Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

Don’t Spy on Your Cheating Spouse

Excerpt from: Lawyers.com (click for full article)

 

Unexplained absences, furtive phone calls, mysterious credit card charges — there are all kinds of clues that a spouse may be having an affair. However, one piece of detective work that partners who think they’ve been cuckolded should not undertake is to intercept their spouse’s electronic communications, or stick a GPS transmitter on his or her car.

With a plethora of technological options making it ever-easier to catch cheating lovers in the act, suspicious spouses need beware of taking the spy games too far and violating state or federal law as a result.

A recent Wall Street Journal story chronicles men who crossed a line trying to keep tabs on their wives and were convicted of stalking, invasion of privacy and violations of the federal Wiretap Act, which bans interception, disclosure or use of electronic communications acquired through the use of a “device.”

Real Ex-Wife of Beverly Hills to Pay $4 Million for Spying on Children

Excerpt from: Lawyers.com (click for full article)

 

A real – not reality show – ex-wife of a Beverly Hills billionaire has been ordered by a jury to pay $4 million for spying on her ex’s three children and personal assistant.

Jacqueline Colburn, who was 38 when she married 85-year-old billionaire philanthropist Richard Colburn, was accused of wiretapping hundreds of private calls by her husband and his three children in order to get a leg up in her divorce.

The couple was divorced in 2002 and Richard died in 2004.

Only years later did his children and a personal assistant discover they had been wiretapped when someone emailed them a New York Times article about a rogue private eye named Anthony Pellicano, convicted of conspiracy, wiretapping and other charges and sent to federal prison for 15 years. Their names appeared in the article as victims of Pellicano’s illegal spying.

In the children’s lawsuit for invasion of privacy, they claimed that their former step-mom paid Pellicano in cash and jewelry to bug their phones with a software program called TeleSleuth, and to listen to calls going in and out of the home for nearly a year.