Will no one think of the poor cheating men?
Because years of incriminating messages popping up on the family's Apple computer is absolutely not their fault... ok?
Ever since Adam and Eve, man has had a bit of a problem with the apple. So, spare a thought for the poor chap who has been caught cheating on his wife with sex workers, after compromising messages he thought he’d deleted from his iPhone later popped up on the family iMac.
The well-meaning husband arranged meetings with prostitutes and then oh-so thoughtfully erased the trail of crumbs, so that his wife of more than 20 years and mother of his children wouldn’t find out. Not all heroes wear capes. Imagine her surprise, then, when she saw several years’ worth of messages on their joint computer. Imagine absolutely no-one else’s surprise when she filed for divorce within a month.
Except one person, that is: her husband. The shocked middle-aged English businessman, only known as Richard (and absolutely not Dick) is now suing Apple for the £5 million he reportedly lost in the split, on the grounds that it wasn’t made clear that messages deleted on your iPhone could still be seen on other linked devices.
All together now: poor diddums.
Can you imagine how hard all this has been on poor Richard? First you have all the pesky admin of contacting prostitutes in the first place - not exactly something you can outsource to your executive assistant, you’d probably get #MeTooed these days, hahaha! - then you have to go through deleting the blasted things, only to lose five million quid your wife because your phone manufacturer, and absolutely not you, has behaved carelessly, callously and doesn’t respect the sanctity of your family.
Of course, we can’t know the full facts of the situation, so we only have Richard’s word to go on. So let’s hear what he has to say.
“It’s all quite painful and quite raw still. It was a very brutal way of [my wife] finding out. 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.”
Oh, phew, that explains it: Richard is only divorced because Apple told him the messages had been deleted, not because he betrayed his wife. And he’s only divorced because of how she found out, not because he betrayed his wife. I get it now.
There’s more. “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.
“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. I think there would have been a way through it if the realisation hadn’t been so sudden and brutal and upsetting,” he added.
Doesn’t your heart just go out to the guy? It must have been so, so traumatising for him to have his wife learn the truth about the sort of man she was married to, in that way. No wonder he’s been on “beta blockers to try to reduce my panic attacks.” No wonder he simply hasn’t had a moment to consider what medication or therapy his now ex-wife might need and that, just maybe, she’d rather have had a husband who didn’t go behind her back in the first place. But best not mention that, in case Dickie has another panic attack. So raw. So painful for him. After all, this is something ‘many men do’. They just can’t help it, you see, it’s a natural part of being a man.
As for the question of whether Apple smashed his wedding vows to smithereens, or if he managed to do that completely by himself, the courts will have to decide. So far the tech giant itself hasn’t commented on the case, but that isn’t holding Richard back from canvassing for other poor men in his situation in the hopes of a class action lawsuit.
“In another case messages were apparently appearing on an Apple TV being watched by the wife upstairs while the man was downstairs on his phone,” he explains. Good God, when will this barbarity end? Will no one think of the poor cheating men who can’t even TEXT on their linked devices anymore? Will no one think of the burner phone industry, which is presumably rapidly going out of business?
“If you are told a message is deleted you are entitled to believe it’s deleted,” Richard told The Times. Which definitely doesn’t mean ‘I’m only sorry I got caught.’
Wonder if Gavin Rossdale will ask to be joined to proceedings as another man wronged by Apple.