Businessman sues Apple after wife finds ‘deleted’ iPhone messages to prostitute
15 June 2024, 19:05
A husband is pursuing legal action against Apple after he was left red-faced when his wife discovered 'deleted' iMessages sent to a prostitute.
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The "happily married" businessman is suing the technology giant over claims his divorce came as a direct result of the "brutal" messages being discovered.
He alleges the compromising texts, that he believed had been permanently wiped from his iPhone, were in fact still visible on the family iMac.
The unnamed man had arranged his liaisons with the prostitutes over text message during the last year of his marriage.
He now claims the tech giant does not make it sufficiently clear to customers that iMessages sent from one iPhone to another can be seen on other linked Apple devices.
The father, who had lived "happily" with his family in England until the discovery, believed that deleting the messages straight away from his phone would ensure the arrangements would not be detected.
However, the plan backfired when the businessman's wife discovered years' worth of undeleted messages on the family computer - messages he believed had been wiped for good.
His wife filed for divorce less than a month after the discovery.
Now, the businessman is suing Apple in the hope of recovering more than £5 million that he lost during the divorce process, alongside legal costs.
“If you are told a message is deleted you are entitled to believe it’s deleted," the anonymous man explained to The Times.
“It’s all quite painful and quite raw still. It was a very brutal way of finding out [for my wife]. My thoughts are 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."
“We were very happily married and had been for over 20 years. I think what had been a superb marriage has been thrown away for something which many men do, and some women do, but mainly men.
The man alleges he now has to take medicine to reduce the panic attacks he now has as a result of the messages being discovered and the subsequent divorce.
London-based lawfirm Rosenblatt, the firm hired by the man, is now looking to turn the individual case into a larger class-action lawsuit.
“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," said the man
"I think there would have been a way through it if the realisation hadn’t been so sudden and brutal and upsetting.”
One possibility for the lack of deletion may be down to the fact the device was not linked to a central iCloud account.
According to Apple support documents: "If you use Messages in iCloud, deleting a message or conversation on your Mac deletes it from all your devices where Messages in iCloud is on."
If the account is not linked to an iCloud account, deleting messages will only remove them from the local device and not the linked devices.
