CLEVELAND — Dread of the unknown hung in the air as Lynn France typed two words into the search box on Facebook: the name of the woman with whom she believed her husband was having an affair.
Click. And there it was, the stuff of nightmares for any spouse, cuckolded or not. Wedding photos. At Walt Disney World, no less, featuring her husband literally dressed as Prince Charming. His new wife, a pretty blonde, was a glowing Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by footmen.
“I was numb with shock, to tell you the truth,” says France, an occupational therapist from Westlake, a Cleveland suburb. “There was like an album of 200 pictures on there. Their whole wedding.”
Affairs were once shadowy matters, illicit encounters whispered about and often difficult to prove. But in the age of Facebook and Twitter and lightning-fast communication, the notion of privacy is fast becoming obsolete. From flirtatious text messages to incriminating e-mails, indiscretions are much easier to track — especially if potentially damaging photographic evidence is posted online.
France, 41, was not completely blindsided by her Facebook discovery, which happened in January 2009. That fall, she had grown suspicious when her husband began taking frequent business trips, even leaving the day the couple’s newborn son came home from the hospital. Once, she found his passport at home when he was supposed to be in China for business.
In October, before leaving for another trip, her husband left a hotel website up on the couple’s computer screen.
“So I actually went there with a girlfriend, just to see for myself for sure,” France says. “He was there with this girlfriend. I said, ‘Hey, I’m his wife. We’ve got a baby.”’
The woman told France that she was engaged to France’s husband. “Sure enough, they were registered for a wedding at Target,” France says.
A girlfriend recommended checking the woman’s Facebook page, which was then public, France says, but has since become private. There, France found evidence of an unfolding relationship that she still couldn’t wrap her head around. Overwhelmed with two young children, she confronted her husband. She says he told her he wouldn’t actually go through with the wedding.
It wasn’t until she saw the wedding photos that she finally began divorce proceedings.
Lynn’s husband, John France, does not deny that he has remarried. Rather, he simply is insisting that he was never married to Lynn in the first place.
His attorney said Tuesday that his client is asking a family law court to declare that his marriage to Lynn was “void since its inception.”
He accuses her of using the Facebook story for attention as the couple fights for custody of their two children.
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