Cristina Carta Villa left her Italian literature professorship at Boston College for love. 🕰️
She married Gabriel Villa in New York in 1994, thirty years older than her, and built a life alongside him: a son, homes in Manhattan, Massachusetts, and France, two decades of shared routines. Everything seemed solid until a tax bill for the Manhattan apartment arrived without her name on it.
There Cristina discovered what Gabriel had never told her: four months after the wedding, he had secretly filed for divorce in the Dominican Republic, claiming to authorities that living together was “intolerable”. Twenty years living as the wife of a man who legally was no longer her husband. Now, at 59, Cristina sued to annul that phantom divorce and recover what legally belongs to her. 💔