The biggest wedding of the year in Palm Beach, Florida was canceled just an hour before the bride and groom were to walk down the isle. New York couple Alexandra Fisher, 28, and Joshua Bailer, 33, a trader on Wall Street had talks stall in the 11th hour due to a dispute over a prenuptial between Bailer and Alexandra’s billionaire father, Jeff Fisher, who sold his hotel company for $1.5 billion last year. Mr Bailer is a Wall Street trader and wealthy in his own right, selling his Innkeepers hotel chain last year for nearly £1 billion.

Three days before the wedding, the couple happily signed a prenuptial contract in which it was agreed that if the marriage failed, both sides would walk away with no alimony payments. But on the wedding day, Mr Bailer’s father, Joe, said Mr. Fisher demanded that Josh sign a last-minute amendment agreeing to pay Alexandra alimony, no matter how much she inherits from her dad.

Joe Bailer, 65, said: “We’re middle-class people with middle-class values. We came to Palm Beach for what was supposed to be the best day in the lives of two human beings, and ended up with two full days of crass negotiations for a prenuptial agreement.

It was like a business transaction. That attitude is foreign to us. There was such urgency on Fisher’s part, it bordered on desperation.”

Mr. Fisher was not available for comment.

Three ballrooms had been reserved for the million-dollar celebrations at the exclusive Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. There were about 300 guests for the power wedding but the Palm Beach Post reports that after the talks broke down, Jeff Fisher was forced to tell guests that the wedding was canceled.

The bride and groom along with all of the guests were left in limbo and the two families ended up having separate parties in adjoining hotels to ‘celebrate’ the wedding that never happened.

Late in the evening, the bride, Alexandra Fisher, put in a brief, tearful appearance among her family, dressed in black.

Meanwhile, the groom, Josh Bailer, glumly nursed a drink with his best man and his 80 guests.

They had been dating for three years and engaged for 18 months.

One guest, 81-year-old socialite Rhoda Cole, said: “We were having drinks and hors d’oeuvres about 7pm when Jeff announced there would be no wedding.

I’ve married three daughters myself, and at my age, I’ve been to quite a few weddings, but I never saw anything like it.”

But here is where it gets even stranger. Page Six actually reports that it happened the other way around and that it was Bailer who demanded alimony!

“Don’t worry,” [Mr. Fisher] told the crowd. “You’re all here. We love you. Let’s party on.” Fisher then kicked out Bailer’s family and guests. A source at the wedding overheard Fisher complain that Bailer wanted lifelong alimony if the couple divorced. Fisher wanted him to sign minus the clause, and Bailer, a former wrestler, bailed. “The two men almost came to blows,” one guest told The Post’s Braden Keil. “It was weird, but still a great party. No speeches, just food and plenty of booze.”

I see several things wrong with this. First, usually issues like this arise when one side has money and the other doesn’t. But in this case, both the bride’s family and the groom are wealthy in their own right. So alimony shouldn’t have really been an issue at all.

Second, though I believe PageSix.com to be a credible source, I do not believe that it was Bailer who asked for the alimony. It sounds like something that Mr. Fisher WOULD tell his friends and family in order to save face. What else is he going to say, “I demanded alimony for my daughter even though I’m a billionaire and signed a binding contract three days ago, but unfortunately I couldn’t extort Bailer so the wedding is canceled”?

Third, even if they DID sign the prenuptial 3-days before, that usually isn’t enough time to make the contract very solid. I am actually very surprised that two smart businessmen would be so careless. Both parties could claim that it was signed under duress because family and friends were on the way. Hotels would have been booked, plane tickets purchased, food ordered, etc. So if three days before isn’t enough time to make the contract very valid, a last minute “amendment” would have even LESS weight in court. You should really never sign a prenup after you send out wedding invitations because the courts will often see that the parties were pressured into signing.

Finally, why is the bride letting her father negotiate on her behalf?

I fully believe in prenuptial agreements even when neither of the parties are very wealthy. It is a way to take an inventory of what two parties are bringing to the relationship. Though marriage does hold emotional and sometimes religious significance, in the court of law it is NOTHING MORE than a business contract between two people. It’s sad but true. In many cases, marriage is the most important business contract people ever have, so why would you NOT get this contract in writing? It is foolish and actually irresponsible NOT to.

The argument that prenups equate to a lack of love or trust is usually from people looking to GAIN by not having one. I’d like to see someone go into a bank for a loan and when they ask the person to sign, they simply say “what you don’t trust me? I’m insulted!”. The whole idea is laughable.

We’ve been brainwashed as a society to think that the “trust” and “love” will actually mean something in court. If the marriage DOES last forever, then the prenup will never have any meaning whatsoever, just like all of the clauses you sign on a home loan. You sign away your house and maybe other assets as collateral but if you pay your payments on time, none of those clauses will ever matter. There are also “sunset” clauses that would allow certain stipulations of a prenuptial to expire after a certain amount of time, or trigger a “post nuptial” negotiation.

At the end of the day, if you are getting married, you should discuss these things with your partner WAY in advance of a wedding. Get it out of the way so that when you are actually planning your wedding and enjoying that celebration, you never have to worry about it. I have a lot of other things I could say about how to form a reasonable prenuptial agreement that is fair to both parties and would stand up in court, but that isn’t really what this article was about, so if you are interested, message me!

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