When Ladan Richardson’s marriage ended in November 2022, she found herself standing in front of a judge who asked her a direct question: what did she want out of the divorce? Most people come to that moment with a mental spreadsheet of assets. Richardson, 33, had a shorter and stranger list. She wanted the car, the dog, and her ex-husband’s Netflix password.
The first two were serious. The third, she admits, was mostly a joke. “The Netflix password clause came up when the judge asked me directly what I wanted out of the divorce,” Richardson told Newsweek. “I said all I wanted was the car, the dog, and his Netflix password.” She tossed the last one out as a bit of levity at the end of a grueling process, fully expecting it to be waved off as the throwaway line it was.
The judge did not wave it off. When the official settlement came back, there it was in writing: Richardson would have access to her ex-husband’s Netflix account, indefinitely. A half-joke had become a legally binding term of her divorce.
But the thing that keeps the story going is her ex-husband has never changed the password. Whether out of indifference, forgetfulness, or grudging respect for the paperwork, the account has stayed open to her ever since, which means a spur-of-the-moment quip is now, functionally, a permanent fixture of her streaming life.
Richardson is quick to say the request wasn’t about spite. “I wasn’t trying to be cruel or vindictive,” she told Newsweek. “It was one small thing at the end of a really heavy process.” Anyone who’s been through a divorce can probably recognize the impulse, the urge to salvage one small, human, faintly ridiculous thing from a proceeding designed to divide up a life. “Divorce can take so much from you all at once,” she said. “It was one small thing that made a heavy process feel lighter.”
Funny as it is, family lawyers would gently advise against trying this at home. Katherine Miller, founder of the Miller Law Group, told Newsweek that writing a specific streaming service into a legal document is the kind of thing that looks harmless and can quietly cause problems later. “If an agreement refers specifically to Netflix, what happens if Netflix is acquired, rebrands, or merges with another platform?” she said. “You can find yourself with future conflict, or even litigation, baked into the document from day one.”
There’s also the small matter of enforceability. A password clause only works as long as everyone feels like honoring it. “If one party simply refuses to share a password, what is the other realistically going to do?” Miller said. “Go back to court and ask a judge to compel them? That’s not a good use of anyone’s time, and it certainly isn’t a good use of scarce court resources.” In other words, Richardson’s arrangement holds up not because a court could really force it, but because her ex has simply never bothered to click “change password.”
Two people formally severed their lives from each other, and years later one of them is still, in one tiny, absurd way, letting the other in.
