MEMORANDUM AND ORDER PURSUANT TO RULE 23.0
This is a dispute over the ownership of a condominium unit at 376 Ocean Avenue in Revere (property). Legal title to the property is held by the defendant, who is the plaintiffs daughter-in-law (the widow of the plaintiffs son). The plaintiff brought this action alleging that the property is subject to a resulting trust of which she is the remaining beneficiary, because she and her own late husband paid the purchase money for the property while intending to hold the beneficial interest in the property for themselves.
2
After a bench trial, a Superior Court judge agreed that the plaintiff and her late husband furnished the purchase money, but nonetheless ruled in favor of the defendant. She explained her ruling in “Findings of Fact, Rulings of Law, and Order for Judgment” dated August 30, 2019. In response to an order that we issued sua sponte (while retaining jurisdiction), the judge issued certain “Findings After Remand,” in which she found that the plaintiff and her late husband intended that the property be a gift to their son.
3
On the plaintiffs appeal, we affirm.
The key question posed by the plaintiffs resulting trust claim is whether -- at the point that she and her husband supplied their son the purchase money to acquire the property in his own name -- they intended the property to be a gift to him, or whether they intended instead to obtain the beneficial interest in the property for themselves. See Citizens Bank of Mass. v. Coleman, 83 Mass. App. Ct. 609, 612-613 (2013). Where, as here, all the parties involved in the purchase are family, “there is a ․ presumption of a gift.” Id. at 614.
The plaintiff argues that the judges reasoning is flawed in various respects. As she accurately points out, the judge focused in great part on whether the plaintiff was aware that the property originally had been placed solely in her sons name. The plaintiff argues that this focus was misplaced, because she did not need to prove that she was unaware of this in order to prove that she and her husband intended to retain beneficial ownership for themselves. But it was the plaintiff herself who emphasized in her trial testimony that she always believed that her name was on the title (a contention that the judge did not credit). To the extent the judge focused on that point, she merely was responding to what the plaintiff herself had argued. We therefore are not persuaded by the plaintiffs contention that the judge “erred by conflating [the plaintiffs] awareness that another party is listed on the deed as legal owner with the separate and distinct question of whether a gift of beneficial ownership was intended.”
The plaintiff is correct that she was able to produce some evidence -- that was either not disputed or expressly credited by the judge -- that tended to support her claim that she and her husband did not intend the property as a gift.
4
According to the plaintiff, once she produced such evidence, any presumption created by law that the property was purchased as a gift evaporated. See Robinson v. Robinson, 366 Mass. 582, 586 (1974) (rebuttable presumptions “operate, when they operate at all, only in the absence of countervailing or rebutting factors, the goal in all cases being to reach a fair interpretation of the totality of the facts”). If we assume that to be correct, however, it would still be true that the burden remained on the plaintiff to prove that she and her husband did not intend to give the property to her son, and the judge found, as a matter of fact, that the plaintiff did not carry that burden.
5
The judges factual finding that the parents intended the property as a gift is not clearly erroneous, and is therefore binding on us. See Demoulas v. Demoulas Super Mkts., Inc., 424 Mass. 501, 509 (1997).
One critical point bears noting. The plaintiff was the sole surviving person involved in the original acquisition of the property. At trial, she testified directly that she did not intend the property to be a gift to her son. The problem for the plaintiff is that the judge evidently did not believe her.
6
That adverse credibility determination essentially doomed the plaintiffs case. See Okoli v. Okoli, 81 Mass. App. Ct. 371, 379 (2012), quoting Palmer v. Murphy, 42 Mass. App. Ct. 334, 343 (1997) (“Credibility determinations ․ lie exclusively within the province of the fact finder ․ who is free to believe one witness and disbelieve another”).
The plaintiff argues that one of the judges key subsidiary findings is clearly erroneous. Specifically, she challenges the finding that the plaintiff and her husband had paid for certain capital improvements and other property expenses “as rent.” According to her, this finding is based solely on a letter that defendants counsel wrote characterizing those payments as rent. The plaintiff argues that the letters characterization of the payment of the expenses was simply prelitigation posturing, an argument she bolsters by pointing to the defendants testimony that she had no personal knowledge of what arrangement her late husband had with his parents.
7
Although this fact-based argument is not without force, it goes to the weight of the evidence, not its admissibility, and it is one more appropriately made to the fact finder, not an appellate court.
8
Even if the specific finding that the parents paid the referenced expenses “as rent” were shown to be clearly erroneous, that would hardly provide definitive proof that the parents could not have intended the property to be a gift. The plaintiff argues that tenants ordinarily would not make the long-term capital improvements or pay for the other significant expenses that she and her husband shouldered. While that commonsense premise may generally be true of arms length tenants on short-term leases, the parents were not such tenants. It is not difficult to imagine parents giving property to a child as a gift with an implicit understanding that they could live there indefinitely, and the parents in that living arrangement choosing to initiate capital improvements and incur other significant expenses primarily for their own benefit. Put otherwise, proof that the parents funded such expenses as something other than “rent” would not negate a finding that they intended the property to be a gift.
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Thus, we affirm.
So ordered.
Affirmed
FOOTNOTES
2
. The plaintiff argued in the alternative that the property was subject to a constructive trust. She does not press that theory on appeal.
3
. We allowed the parties to file supplemental briefs addressing the findings after remand.
4
. We also agree with the plaintiff that the judge erred in concluding that “no evidence was presented from which the Court can determine [the plaintiffs late husbands] intent.” As the judge herself recognized, whether a party had donative intent can be shown through circumstantial proof based on that partys actions. See, e.g., Kennedy v. Innis, 339 Mass. 195, 202 (1959) (intent at time of transaction may be deduced from parties’ subsequent conduct). However, in our reading of what the judge wrote explaining her decision, she referred to the lack of evidence regarding the husbands intent as an independent ground for ruling in the defendants favor even if she had credited all of the plaintiffs testimony. Where a judge takes a “belts and suspenders” approach, a malfunction in the suspenders alone does not mean the pants will fall down.
5
. To be sure, the judge set forth her initial conclusions regarding donative intent by stating that the plaintiff “has not rebutted the presumption that she and [her husband] intended the [property] to be a gift.” However, we disagree with the plaintiff that this chosen phrasing signaled that the judge did not weigh the conflicting evidence on the issue.
6
. As clarified in her “Findings After Remand,” the judge expressly found that the plaintiff and her husband “intended the [property] to be a gift to [their son].” This necessarily means that she did not credit the plaintiffs direct testimony to the contrary.
7
. The plaintiff also highlights in her supplemental brief that the letter from the defendants lawyer claimed that only certain of the expenses related to the property funded by the plaintiff and her husband regarding the property were paid as “rent,” yet the judge in her findings after remand seems to have found that all such payments were made as rent.
8
. The defendant presented a copy of a document that she found in her husbands files that purports to be an actual executed lease between the defendants husband (as landlord) and the plaintiff and her husband (as tenants) for 1999. The plaintiff objected to the introduction of the document on authentication grounds, and the judge accepted it de bene as exhibit 39. No formal ruling on the admissibility of exhibit 39 appears on the record. The judge did not specifically reference the lease in her findings, and we do not rely on it.
9
. The plaintiff also argues that the judge erred in refusing to credit a letter in which she stated her intent to leave the property to two of her children. According to the plaintiff, this letter provided strong evidence of the plaintiffs belief that she owned at least the beneficial interest in the property. However, there were multiple reasons why a judge properly could give the letter little weight, or even to discredit it entirely. As but one example, the letter inexplicably contained an unacknowledged notary stamp, which was apparently provided by a notary employed by her who was not present at the time that the plaintiff signed the letter.