Tag Archive for: evidence

Facebook Postings Could be Evidence in Divorce

Divorce is often a very contentious and stressful experience. Parties can look for any advantage they can get and a Facebook faux pas can have major consequences.

Depending on your privacy settings, not everyone who can read your Facebook is your “friend.” As more and more people use social media, we are seeing a growing trend in Wisconsin and across the country with more electronic postings from the internet coming into courts of law as evidence in civil cases like divorce and in criminal matters.

On September 10, the New York State Bar Association issued an ethics opinion that permitted using Facebook evidence so long as no trickery or fraud was used in obtaining it. Last year, a Wisconsin court of appeals upheld using a defendant’s Myspace page as evidence against him.

The sort of evidence that you can get from social media web sites is the sort of evidence that you used to need a private investigator to get. Now people are more than willing to share their secrets to complete strangers over the internet. Examples of self-damaging Facebook posts are plentiful. They range from a fugitive commenting on the great weather where she was hiding, to a parent claiming to be too poor to pay child support and then showing off a newly bought luxury car in Facebook photos.

People tend to write things on Facebook they would never say aloud and post pictures they would not want everyone to see. Facebook is a great outlet for expression, but some people should take more care with what they post on Facebook. Facebook postings have come back to haunt some people in court.

Sources:

St. Petersburg Times (TampaBay.com): Facebook flubs make for salacious legal cases; Stephanie Hayes, 10/15/2010.

State v. Trusty, 776 N.W.2d 287 (Wis. App. 2009)

Is Reading Your Spouse’s E-Mail a Felony?

In the past, we have written about the impact that social media and E-mail are having in family law cases. It is now very common for divorce cases to involve some evidence obtained from e-mail, Facebook or other internet services. E-mail evidence was recently used in a Michigan divorce, but now the man who obtained that E-mail evidence is facing criminal charges for doing so.

Leon Walker suspected his wife was carrying on an affair. His wife was then on her third marriage and he suspected she was involved with her second husband. Knowing that her second husband had been arrested for domestic violence in the past, and suspecting his wife was taking their 3-year-old daughter along on liaisons with her second husband, Mr. Walker logged into his wife’s Gmail account using the laptop they shared.

His wife found out he accessed her e-mail account when messages between her and her second husband appeared as evidence of infidelity in their divorce, which was finalized earlier this month. His wife and prosecutors believe that Mr. Walker, a computer technician, illegally hacked into her e-mail account. Leon Walker contends he accessed her e-mail account with her permission before, and that she kept the password in a notebook next to the computer they shared.

Prosecutors are now charging Leon Walker for obtaining the e-mail evidence of infidelity for use in his divorce case. They are charging him with a felony for violating a computer misuse statute that is generally reserved for charging identity thieves and people who hack into business computer systems. It is very rare for this sort of statute to be used to charge an individual for reading his or her spouse’s e-mail.

Sources:

ABC News, “Husband in Hot Water: Man Faces Five Years in Prison for Snooping Through Wife’s E-Mails,” Chris Bury and Bret Hovell, 12/28/2010

Chicago Tribune, “Man to fight charges he hacked into wife’s e-mails,” 12/30/2010

Lifetime alimony lost due to Facebook flub

In the past, we have written about the use of Facebook evidence in divorce cases. The use of Facebook evidence to resolve disputed claims in a divorce is becoming increasingly common. A recent divorce case illustrates how impactful Facebook evidence can be.

A family court judge recently sided with an ex-husband on the issue of alimony after seeing evidence from a social networking site that the man’s former spouse was not disabled as she had claimed, but was actively working as a belly dancer. The ex-wife had claimed to be disabled in a car accident and was requesting $850 per month in alimony from him for the rest of her life.

Despite her claims of being disabled, she apparently spent several hours a day performing as a belly dancer. She also spent many hours each day posting about her belly dancing on the Internet. The posts made their way into court as evidence on the issue of her need for alimony.

The belly-dancing woman told the judge that the reason she belly danced was for physical therapy reasons, as a way to recover from injuries she had received in a disabling car accident in the mid-1990s.

The court did not find the woman’s testimony credible compared to the evidence the ex-husband presented clearly showing the effervescent blogs of his ex-wife’s belly dancing activities. The judge took a dim view of the woman’s claim and ordered that her requested $850 monthly spousal support for a lifetime be reduced to $400 each month for limited time of two years.

In addition to cutting the amount and the time limit on the spousal maintenance owed to the ex-wife, the judge in the case also decided that the ex-husband should receive 60 percent of the proceeds of the sale of the couple’s home and that the woman should pay thousands of dollars for her ex-husband’s legal fees.

Source: New York Post, “‘Disabled’ woman seeking alimony revealed to be belly dancer,” Dareh Gregorian, 4/16/2011