexico's Puerto Vallarta, on a point of land that juts between the Pacific Ocean and the Bay of Banderas, sits the exclusive resort community of Punta Mita. Blaine Bell married his third wife there, on the beach at the Four Seasons luxury hotel, on May 26, 2004.

She said she left him after nine days.

The woman, an Erie native, said she ended the relationship so quickly because she found Bell "very controlling." She and Bell later had the marriage annulled in Mexico, according to an affidavit he filed with Mexican authorities on Jan. 10, 2005.

The woman, 39, asked that her name not be used out of concern for her family's privacy. She said she is happily remarried.

"Live and learn," she said.

The woman continues to reside in Erie. She knew of Johanna Bell when she married Blaine Bell, and she is aware of Blaine Bell's current divorce.

"I feel bad for the girls involved," she said. "But how are they going to know, being from another country?

"I do feel these women are victims."

Blaine Bell met Martha Isabel Lopez Ramirez in November 2006. They connected via a Web page, Latinamericancupid.com.

She said Bell asked her to marry him after two weeks of exchanging e-mails and phone calls. She said she needed more time to get to know him.

He initially told her, she said, about two of his previous marriages -- the one with Johanna Bell and his first marriage, in 1984.

Martha Bell said she told her future husband about herself and her career.

She studied business administration at Colombia's National Training Service, known as SENA, and lived in the Colombian city of Armenia. At the time she met Blaine Bell, she worked a middle-class job for a construction company based in Bogota, about 180 miles to the east.

Martha Bell raised her daughter, Veronica, on her own after the father, whom she never married, died in a car accident in September 2002.

Blaine Bell told Martha Ramirez he was smitten with her.

"Your real beauty comes from what you have inside of you ... having a good sense of humor, having good morals, old fashioned in your thinking, being sensitive, loving, and sensual," he wrote in an e-mail in December 2006.

"I am looking for a woman that is easy to get along with, because I cherish peace and love in my home. Someone who takes care of herself, and someone that likes a strong, confident, independent, private, ambitious man."

Blaine Bell flew to Bogota in April 2007 to meet the woman who would become his wife.

"I fell in love with Blaine the first time I saw him in Colombia," Martha Bell said. "He kept acting like a prince, a gentleman. He spoke about family.

"I adored him on the second date. He was very good. Now we know he was pretending."

The two grew closer as Blaine Bell's visits to South America continued. Then she discovered his third marriage.

During the courtship, Martha Bell's mother, a lawyer in Colombia, helped represent Blaine Bell on custody issues involving Bell's son with Johanna Bell, who was living in Colombia as well. Martha Bell said her mother did the work for free.

The information about Blaine Bell's third marriage came up at a custody hearing in Colombia, Martha Bell said. She said she learned of the marriage through her mother in the summer of 2007.

Blaine Bell, Martha Bell said, at first denied he had been married a third time. She said she broke off the relationship for about a month, in July 2007.

Blaine Bell apologized. He sent flowers. They got back together.

"I was in love with him," Martha Bell said. "He always had the explanations. He always had that crying face."

The two were engaged in Panama in September 2007.

"I am looking forward to marrying her and having her with me for the rest of my life," Blaine Bell wrote to U.S. immigration officials in October 2007.

Blaine Bell wrote to the immigration officials as part of his application for a fiancee visa for Martha Bell, then Martha Ramirez, so she could enter the United States. Bell also filled out a required affidavit of support, a document meant, according to the affidavit, to assure the U.S. government that the person entering the country "will not become a public charge in the United States."

Under oath, Blaine Bell swore to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Oct. 2, 2007, that he would support his future wife and her daughter "for a period of three years," according to the affidavit. He listed his annual income as $729,385.

"I intend to provide room and board for my fiance and her daughter while they are here in the United States," Bell wrote. "I will pay for all expenses they may have. I intend to marry her and will support them."

Martha Ramirez and her daughter arrived in Erie in July. When Blaine Bell and Martha Bell married in August, the affidavit of support remained in force, on file with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The affidavit Blaine Bell signed is called I-134. As things turned out, it would have been better for Martha Bell if Blaine Bell had filled out and signed a different affidavit of support, one that, over the years, the courts have found to be more legally sound. That affidavit is called I-864.

As with the demise of any relationship, the collapse of the Bells' marriage in the fall of 2008 is a matter of dispute.

Martha Bell said he changed after the wedding. She and Blaine Bell were trying to have a baby, she said, and a recent pregnancy test had come back negative.

Martha Bell said Blaine Bell became upset after she expressed displeasure at the way he was handling the custody issues involving his son from his marriage to Johanna Bell. Martha Bell said she and Johanna Bell have contacted each other about their mutual difficulties with Blaine Bell.

Blaine Bell, in an e-mail he sent around the time of the breakup, said Martha Bell was unable to accept his two children, ages 19 and 15, from his first marriage, in 1984.

Martha Bell said she overheard Blaine Bell in a romantic telephone conversation with another woman on Oct. 13. Martha Bell said he told her he was doing nothing wrong.

Whatever happened, the rift proved irreversible on Oct. 17 -- the night Martha Bell and her daughter walked along the Bayfront Parkway.

SafeNet, which helped Martha Bell and her daughter, confirmed that Martha Bell told the agency's counselors that Blaine Bell had kicked them out of the house. Dennis Williams, Martha Bell's lawyer, got involved in the case through SafeNet.

Blaine Bell, in his divorce filing, blamed his wife for the Oct. 17 incident, claiming she had deserted him. Joseph Martone, his lawyer, said Blaine Bell will not pursue the desertion theory in court.

"We have a conflicting version of events," Martone said of what happened Oct. 17. "Needless to say, at one point he did leave the house to avoid any continued conflict between them. He has left the house."

Blaine Bell is unwilling to depart from the prenuptial agreement. His lawyers -- he also has a divorce attorney from Pittsburgh -- said in court records that the pact is valid, and that Martha Bell voluntarily signed it Aug. 25, five days before the marriage.

"A premarital agreement is presumed to be enforceable until such time as proven otherwise by the challenging party, by clear and convincing evidence," the lawyers said in court filings.

Martha Bell has presented that challenge. Williams is arguing Blaine Bell coerced her into signing the prenuptial agreement -- a copy of which was printed in Spanish -- and that she had inadequate legal counsel because Blaine Bell paid for the lawyer who reviewed the deal for her. Williams said the prenuptial agreement is so restrictive that Martha Bell would have never signed it had she truly understood it.

"It gives her nothing," he said.

Martha Bell's financial future is linked to the fate of the prenuptial deal.

If a judge strikes it down, Martha Bell will get alimony based on a percentage of her husband's income. The short duration of their marriage would influence the size of those payments.

If a judge upholds the prenuptial agreement, then Martha Bell will receive no money. The prenuptial agreement guarantees that she receive a $25,000 payment from Blaine Bell upon divorce -- but only if she does not challenge the legitimacy of the prenuptial agreement.

Williams has an additional legal strategy to attack the deal. Even if a judge rules the prenuptial agreement valid, Williams is arguing that Blaine Bell still must support Martha Bell and her daughter. Williams said Blaine Bell promised to do so, for three years, in the affidavit of support he filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in October 2007.

"Doesn't a federal document mean anything?" Williams said to Erie County Judge Stephanie Domitrovich during a Dec. 1 hearing on the divorce.

The answer, in the Bell case, is likely to be complicated.

Following a revision of U.S. immigration policies about a decade ago, federal and state courts have been grappling with how immigration law applies to marriages and divorces, which the states regulate.

One of the key issues is whether federal affidavits of support, such as the one Blaine Bell signed, can force the one divorced spouse to support the other, no matter what happens in the divorce proceedings in state court.

Some courts have said such affidavits of support are binding -- but only if the affidavit is I-864, and not the less-comprehensive affidavit I-134, which Blaine Bell signed.

"I don't think the language is tight enough in terms of contractual language," Charles Wheeler, an immigration lawyer in San Francisco, said of form I-134.

Wheeler is director of training and technical support for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, whose national office is in Washington, D.C.

He said interpretations of the legal authority of the affidavits, including how they might apply to support payments and prenuptial agreements, "are just making their way through the state and federal court systems. We shall see."

The unique nature of the Bells' divorce became clear at the Dec. 1 hearing before Judge Domitrovich. The lawyers sparred over the prenuptial agreement and the affidavit of support.

Williams, Martha Bell's lawyer, asked her where she would live if she were forced to leave Blaine Bell's house.

"I have to ask the American state, or the American system," she said, referring to public assistance. "I don't have anyplace to go."

Blaine Bell did not attend the hearing.

Domitrovich, who heard the case temporarily, did not rule on the long-term support issues. But she granted Williams' request that Martha Bell be allowed to stay in the Niagara Pointe house, for the time being, and she required Blaine Bell pay $5,000 toward his wife's legal fees. The prenuptial agreement said he had to pay no money toward her legal representation.

"For me to now force her out into the street, terminating everything ...," Domitrovich said of Martha Bell at a follow-up hearing Dec. 10. "How is the court supposed to leave her homeless when he invited her to the United States and had assured Homeland Security that he would pay for all her expenses?

"I find there is no case law or any statutory law that prevents this court from doing the right thing, and the right thing in this case is to keep the status quo here and to allow her to have attorneys' fees so she can contest the validity and legality of the prenuptial agreement."

The detailed challenge to the agreement will occur at a hearing in April before Erie County Judge William R. Cunningham, who is assigned the case. He has set aside two days to hear testimony.

Blaine Bell, in the meantime, has ceased paying tuition for Veronica, Martha Bell's daughter, who takes English lessons and is in eighth grade at Villa Maria Elementary School, where she is a cheerleader. Martha Bell said the school has allowed her daughter to continue to attend, pending the outcome of April's hearing.

Williams said Blaine Bell has canceled the registration and insurance for his 2004 Lexus sport utility vehicle, which Martha Bell had been driving. And Martha Bell said her husband has stopped providing dental care for her and her daughter. Martha Bell recently had to go to another dentist to get treated for a cracked tooth.


Martha Bell could have returned to Colombia. Blaine Bell bought airline tickets for her and her daughter so they could leave Nov. 18.

Martha Bell chose to stay in Erie. She said she uprooted her life and scrambled her daughter's childhood for Blaine Bell. She said she worked hard to try to make the marriage succeed.

Martha Bell wants something in return for her efforts. She said she wants the resources to start anew, and she said she wants Veronica to be able to stay in Erie and finish at least the school year.

"I don't have a normal life," Martha Bell said, "but I want my daughter to."

Blaine Bell, Martha Bell said, wooed her to come to the United States. She said love -- rather than a green card -- led her to follow him.

"I lived very well as a single mother in Colombia," she said. "I was never after an American man."

Martha Bell said she also wants other women to learn from her experience, what she described as a weight that God has sent her to carry. Still stinging from that walk in October, she doesn't want anyone else to go through the same turmoil -- with Blaine Bell or any other future spouse.

"I thought I knew Blaine, but I didn't," she said. "I thought more with my heart than with my head. He has done a lot of hurt in my mind and in my heart. I am not anything now. I am sad."

Blaine Bell, apparently, has moved on.

His Facebook page, available for viewing on the Web, shows him embracing a woman who is kissing him on the left cheek. Martha Bell said she learned the background of the new woman from Johanna Bell, Blaine Bell's second wife.

The new woman, Martha Bell said, is Colombian.

ED PALATTELLA can be reached at 870-1813 or by e-mail.

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/...2209959/-1/ETN

Comments are allowed on the article.

Blaine Bell is still legally responcible for his soon to be X wife and the child, period.

Martha Bell has presented that challenge. Williams is arguing Blaine Bell coerced her into signing the prenuptial agreement -- a copy of which was printed in Spanish -- and that she had inadequate legal counsel because Blaine Bell paid for the lawyer who reviewed the deal for her. Williams said the prenuptial agreement is so restrictive that Martha Bell would have never signed it had she truly understood it.

I have a problem believing she didn't understand what she signed in light of it was translated into Spanish and that her mother is a lawyer.

He seems to have mental/morality issues and needs to pay for their support until they can return to Columbia. This divorce should not result in green cards for her or her daughter either.

Originally Posted by miguelina

Martha Bell has presented that challenge. Williams is arguing Blaine Bell coerced her into signing the prenuptial agreement -- a copy of which was printed in Spanish -- and that she had inadequate legal counsel because Blaine Bell paid for the lawyer who reviewed the deal for her. Williams said the prenuptial agreement is so restrictive that Martha Bell would have never signed it had she truly understood it.

I have a problem believing she didn't understand what she signed in light of it was translated into Spanish and that her mother is a lawyer.

He seems to have mental/morality issues and needs to pay for their support until they can return to Columbia. This divorce should not result in green cards for her or her daughter either.

I agree.

miguelina, I think you are right. Yes, his obligation is moral and should not include a green card for the woman and/or her daughter. As a tax payer, I don't want to be burdened with other people's obligations.

My concern is that if he doesn't pay for her return to Columbia, she and her daughter will be go on the "welfare rolls" and then HUD housing relief and the array of goodies will follow.

And by the time, she soaks our system, the American tax payer could be out millions. And we. of course, we ( tax payers) would get nothing for our investment.

Also, I think that she married him in order to become a legal citizen and it back fired.