Divorced man left with 0.5pc of wife's fortune wins ‘gender bias' appeal

Telegraph

4 days ago

A husband who received £325,000 in a divorce from his multimillionaire wife has won a court appeal after accusing the divorce judge of ' gender prejudice '.
High Court judge Mr Justice Francis awarded Simon Entwistle, a 42-year-old City trader, just 0.5 per cent of Jenny Helliwell's fortune in January last year.
Mr Entwistle claimed that the judge, who upheld a pre-nuptial agreement in which the couple agreed to keep their own assets in the event of a split, would not have made the same ruling if the genders were reversed.
Appeal judge Lady Justice King ruled that Mr Entwistle's case should be heard again, after she accused Ms Helliwell, 42, of 'fraudulent' behaviour by not declaring almost £48m of her £66m personal fortune whilst making the prenup.
Mr Entwistle and Ms Helliwell married in 2019 in a £500,000 ceremony in Paris and lived in a £4.5m villa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
They split after three years of marriage in August 2022 when Ms Helliwell ordered her husband out of their home with 48 hours' notice.
In court, Mr Entwistle asked for £2.5m of his ex-wife's personal fortune, including £26,000 for a personal meal plan, as a court heard he ' can't even cook an omelette '.
He was left with a 0.5 per cent cut after the judge upheld a prenup, which Mr Entwistle went on to dispute.
Appealing the ruling, Mr Entwistle said he was a victim of 'gender prejudice' and that the prenup had been invalidated by Ms Helliwell having failed to disclose assets worth almost £48m – amounting to 73 per cent of her wealth – when he signed it.
At the Court of Appeal in March 2025, Deborah Bangay KC, for Mr Entwistle, said: 'The judge was warned against gender prejudice, but failed to heed that warning.
'Had the positions been reversed, it is very unlikely that [Mr Justice Francis] would have ... so ungenerously assessed the needs of a wife after a six-year relationship.'
Lady Justice King has ruled that the non-disclosure by the heiress amounted to 'fraudulent' behaviour, which invalidated the prenup.
She sent the case back to the divorce courts, ordering it to be recalculated as if the prenup did not exist.
The appeal judge said: 'Since the husband in the instant case was deliberately deprived of information which it had been agreed that he should have, in my judgment, the agreement cannot stand.'
A 'fraudulent' prenup
Lady Justice King, giving her ruling today, made no finding on the gender prejudice argument, but said that when agreeing to the agreement, Ms Helliwell disclosed £18.2m of assets, and failed to include £47.9m assets.
The assets Ms Helliwell failed to mentioned in her prenup included almost £40m worth of business assets, £8m worth of beachfront land in Dubai and a £1.6m house in Wimbledon, where her mother lives.
Lady Justice King said: 'The deliberate decision by the wife not to disclose her business assets and her interest in her mother's house amounted to fraudulent non-disclosure which vitiates the agreement.'
She concluded: 'In my judgment, the judge erred in law in concluding that on the facts of the case, the wife's deliberate non-disclosure, on current figures, of some 73 per cent of her wealth did not serve to vitiate the agreement.'
She added there must be a 'reconsideration of the husband's needs and in particular his housing provision'.