June 15, 2024, 7:05 PM
Businessman sues Apple after woman finds ‘deleted’ iPhone messages for prostitution.
Image: Alamy
A man is taking legal action against Apple after he was left red-faced when his wife discovered ‘deleted’ iMessages sent to a prostitute.
The ‘happily married’ businessman is suing the tech giant, claiming his divorce was a direct result of the ‘brutal’ messages discovered.
He claims that the compromising texts, which he thought had been permanently erased from his iPhone, were in fact still visible on the family iMac.
The unnamed man had arranged his contacts with the prostitutes via text message during the last year of his marriage.
He now claims that the tech giant is not making it clear to customers that iMessages sent from one iPhone to another will be seen on other linked Apple devices.
A man is taking legal action against Apple after he was left red-faced when his wife discovered ‘deleted’ iMessages sent to a prostitute. 
Image: Alamy
The father, who had been living ‘happily’ with his family in England until the discovery, believed that immediately deleting the messages from his phone would ensure the appointments would go unnoticed.
However, the plan backfired when the businessman’s wife discovered years of undeleted messages on the family computer – messages he thought had been deleted 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 he lost during the divorce process, in addition to legal costs.
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“When you’re told a post has been deleted, you can believe it has been deleted,” the anonymous man explained to The Times.
“It’s all quite painful and still quite raw. It was a very brutal way to find out [for my wife]. My thoughts are that if I could have talked to her rationally and she hadn’t realized it so brutally, I might still be married.”
A man is taking legal action against Apple after he was left red-faced when his wife discovered ‘deleted’ iMessages sent to a prostitute. 
Image: Alamy
“We were very happily married for more than twenty years. I think what had been a wonderful marriage has been thrown away for something that a lot of men do, and some women, but mostly men.
The man claims he now has to take medication to reduce the panic attacks he is now having as a result of the discovery of the messages and the subsequent separation.
London-based law firm Rosenblatt, the firm hired by the man, is now trying to turn the individual case into a larger class action lawsuit.
“When I talk to some of my friends, some of them have had affairs – which I consider a much bigger breach of trust – and are still married after it was exposed,” the man said.
“I think there would have been a way out if the realization hadn’t been so sudden, brutal and disturbing.”
One possibility for the lack of deletion could be due to the fact that the device was not associated with a central iCloud account.
According to Apple support documents: “When you use Messages in iCloud, the message or conversation on your Mac is deleted from all your devices that have Messages in iCloud turned on.”
If the account is not linked to an iCloud account, deleting messages will only delete them from the local device and not from the linked devices.