Man Blames Apple For His Divorce After Wife Finds 'Deleted' Chat With Sex Worker

A man, identified as Richard for anonymity in the media, is planning to sue multinational corporation Apple. He alleged that the company’s technology led to his divorce. According to Richard, his wife discovered his chats with sex workers on the family iPad, which he believed were deleted after he removed them from his iPhone. However, unbeknownst to him, the messages remained accessible on the iPad, leading to his wife finding a year’s worth of incriminating texts. She subsequently filed for divorce.

Now, Richard plans to sue Apple for reportedly not making it clear that the messages do not automatically get deleted across devices. He hopes to recover £5 million, which is approximately Rs 53 crore, that he lost during his divorce settlement. Richard told the British newspaper The Times that he was married for 20 years and would have stayed longer in the marriage had his messages which disclosed his bookings with sex worker had not been discovered. He said, “It’s all quite painful and quite raw still. It was a very brutal way of finding out for my wife. My thoughts are that if I had been able to talk to her rationally and she had not had such a brutal realisation of it, I might still be married.”

London-based law firm Rosenblatt, hired by Richard to represent him, alleges that their client has been under tremendous stress after the end of his marriage. They are now looking to turn this individual case into a class-action lawsuit against Apple. Explaining the reasoning behind it, Richard said, “Talking to some of my friends, some of them have had affairs, which I consider a much greater breach of trust — and still stayed married after they had been revealed.”

Meanwhile, Apple clarifies on its website, “If both of your devices are signed in to the same iCloud account, the messages would come into each device.” However, if devices are not synced to the same iCloud account, messages deleted from one device may not be removed from another.

Apple also has a feature for recovering deleted chats by viewing them in the “Recently Deleted” folder. One can recover items in the Recently Deleted folder for up to 30 days. After 30 days, all the messages are removed and after 40 days the messages are permanently deleted from iCloud.