Jilted

This bride to be sued her ex when he called off the wedding, and a jury saw fit to award her $150,000 for financial and mental suffering. While the tidy sum is newsworthy, the suing - and winning - for broken engagements has been happening since men and women have gone public with their intent to get hitched.

"Breach of promise" suits were established as early as medieval times to hold a suitor responsible for breaking an engagement. And by suitor, I mean the man, because it was inevitably the ex-bride to be who suffered serious blows to her reputation.

According to wikipedia:

The main factors [for suing] were compensation for the denial of the woman's expectations of becoming "established" in a household (supported by her husband's wealth), and/or possible damage to her reputation — since there were a number of ways that the reputation of a young never-married woman of the "genteel" classes could be damaged by a broken engagement, or an apparent period of intimacy which did not end in a publicly-announced engagement, even if few people seriously thought that she had lost her virginity. She might be viewed as having broken the code of maidenly modesty of the period by imprudently offering up her affections without having had a firm assurance of future marriage.

So it's nothing new. But what I find fascinating about this particular case? His particularly dirtbaggy method of calling it off.