Dr. Thea Clara Spyer

Thea Spyer was born in Amsterdam on October 8, 1931, to a wealthy Jewish family that escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to the United States before the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. Spyer enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, but was expelled after a campus guard saw her and another woman kissing. She received a bachelor's degree from the New School for Social Research, and a master's degree and PhD in clinical psychology from City University of New York and Adelphi University, respectively. In addition to her private psychology practice in Manhattan, Spyer was an accomplished violinist. She met Windsor in 1963 at a West Village restaurant, and the two began dating after they reconnected in the Hamptons during Memorial Day weekend of 1965. Spyer proposed to her in 1967 but presented her with a diamond brooch instead of an engagement ring, fearing that Windsor would be stigmatized at work if her colleagues knew about her relationship.

In 2007, the pair, both residents of New York, married in Toronto, Ontario, under the provisions set forth in the Canadian Civil Marriage Act, after 40 years of romantic partnership. Canada's first openly gay judge, Justice Harvey Brownstone, officiated. Windsor had first suggested engagement in 1965. After Spyer's death in 2009, Windsor was required to pay $363,053 in federal estate taxes on her inheritance of her wife's estate. Had federal law recognized the validity of their marriage, Windsor would have qualified for an unlimited spousal deduction and paid no federal estate taxes.

The resulting legal dispute culminated in United States v. Windsor, a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court held that restricting U.S. federal interpretation of "marriage" and "spouse" to apply only to opposite-sex unions, by Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), is unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment; Justice Kennedy wrote: "The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity."

• Wikipedia: United States v. Windsor

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https://www.scribd.com/document/61610736/1-10-cv-08435-31

Dr. Spyer is the daughter of the late Elisabeth Ketellapper and the late Willem Spyer, who lived in Amsterdam