Ex-Wife to Pay for Hiding Lack of Desire for Husband : Divorce: Jury in fraud case penalizes woman $242,000 for concealing lack of attraction in their 13 years together.

An Anaheim banker won $242,000 in damages Wednesday when a Superior Court jury concluded that during their 13-year relationship his wife had concealed the fact that she felt no physical attraction for him.

The jury ordered Bonnette Askew, 46, of Santa Ana to return her $240,000 interest in four parcels of land.

The jury agreed that Ronald Askew, her 50-year-old ex-husband, would not have married Bonnette Askew had he known that she felt no sexual desire for him and ordered her to compensate him for the deception.

“She went into the marriage holding back something that was obviously very important to him,” said juror Amy Beard, 45, of Huntington Beach, who called the trial a matter of honesty and integrity.

Bonnette Askew must also pay $2,000 in cash damages. The Askews will return to court Monday, when a judge in the fraud case will decide whether she must pay an additional $84,000 from proceeds she received when a fifth property was sold.

Richard W. Millar, Bonnette Askew’s lawyer, said she probably will appeal the decision.

Ronald Askew wept into his handkerchief as the clerk read the verdict aloud. Outside court, he hugged his daughter from a previous marriage and beamed as he talked of his relief that the trial, which included an airing of marital intimacies, was over.

“The hardest part of the trial was the fact that my ex-wife and her attorney chose to go to the press with what should have been a private matter,” said Ronald Askew, who initiated the lawsuit but contended that it might not have been publicized if his wife had not contacted a newspaper.

“But what I’ve learned from this is that when people enter in a marriage, they have a right to be honest with each other,” he said. “If not, don’t get married.”

Bonnette Askew said she was shocked by the verdict. She said that although she was never physically attracted to Ronald Askew she had always loved him.

“That he would even think that I didn’t love him because he had sexual problems is still a shock to me,” she said outside of court. “I guess he confused sex with love.”

Bonnette Askew testified during the trial that she was never physically attracted to her husband. And as their marriage progressed, he became impotent, she said in court.

But jurors said they were not swayed by the assertion that Ronald Askew’s sexual dysfunction made him less attractive to his wife. For them, the main issue was Bonnette Askew’s damaging testimony that for more than a decade she had concealed the fact that she did not find her husband physically attractive.

“The only reason I did not tell him was because I didn’t want to hurt his male ego,” she said Wednesday.

Ronald Askew, president of the Pacific Inland Bank in Anaheim, testified that from the time the two began dating, and throughout their marriage, he had told Bonnette Askew that honesty and integrity were very important to him. He said he repeatedly asked if she wanted to reveal anything.

Time and time again, his wife told him she had nothing to hide, he told jurors.

But Bonnette Askew finally acknowledged during a session the couple had with her psychiatrist in March, 1991, that she found her husband sexually undesirable. In her testimony, she admitted the conversation and it was corroborated by the psychiatrist.

Although it is too early to predict exactly what the verdict might mean to divorce cases, Millar insisted that the decision could be precedent-setting because it allows circumvention of a property-division settlement in a divorce case.

“The issues decided by the jury were essentially those which would normally be decided by a judge in a divorce action,” Millar said, “particularly the property issue.”

The issues decided by the jury should be left up to a judge in Family Court, Millar said. And a judge already had decreed that state law entitled Bonnette Askew to half of the couple’s property, he said.

Under California divorce law, responsibility for the failure of a marriage does not affect the division of community property. Thus, attorneys for both sides said, the fraud suit was Ronald Askew’s only hope for removing the four pieces of property from the divorce settlement.

Lawyers for Ronald Askew said the case was highly unusual but disagreed that it could be precedent-setting.

Albert M. Graham Jr., who represented Askew in his divorce and was co-counsel in the civil case, cited a 1984 case in the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana in which the justices ruled that under certain circumstances matters that would normally be tried in the Family Court may be tried in Civil Court.

Ronald Askew bought the properties during the marriage, with bonuses he earned before the marriage.

Bonnette Askew and two children from her marriage to Ronald Askew have been living in a rented home on $3,400 a month in court-ordered support for the family. Lawyers on both sides said the verdict would not affect the support payments.