Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Bet365 CEO Denise Coates earned a £221 million salary last year, Lily Gladstone became the first indigenous person to win Best Actress at the Golden Globes, and celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser wants more divorces to move online. Have a fantastic Tuesday.
– Separation status. Laura Wasser has seen every kind of divorce imaginable. A family law attorney at the Los Angeles firm Wasser, Cooperman & Mandles, she’s known for representing celebrities from Kim Kardashian to Britney Spears in their divorces. Actor Laura Dern played an attorney reportedly inspired by Wasser in the film Marriage Story.
She represents many high-earning women who are the breadwinners in their families, but some dynamics are constant regardless of income. “Divorce is the great equalizer,” Wasser says. “Whether you’re [figuring out if you’re] going to be able to fly private anymore or to take that cross-country road trip with your kid, the issues are the same. The fear and sadness that people have going through this are the same.”
For many people, divorce is the “first, hardest thing” they go through, Wasser says. Divorces peak in January, as people emerge from the holidays, set resolutions, or think ahead to next year’s tax return.
While Wasser is best-known for her high-profile clients who pay her $1,000-an-hour fee, she’s also a backer of and “chief of divorce evolution” for Divorce.com, a 78-person startup building a platform for people to handle divorces online. For about half of all divorcing couples, the process costs between $20,000 and $40,000; as much as three-quarters of that work is to prepare for a trial that never happens, Wasser says. She believes that divorce—like shopping, dating, and banking—can eventually move online. The only types of cases that aren’t suitable to online legal proceedings are complex matters involving severe acrimony, custody issues across state lines, or domestic abuse, she argues.
Divorce.com is led by co-CEOs Elizabeth Pharo and Elizabeth Stewart. Featheringill Capital acquired the online divorce processor CompleteCase, the divorce.com domain, and Wasser’s previous online divorce platform It’s Over Easy in 2022 to build the online divorce platform. Divorce.com offers mediated divorce services alongside uncontested divorces, which have a longer history taking place online.
Wasser could be accused of cannibalizing her own profession, but she believes that divorce should be less expensive and less complicated for the masses. “There are always going to be high-conflict, high-resolution cases. But plenty of attorneys are taking advantage of people’s fear and lack of knowledge,” she says.
She advises divorcing spouses to mediate and move on. “I see a lot of breadwinners, especially women, resentful that they have to write a check every month. It is what it is,” she advises. “Try not to live in that resentment. Instead of staying in the anger, this is the next chance for you to be who you are.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Cashing out. Bet365 founder and CEO Denise Coates earned around £270 million ($344 million) in combined salary and dividends for the year ending March 2023, according to records filed on Monday. This made the gambling mogul the highest paid executive on the S&P 500 in 2023 and adds to the more than £1 billion she's already made off of the gambling site. Financial Times
- Commerce amid conflict. Hepsiburada CEO Nilhan Onal Gokcetekin is hoping that an expansion into war-torn Ukraine can bring a much-needed boost to the Turkish e-commerce giant’s profits. If a trial run goes smoothly, Onal says the company will begin selling goods in the country as it attempts to recoup losses from a post-IPO stock plunge two years ago. Bloomberg
- Dream come true. Lily Gladstone became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress Sunday night for her performance in last year’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Gladstone, whose background is rooted in the Blackfeet and Nez Perce nations, spoke in the Blackfeet language during her acceptance speech and held up the award "for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream." AP
- Shaming surrogacy. Pope Francis called for a universal ban on surrogate motherhood on Monday, a practice he described as “despicable” for turning unborn children “into an object of trafficking.” Surrogacy is a common way for same-sex male couples and women with infertility to build families. The practice is outlawed in Italy and paid surrogacy is illegal in several other European countries. New York Times
- Bad bots. A wave of new sites promising sexual interactions with AI-powered bots mimicking underage girls are operating publicly without regulation. Fortune spoke with more than a dozen AI developers and founders about how to prevent exploitation from these uncensored sites. Fortune
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: JetBlue named Joanna Geraghty as its next CEO; she will be the first woman to lead a major U.S. airline. Ad Age appointed Jeanine Poggi as editor-in-chief.
ON MY RADAR
How the ethnicity pay gap campaign is tackling salary inequity BBC
The new faces of watch collecting Marie Claire
Why is the pundit class suddenly so marriage-obsessed? Politico
PARTING WORDS
"No matter the circumstances of a woman’s life, whether she’s very privileged or underprivileged, the uniting factor is the limits placed by society on what women can be."
—Actress Natalie Portman describing how all women-centered stories revolve around freeing women from societal limitations
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