Robin Williams and his wife, Marsha Garces Williams, have announced in court papers that they are going to have a collaborative divorce. (Which means we won't see them and their children paraded on special editions of Entertainment Tonight.) In their court filing they said they would be "honest, cooperative and respectful" and put their children first.

A collaborative divorce allows the couple to make final decisions on the division of property, custody, child support, and other matters, and not leave the decisions to the judge. The idea is to look at long-term interests instead of short-term anger, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In mediation, the husband and wife seeking a divorce meet with a trained mediator, try to work out an agreement, and the agreement is sent to their respective lawyers. Mediation is sometimes ordered in the midst of litigation, as a way to resolve problems. Mediation, on average, will cost around $7,000. 

In a collaborative divorce, the couple agrees that they will reveal all pertinent information and their lawyers agree that they will not go to court. If the husband and his lawyer and the wife and her lawyer cannot come to an agreement on something, a neutral expert – a psychologist, an accountant, a real estate analyst, whatever – is brought in to offer advice.

The sides agree not to take advantage of mistakes made by each other. (If only this process had been around during the marriage!)

Everything about the settlement remains confidential. (Thus the results of the Robin Williams divorce will not hit the tabloids.) And finally, if the process breaks down, which it does in less than 10 percent of cases, the two sides cannot continue with their lawyers. They have to start over from the beginning.

She Is! She Isn’t! She is? She is! It seems that Madonna is getting divorced after all, or at least she has seen a highly placed divorce lawyer in London. Her press person keeps repeating that Madonna and her husband, the movie director Guy Ritchie, are not getting divorced.

Could this all be a publicity stunt to promote his new movie and her European tour?  

Madonna has a 13-show European tour “Sticky and Sweet” starting in Cardiff in August, and is planning her 50th birthday bash on August 16. Richie will turn 40 in September, and has a new film, “RocknRolla” opening in September in London, and in October in America. His film has nothing to do with Rock ‘n’ Roll and everything to do with Russian gangsters in London.

The whole thing has certainly brought enough attention to the two of them. (Like, did you know he had a movie coming out before this?) People magazine online has been having a field day reporting day-by-day updates. On Tuesday night, for instance, they breathlessly reported that the couple was holding hands after having dinner together in New York. Perez Hilton, meanwhile, is bragging that he predicted they would make a very public dinner date. And that this is a well thought out ploy. And then there are rumors elsewhere that Madonna is seeing A Rod.

If there is a divorce filed, dividing up the marital property will be intense. There is no prenuptial agreement, but the assumption is that Ritchie won’t try to drain her of her millions, or try to take away her newly acquired British accent.

Wonder how you’ll collect child support? Some states like Mississippi throw deadbeat dads in jail. In Ohio they put delinquent dad’s mug shots on pizza boxes. And California will pull a deadbeat doctor’s medical license. You’d think that would kind of get his attention, but it happened twice to the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who operated on Kanye West’s mother, Dr. January (Jan) Adams, most recently on Wednesday night.

The California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the California Medical Board, wrote to Adams on May 21 informing him that he had to pay back child support or alimony by midnight on June 25. The Associated Press reported that he had been working under a temporary 150-day license, part of a debtor’s program run by the Department of Consumer Affairs, which issues temporary licenses until deadbeats pay up.

On June 26, the Medical Board announced in the matter of Dr. Adams that, “as of midnight last night, he is not allowed to practice medicine in California.” His license had previously been suspended for three months in 2006, for the same problem.

Turns out, that’s not his only problem. The Medical Board was already investigating whether or not to suspend his license because of two arrests for drunk driving. (You’d think that would be enough, wouldn’t you?) A few hours after his medical license was suspended he was arrested about an hour from Oakland by California Highway Patrol for driving his gray Jaguar up an off ramp on Interstate 680. He flunked the sobriety test. Oh yeah, and he was driving with a suspended license.

His website lists him as “a physician, author, lecturer, television personality, and entrepreneur,” and says he graduated from Harvard and has created some top cosmetic products. Maybe, but he also apparently doesn’t pay court ordered child support or alimony.

It was, as The Chicago Sun Times said, “A funny man and an ugly divorce.” And now it’s also been a fast divorce, after 10 years of marriage and four sons. Barely a month after Jennifer Butler Murray filed for divorce in South Carolina, with scathing accusations about Bill Murray's involvement in drugs, violence, and adultery, her divorce is final. She moved out of Murray’s home with their children in 2006, she said, and into a home in Sullivans Island, South Carolina, because of Murray’s “adultery, addiction to marijuana and alcohol, abusive behavior, physical abuse, sexual addictions, and frequent abandonment."

Jennifer Murray said her husband traveled frequently outside the US without her, ''where he engages in public and private altercations and sexual liaisons.'' And she claimed that in November at the Sullivan Island home, Murray ''hit her in the face and then told her she was 'lucky he didn't kill her.' ''

The complaint noted that this was not the first time Murray had abused her. Her attorney, based in Charleston, was Robert Rosen.

Murray is famous in film circles for not having a publicist, a manager or an entourage. But he certainly needed a lawyer, and he hired one, John McDougall of Columbia, SC. According to the Charleston newspapers, McDougall responded to the divorce filling by saying that Murray “was deeply saddened by the breakup of his marriage. He and his wife made loving parents, and they are committed to the best interests of their children.''

Jennifer Butler Murray and William (Bill) Murray signed a 23-page prenuptial agreement in 1997 in which they waived all rights to alimony or support in the event of a breakup. But Murray did agree to pay his wife $7 million within 60 days of a final divorce decree.

"Bad mother!" "Adulterer!" Those are likely to be the arguments when, and if, Christie Brinkley’s divorce action against Peter Cook, her fourth husband, hits the Suffolk County courts on July 2. It all started two years ago when Brinkley had already asked for a separation from Cook, and The New York Post tattled that Cook, a prominent architect in the Hamptons, had had an affair with an 18 year old in his office, Diana Bianchi.

Cook, it should be noted, was 47 at the time. Brinkley was a fine looking 52, but she was humiliated by the talk of a teenage Lolita, and abruptly fled to the West Coast with their two minor children. Public opinion was solidly in her favor.

Brinkley and Cook reached an agreement in January for temporary custody of Jack, 13, whom Cook legally adopted from Brinkley’s third marriage, and their daughter Sailor, 9. (Brinkley also famously has a 22-year-old daughter, Alexa, with Billy Joel.) The July 2 trial therefore is shaping up to be a battle over the division of assets, including houses and boats, despite the prenup Cook signed when they were married.

Gearing up for the championship match, Brinkley has successfully petitioned the judge to hear testimony in open court, and has threatened to reveal embarrassing things (porn, skirt-chasing, swinging, swapping) about her soon to be ex-husband. Cook’s lawyers, and the children's law guardian, have claimed that Brinkley ("Bad mother") is permanently damaging the children by dragging all of this into court.

It’s Divorce 101: One side argues the facts, the other side argues that the messenger should be shot.

So far, Brinkley seems to have the most to gain. And Brinkley may be willing to put up with charges that she is a bad mother just so she can humiliate her husband in court.

Let's see. You're working fulltime. You begin every day by turning on the Mr. Coffee, waking the kids, doing a load of laundry, making breakfast, packing lunches, sending the two of them off to the school bus. You drive to work with a thermos at hand. You barely have time for lunch, so you drink a diet soda and eat some crackers, because you need to leave on time to shop for groceries, then pick up the kids from afterschool. You rush home at night, make supper, supervise homework, do baths, tuck them in, read bedtime stories. Then you pay bills, answer emails, mop the kitchen floor, feed the dog, do another load of laundry, try to read a book, and collapse. And throughout the day youíve had six cups of coffee, two diet Cokes, and late in the afternoon a bottle of Go Girl energy drink.

The wedding of the televangelist Juanita Bynum and Bishop Thomas Weeks of the Pentecostal church was a televised spectacular in 2002. A thousand guests were invited, and the event cost more than $1 million. The couple preached together in his Global Destiny Ministry in Duluth, Georgia, and toured the country lecturing on love and marriage.

And then it all went bad, really, really bad. Last August 21, she charged that he beat, choked and stomped her in a parking lot of an Atlanta hotel. He turned himself in, then preached that the devil indeed made him do it.

Apparently the devil also told him to plead guilty to a felony count, rather than go to jail, and to attend anger management. He was given three years probation.

On September 10, Juanita Bynum-Weeks filed a petition for divorce saying that “The parties separated on or about June of 2007 and since lived in a state of separation.”

Remember that date.

Last week, in an Atlanta courtroom, Superior Court Judge Debra Turner was processing their final divorce motion when she asked a routine question:

Had the couple had sex since their June separation?

Turns out, they had, Bynum said.

It was in August (although it was not revealed whether this was before or after the clobbering in the parking lot). Under Georgia law, and the law in several other states, having sex constitutes a reconciliation, and therefore the original separation date was no longer valid.

In a Solomonlike decision on June 20, Judge Turner gave the couple a do-over. She advanced the date of separation to last September, to after they had sex, and then granted the divorce. Their settlement has Ms. Bynum paying $40,000 of Bishop Weeks’s legal bills, but her receiving their silverware and some artwork and antiques, including a harp and a piece of sculpture. He gets to keep a 2004 Land Rover.