CLEVELAND, United States – Dread of the unknown hung in the air as Lynn France typed two words into the search box on Facebook: the name of the woman with whom she believed her husband was having an affair.
Click. And there it was, the stuff of nightmares for any spouse, cuckolded or not. Wedding photos. At Walt Disney World, no less, featuring her husband literally dressed as Prince Charming. His new wife, a pretty blonde, was a glowing Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by footmen.
“I was numb with shock, to tell you the truth,” says France, an occupational therapist from Westlake, a Cleveland suburb. “There was like an album of 200 pictures on there. Their whole wedding.”
The husband claimed on Thursday that his marriage to Lynn France was never valid. He said she knew earlier about the other marriage and was making the Facebook claim as a publicity ploy.
Affairs were once shadowy matters, illicit encounters whispered about and often difficult to prove. But in the age of Facebook and Twitter and lightning-fast communication, the notion of privacy is fast becoming obsolete.
From flirtatious text messages to incriminating emails, marital indiscretions are much easier to track – especially if potentially damaging photographic evidence is posted online.
“People who engage in these sorts of behaviours now have the option of trying to keep things private or turning it into a spectacle and becoming their own reality show,” says lawyer Andrew Zashin, a child custody expert who is representing Mrs France. “In this case, it seems, the spouse may have crossed the line and gotten married while he was still married.”
Ms Aftab, who runs the online protection site WiredSafety.org, says the lesson to be learnt from the Frances’ case is that no form of communication is sacred any more.
“It’s like trying to catch a river in your hand,” she says. “It will leak out eventually.”
But Aftab doesn’t recommend snooping around online. That can backfire in court if used inappropriately – such as when spouses log on to each other’s Facebook pages without permission. If your spouse isn’t trustworthy, she says, get a divorce and save yourself the trouble.
Source: Huffington Post/Sidney Morning Herald
