Legal Question in Family Law in Maine

Re: Divorce and Adultry

The short answer is that there are no legal effects of adultery in a divorce context. Maine is a "no fault" state, which means that no grounds for divorce are necessary apart from irreconcilable differences and that the Courts are not supposed to weigh adultery (or abandonment, cruelty, etc.) when allocating marital assets or debt.

Adultery does, of course, has "real life" effects. Notably, it is very difficult to have a "clean" divorce if the adultery is discovered. More often than not, the offended party will cease being reasonable and will seek to punish the adulterer by demanding a larger portion of the assets and by dragging out the process and inflating the other side's time and expenses.