Family Law

Text Messages Are Digital Lipstick for Cheating Spouses

By J. Benjamin Stevens

Tiger Woods, Sen. John Ensign, the Mayor of Detroit -- all men whose adultery was discovered by text messages to their lovers.  Family law attorneys have seen a rise in the number of situations where a cheating spouse's own text messages tell his/her spouse about the adultery, and that number is expected to continue to grow in the future.

Most people know that email messages remain on their computers even if deleted, but they do not think about text messages in the same way.  A copy of the message remains on the cell phones of both the sender and receiver for at least some period of time, and communications companies retain them for short periods of time.  AT&T says that it keeps its text messages for 72 hours at most, while Verizon claims it saves them for 5 to 10 days.

Of course, younger cell phone users use text messages more than older users, so the number of cases involving this issue is expected to grow. The Nielsen Company reports that text messages now outnumber mobile voice calls three to one.  Monthly text messages sent or received jumped to 584 per person in the quarter ending in September, which is a 60 percent increase from a year earlier.

Source: 'Text Messages: Digital Lipstick on the Collar' by Laura M. Holson, published in the New York Times.

Full post as published by SC Family Law Blog on December 30, 2009 (boomark / email).