Roger and Sharon MacDonell married in California in 1992 and moved to France with their four children in 2006. Roger started divorce proceedings in France in 2010. In 2017, Sharon used 28 U.S.C. § 1782 in the Eastern District of California to subpoena documents from Wells Fargo, Vanguard, and several U.S. businesses connected to Roger, for the French court to use in dividing the marital assets. The court granted that application because none of those entities were parties to the French case, so they might be beyond the French court’s reach.
This time, Roger, representing himself, filed his own ex parte § 1782 application in the same court. He asked to serve a subpoena on Sharon for leases, rental accounts, bank records, and management documents for an apartment in France the couple once co-owned. A French appellate court gave Sharon exclusive use of the apartment in 2015, and Roger said she had been collecting rent he never benefited from. Roger had asked the French courts for the same records and was refused, and the matter is now before a French Tribunal. He asked the U.S. court to step in for two reasons. The Tribunal might not rule before November 11, 2026, when his time to appeal the debt judgment runs out. And no French order could reach records held by U.S. financial institutions.
The magistrate judge found that Roger met the three statutory requirements. He is an interested person because he is a party to the French debt proceeding, that proceeding is before a foreign tribunal, and Sharon is found in the district. However, the discretionary factors from Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices weighed heavily against him. Sharon is a participant in the French proceeding, the property is in France, and Roger had already been refused the same discovery there, so the French courts have jurisdiction to order whatever production French law requires. The court said it would not be used to circumvent the French courts’ decisions. For the same reasons, French courts were unlikely to welcome an order undercutting their own ruling on a discovery dispute about French property, and the request looked like an attempt to get around foreign proof-gathering restrictions. Roger did not attach the subpoena’s Schedule A, so the court could not judge whether it was unduly burdensome. Even assuming it was not, the totality of the circumstances required denial. In a footnote, the court explained that Sharon’s 2017 application was the inverse situation: the French court had no power to compel discovery from American third parties about Roger’s U.S. assets.
