Lori Loughlin filed for divorce from her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, on September 4, closing out nearly 29 years of marriage. Loughlin, best known for playing Aunt Becky on Full House, and Giannulli, founder of the Mossimo clothing label, met in the mid-1990s and married in November 1997. The split follows a year of quiet separation and, further back, the college admissions scandal that sent both of them to prison in 2020.
Most coverage of the filing has focused on that history. Buried a few paragraphs down is the detail we find more interesting: Loughlin and Giannulli signed a premarital agreement on October 28, 1997, a month before their wedding, and amended it on August 11, 2015, eighteen years into the marriage. That amendment predates the scandal by five years. Whatever prompted it, it wasn't a crisis.
We've written before about whether couples should get a prenup in the first place. The more useful question here is what happens to a prenup that outlives several home purchases, a couple of hairstyles, and a very public scandal. Does it just sit in a drawer, untouched and increasingly out of date, or is it meant to be revisited?
Why revisit a prenup 18 years in?
Nobody pulls a premarital agreement out of the drawer for fun. Something in real life outpaces what the paper says, and eventually the gap gets too wide to ignore. Common triggers include:
- A business gets sold, folded, or started from scratch
- Real estate changes hands — bought, sold, or refinanced
- One spouse's income changes substantially
- New separate property accumulates faster than expected
Any one of those is enough to drag both spouses back to the table, lawyers in tow.
Washington law makes the mechanics simple. Under RCW 26.16.120, spouses can alter or cancel a marital property agreement at any time, following the same formalities required to sign the original. There's no expiration date and no window that closes. A prenup isn't a lease that resets every year; it's closer to a living document that only changes when someone bothers to update it.
That doesn't make amendments risk-free, and we previously discussed some of the pitfalls of prenups in Washington. Courts can still set aside an agreement, original or amended, if it was signed unfairly or turns out to be unconscionable when someone tries to enforce it.
Do prenups age like wine, or like milk?
Not automatically. Washington courts apply the same fairness test — which was first laid out in In re Marriage of Matson — to an amendment that they apply to a first-time agreement, weighing whether the terms were substantively fair and whether the signing process was above-board. An eighteen-year-old marriage doesn't exempt it from scrutiny in a contract. It just means there's more history for a judge to sift through if the agreement is ever challenged.
In Loughlin's filing, the two documents are doing real work. She's asking the court to divide property, assets, and debts according to their terms, while spousal support and attorney fees are left for the judge to determine separately. That kind of split is common, and it suggests the 2015 amendment addressed exactly what needed updating rather than trying to lock in every detail decades in advance.
The takeaway isn't “everyone needs a prenup.” It's that a prenup signed at twenty-five, thirty, or forty doesn't have to keep governing a life you no longer lead. A short review every few years, or after any real change in circumstances, costs far less than discovering decades later that the fine print no longer fits.
Loughlin and Giannulli didn't wait until things fell apart to check whether their 1997 agreement still made sense. They updated it in 2015, years before the marriage did fall apart. Whatever else played out between them, that timing is the part worth stealing: the update happened while the marriage was still going, not after someone had already reached for a lawyer.
If your premarital agreement hasn't been looked at since you signed it, LaGrandeur & Williams can review it and tell you honestly whether it still holds up, no eighteen-year wait required. Contact us to schedule a consultation.