Woman hocked her $32,000 engagement ring — but it wasn’t hers to sell, Alabama court says
An Alabama appeals court recently ruled that a woman had been “unjustly enriched” after selling the $32,000 engagement ring her boyfriend gave her.
Court records tell the story of a woman and her boyfriend who had been involved in a romantic relationship for several years and lived together. On Christmas Eve in 2018, her boyfriend gave her a gift bag containing a half-carat diamond ring worth $32,000.
There’s some gray area when it comes to what happened next, according to the narratives in the court documents.
The boyfriend tells the court that he dropped to one knee and asked the woman to marry him after she pulled out the gift, a moment that he said he recorded on his phone, although the video evidence was not admitted into evidence in court. He then put the ring onto her hand after she accepted his proposal, he said.
His girlfriend, however, states on the record that he never proposed marriage to her, and although she “assumed” it was an engagement ring, she never informed others that they were engaged.
Afterward, the two discussed wedding dates for months to come and also went to counseling for couples to work on their relationship. Eventually, after disputes, the boyfriend ended up moving out of their home in September 2019.
Following the separation, he asked about the ring. First she told him she threw it into the waters of the Intracoastal Waterway. Then she admitted that she sold it in 2020 for about $10,000 after losing her job.
In March 2020, the man filed a complaint against his ex-girlfriend, amending it in August to include a claim the woman was unjustly enriched by selling the ring.
“[The woman] knew that the $32,000 engagement ring was a gift conditioned on marrying [the complainant] inasmuch that it was proffered with the proposal of marriage, and that only if [the woman] agreed to marry [complainant] would she be entitled to receive the ring as a gift, pending the future marriage,” the man’s claim said.
The Baldwin County Circuit Court ruled in favor of the girlfriend in January 2021, stating that since the couple had not set a wedding date and the man had not given written or oral conditions on which the ring should be returned, it did not find proof that his ex-girlfriend had been unjustly enriched.
The man appealed the ruling, and the Alabama Court of Appeals sided with him, ruling that it wasn’t his ex-girlfriend’s ring to sell due to the agreement of marriage that comes along with an engagement ring.
“We agree that, when an engagement is terminated, the donor has the right to request the return of the engagement ring and that, when such a request is refused, an unjust enrichment cause of action exists,” the court of appeals wrote in their judgment.
This story was originally published December 21, 2021 at 2:39 PM with the headline "Woman hocked her $32,000 engagement ring — but it wasn’t hers to sell, Alabama court says."
