Gnats' Owner Ex-Wife Wants Judge to Rescind Her $250 Million Divorce Settlement

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CRYSTAL LAKE HERALD

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Gnats' Owner Ex-Wife Wants Judge to Rescind Her $250 Million Divorce Settlement
Updated: December 11, 2030 – 8:00 PM

By Howard Heskin, Gnats Beat Writer and ESPN PEBA Correspondent – Twitter @HowardHeskin1

Vanessa Dole, the ex-wife of Crystal Lake Sandgnats owner Charles "Chuck" Dole IV claims her $250 million divorce settlement is not enough. A judge in McHenry County Superior Court will hear closing arguments today in the divorce dispute. Counsel for both sides have vowed to file an appeal should they lose, likely dragging on this nasty battle for years.

Last year, Dole agreed to a divorce settlement giving her $250 million plus a tax indemnity and splitting her residential real estate with her husband Chuck. While Dole believed she was receiving half of the assets she shared with her husband, only one week later, 49% of the Gnats were sold for $1.25 billion to a group that included Megan Ellison, daughter of the now deceased, former Gnats Founding Owner Larry Ellison.

According to her publicist, Megan Ellision is an American film producer and entrepreneur. She is founder of Annapurna Pictures, established in 2011. She has producing credits on the films Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Her (2013), American Hustle (2013), and Phantom Thread (2017), all of which have earned her Oscar nominations. In 2014, she was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. Since then she has been involved in the Indian Wells Tennis Garden tennis facility in California's Coachella Valley and the Indian Wells Masters tournament, both of which she inherited from her father's estate

"I was surprised I could have made such a huge mistake," Dole said in her court testimony last week. Her attorneys have argued she was short-changed about $500 million. In her legal complaint to quash the divorce settlement, she accuses her ex-husband of fraud, failure to make required disclosures, perjury, undue influence, and breach of fiduciary duty, among other legal theories. Dole was quoted muttering on a hot-mic in the court room, "He won't get away with this - one way or another - he won't."

The Doles met at Princeton University and were married on December 26, 2004. Chuck Dole is president of Dole Ice International, now a whiskey distillery and distribution company. He is the great-great-grandson of the legendary Charles Dole (an early member of the Chicago Board of Trade, a grain merchant and founder of Crystal Lake, IL). The couple has been residents of Illinois since 2027, when the couple acquired the Gnats and its related assets, which were the Dole's principal assets. Their assets included "the entities owning the Crystal Lake Sandgnats, Ellison Field at Dole Park and its vast parking lots, the profit sharing television rights to PEBA baseball games, and approximately 500 acres of real estate in the area of Dole Park."

According to her complaint, in 2028 he told her the market value of the Gnats assets could be as much as $2.5 billion. In November 2028, Vanessa filed divorce papers. The marriage was dissolved a year later. After the divorce ensued, Chuck denied his earlier statements that the Gnats could be worth $2.5 billion. Instead, he said their "assets had a current value less than $500 million..." according to her complaint. Before Vanessa agreed to the settlement, she believed, "based on what Chuck represented," that the net value of their assets, including the Gnats assets, was "in the range of $500 million."

Chuck Dole's attorneys have argued that his ex-wife failed to do her due diligence, the Associated Press reported. One of his attorneys said Chuck paid more than $400 million in state and federal taxes related to the partial stock sale of the Gnats.