Wednesday Weirdness: Legally Adopting Ex-Husband

From the article: “Susan W. Gore, one of Wilbert’s five children, triggered a five-year Delaware Chancery Court battle by adopting her ex-husband. The event that adoption experts call incredibly rare and perhaps unprecedented — a man becoming his former wife’s son — occurred in 2003 in Wyoming, where the Gore family has roots. Susan Gore went through with the adoption so that each of her three natural children could reap tens of millions of dollars more from a family trust worth hundreds of millions. But she did it without informing her mother, Genevieve W. Gore, Wilbert’s widow and overseer of the trust, or other relatives outside Susan Gore’s immediate branch of the family. Not until after Genevieve died in 2005 — more than 18 months after the adoption — did Susan file court papers seeking to have her “adopted child” declared a trust beneficiary. Her petition unleashed a tsunami of protest from relatives incensed over the attempt to change the distribution of the trust. Documents in the case suggest Susan Gore wanted her grown children — Jan P., Joel and Nathan Otto — to get a bigger trust share because she had spent too much of her own inheritance, which her father expected her to pass on to them