Court denies NFL benefits for ex of former Patriot Mosi Tatupu

The ex-wife of late New England Patriots special-teamer Mosi Tatupu is not eligible to collect on his remaining retirement benefits from the National Football League, an appellate court has ruled.

The Hawaiian-born Pro Bowler, who played for the Pats from 1978 to 1990, died of a heart attack in 2010 at age 54. He was posthumously diagnosed by the Boston University School of Medicine with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease associated with football-related head injuries.

Monday’s three-judge ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirms the 2017 decision of U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock denying Linnea Garcia-Tatupu, 63, the benefits she sued the NFL Player Retirement Plan to cash in following her ex-husband’s death. In 2011, Garcia-Tatupu obtained a postmortem domestic-relations order from the state awarding her 100 percent of Tatupu’s accrued benefits.

According to federal court documents citing their marital-separation agreement, Tatupu elected to receive an early lump-sum payout when he retired from professional football, one-third of which he agreed to share with Garcia-Tatupu when they split on the condition she waive her right to alimony and any future pension benefits.

Tatupu was playing for the Los Angeles Rams when he elected to call it a career in 1991. He and his wife divorced in 1997.

Woodlock wrote in his decision that Garcia-Tatupu “did not have an independent right to
elect to receive” Tatupu’s benefits and “she had no right to a share unless he directed such
a distribution.”

The NFL plan’s retirement board properly refused to pay Garcia-Tatupu, Woodlock found. He said the state order granting Garcia-Tatupu postmortem survivorship rights could not override the marital-separation agreement and entitle her to benefits she would not have received had Tatupu lived.

In upholding Woodlock’s order, the appeals court said Garcia-Tatupu was “attempting to rewrite the separation agreement to posthumously create new interests in his retirement benefits.”