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Talk of the bay

Boeing ex-CEO's wife has high-profile divorce attorney

By KRIS HUNDLEY
Published March 21, 2005

Four days after learning that her 68-year-old husband, Harry, had been fired as Boeing's chief executive for having an affair with an employee, Joan Stonecipher decided to end their marriage of 50 years.

But Mrs. Stonecipher, who lives in the couple's waterfront home in St. Petersburg's Bayway Isles, didn't file for divorce in Florida.

Instead, she opted to go to court in Chicago, where the couple has a second home and, perhaps more importantly, where corporate giant Boeing is headquartered.

Legal experts said there are few, if any, legal reasons for Mrs. Stonecipher's choice of Illinois divorce courts over Florida's. Joy Feinberg, a divorce lawyer in Chicago, said conducting the process in Boeing's back yard might mean financial information about Harry Stonecipher's assets is more readily available.

But Feinberg said a more likely reason Mrs. Stonecipher opted for Chicago is because she may feel especially comfortable with her high-profile attorney there, Donald Schiller. Schiller's firm, Schiller, DuCanto and Fleck, calls itself the largest matrimonial law firm in the U.S. and says it "represents many individuals whose cases involve the distribution of multimillion-dollar holdings and require sophisticated financial expertise."

Among Schiller's past clients are former U.S. Commerce Secretary Bill Daley and Juanita Jordan, wife of Michael Jordan. Mrs. Jordan filed for divorce in 2002, but later withdrew the petition. Schiller declined to comment on Mrs. Stonecipher's case, saying only that his client hopes to settle the divorce privately, amicably and expeditiously.

Speaking generally, Schiller, who has been married 41 years, said divorces tend to occur in both very short-term and very long-term marriages.

"That "till death do us part' bit worked when people died in their 50s," Schiller said. "The whole idea of male menopause, of considering a new life, that kind of thing is very real."

[Last modified March 20, 2005, 01:04:02]