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ew York Times
April 18, 2008
When the Ex Writes a Blog, Dirty Laundry Is Aired
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
This week, the potential of the Internet to expose and disgrace when
marriages fall apart came into stark relief as Tricia Walsh Smith, who is
being divorced by Philip Smith, a theater executive, put a video on YouTube
announcing that they never had sex, and yet she found him hoarding Viagra,
pornography and condoms.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Smith's lawyer, David Aronson, called the video
"appalling" and said: "Mr. Smith is a very private person. This is obviously
embarrassing."
But in an era when more than one in 10 adult Internet users in the United
States have blogs, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project,
many people are using the Web to tell their side of a marital saga. Despite
the legal end of a marriage, the confessions can stretch toward eternity in
a steady stream of enraged or despondent postings.
In separation, of course, one person's truth can be another's lie. Often the
postings are furtive. But even when the ex-spouse is well aware that he or
she is starring in a blog and sues to stop it, recent rulings in New York
and Vermont have showed the courts reluctant to intervene.
For the blogger, the writing can be therapeutic.
Until the morning her husband, David Sals, told her he "was done" with their
marriage, Jennifer Neal had portrayed him so lovingly on her blog that he
was called DearSweetDave. By the afternoon of that October day last year,
Ms. Neal had shared what she portrayed as his perfidy with the 55,000
regular readers she says visit http://www.NakedJen.com/.
Soon after, readers came to know him by a far less flattering name, and as
the guy whose insensitivity made Jen so sick that she was throwing up every
day and so poor that she lost her house in Santa Cruz, Calif.
And when a despairing Jen discovered in February that her ex-husband had put
his information up on Match.com, an Internet dating service, she linked to
it from her blog, giving her readers a chance to share their thoughts.
Mr. Sals protested, but Ms. Neal held firm: "If he wants to tell his side of
the story, he should get his own blog."
Mr. Sals said that he had stopped reading her blog but that his family still
sometimes looked at it and got upset. "I've never tried to make her stop,
but I've definitely had to adjust to giving up my privacy," he said.
It is impossible to say just how many people are blogging about divorce, but
the percentage of Internet users with personal blogs has quadrupled in five
years, according to Pew. Mary Madden, a senior researcher with the Pew
Project who specializes in online relationships, said that in emotionally
charged times, some people go to the Web.
"It is a blank slate to unload all the frustrations and emotions of a
personal crisis," Ms. Madden said.
There will certainly be consequences down the line of all this sharing. "The
long-term impact of the persistent information on line has not been fully
felt," Ms. Madden said.
"People tend to think that they are blogging for a small group of friends or
that they are anonymous," she said. But that is not really the case, she
said, because "all it takes is one friend posting a link to your blog to out
you."
Laurie, a Manhattan mother, started podcasting http://DivorcingDaze.com
during her divorce in 2006. Each week Laurie and a divorced friend have a
glass of wine and tape their discussions of the day's topics -- spas, their
boyfriends, Eliot Spitzer -- and then post to the web.
Laurie never told her ex-husband she was doing the programs because they
were meant as advice to others and not as retribution, she said. She does
not use her last name or her ex-husband's in her talks and asked that both
names be withheld for this article.
Still, Laurie maintains no pretense of impartiality. The 10,000 monthly
listeners she says download DivorcingDaze episodes have heard Laurie say
that she discovered her ex-husband was having an affair with his boss from
e-mail on his BlackBerry, and that he had told their older daughter he
wasn't cheating because the marriage, in his mind, was already over
"I am 100 percent aware that if he told his version of the marriage, it
would be completely different," Laurie said.
So different in fact, that when her husband did find out about the podcasts
last year, he sued her. He argued that they included statements that were
"obnoxious, derogatory or offensive" and that they violated the terms of the
divorce settlement that she not "harass" or "malign" him.
In a decision only weeks ago, however, a justice of the Supreme Court of the
State of New York said his complaints were not grounds for blocking the
podcast. While Laurie's statements may be "ill-advised and do not promote
co-parenting," the court wrote, they were covered by the First Amendment.
Obviously, divorce lawyers are taking note. Deborah Lans of Cohen Lans, a
Manhattan law firm with a thriving matrimonial practice, said, "The last
thing you want to see is angry people making uncontrolled statements."
Ms. Lans said her divorce agreements included a confidentiality provision
that forbade either party to publish even fictionalized accounts of the
marriage, but not every lawyer insists on that. The judge in Laurie's case
explicitly noted that her agreement did not have such a provision.
Earlier this year, a court in Vermont did tell William Krasnansky to take
down his lightly disguised account of his divorce, in which he described his
ex-wife in an unflattering light and blamed her for forcing him to sell
their home at "a ruinous loss." Mr. Krasnanksy's ex-wife had complained that
it was "defamatory." But weeks later, after a firestorm of criticism, the
court reversed itself and gave him the right to continue to publish.
For some ex-spouses, revenge is not the point. Writing about divorce can be
good for readership.
"The bloggers who are doing the best are those who are injecting their
personal lives," said Penelope Trunk, the author of the Brazen Careerist
blog, who has written frequently in the past year about the collapse of her
15-year marriage.
Ms. Trunk wrote about going to what she thought was a first session with a
new marriage counselor chosen by her husband only to discover it was a
divorce lawyer's office. That was one of her most popular posts.
More painfully, she has written about the problems of a son who has
Asperger's syndrome and said that both she and her husband believed the
challenges of raising him helped cause their divorce.
But this kind of brutal honesty is not a good idea for children, especially
since most harbor feelings of guilt about their parents' divorce anyway,
said Irene Goldenberg, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University
of California, Los Angeles.
"It is not good for children to get personal information in that way," Dr.
Goldenberg said. "And people have to consider doing things in the heat of
the moment. The way they feel now will not be how they feel in two years,
and there is no way it can be retrieved."
Ms. Truck disagrees.
"It is a generational issue," she said. "We think it will be a big deal, but
it won't be to them. By the time they are old enough to read it, they will
have spent their entire life online. It will be like, 'Oh yeah, I expected
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