Disclaimer: All facts gleaned from the filings stated hereafter are only as truthful as the petitioner. The tone of this article expresses a style of writing historically employed by America’s greatest writers and, as such, is for opinion purposes only. No intentional harm is due. Do not read if the topic of divorce (even your own) causes you emotional distress. Continue at your own risk.
The calendar had just turned when Jane Broussard Gonnerman stepped into a new year carrying an old decision. The petition dissolving her marriage to Grant Gonnerman was filed January 6, 2026, in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois—after the confetti had settled, after the holidays had passed, when resolutions tend to harden into action. The timing matters. A filing in the final days of December can feel like a hurried closing argument to a weary year, an attempt to leave the wreckage behind before midnight. Early January, by contrast, reads as deliberate: a clean margin, a pause taken, a choice affirmed with daylight ahead.
Jane, 44, a Cook County resident employed at Collegium Pharmaceutical, and Grant, 45, currently unemployed, were married on December 10, 2011, in New Orleans. They share one child, A.G., born in 2013. By the time the petition arrived at the clerk’s office, the couple had already done much of the quiet work of disentanglement. Irreconcilable differences were named plainly, reconciliation dismissed as impracticable.
Represented by Marcelle R. Kott and Jamie A. Zider of Berger Schatz, Jane asked the court for an orderly ending rather than a drawn-out fight. The petition seeks a judgment dissolving the marriage; entry of an agreed allocation judgment and parenting plan governing decision-making and parenting time; equitable division of marital assets and liabilities under a marital settlement agreement; a bar against maintenance for either party; an order requiring each side to pay their own attorneys’ fees and costs; appropriate child support and contributions to the child’s expenses; and any further relief the court deems just.
In choosing the first week of January, the filing frames the divorce not as an escape from the past year, but as a measured beginning—one that insists on structure, finality, and a future carefully mapped.
Please contact VowBreakers for access to documents related to the case.
