June 15, 2024, 7:05 p.m
Businessman sues Apple after wife finds ‘deleted’ iPhone messages for prostitute.
Image: Alamy
A husband is taking legal action against Apple after he was left red-faced when his wife discovered “deleted” iMessages sent to a prostitute.
A ‘happily married’ businessman is suing the tech giant, claiming his divorce was a direct result of the revelations of the ‘brutal’ news.
He claims compromising texts he believed had been permanently deleted from his iPhone were in fact still visible on the family’s iMac.
During the last year of his marriage, the unnamed man arranged his liaisons with prostitutes through text messages.
They now claim that the tech giant is not adequately informing customers that iMessages sent from one iPhone to another can be seen on other connected Apple devices.
A husband 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 was living “happily” with his family in England until the revelations, believed that by deleting the messages directly from the phone he would ensure the measures were not discovered.
But the plan backfired when the businessman’s wife discovered several years’ worth of undeleted messages on the family computer—messages he believed 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 proceedings, along with legal costs.
Read more: ‘Shake it off the charts’: Taylor Swift fans set off earthquake monitors at first UK nights of singer’s Eras Tour
Read more: Liverpool issue heartfelt birthday message to Alan Hansen after he was ‘seriously ill’
“If you’ve been told a message is deleted, you have a right to 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]. I think if I had been able to talk to her rationally and she hadn’t been so brutally aware of it, I might still be married.”
A husband 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 and together for over 20 years. I think what was a great marriage was thrown away because of something that many men and some women do, but mostly men.
The man claims he now has to take medication to reduce the panic attacks he now has as a result of the revelations and subsequent divorce.
London law firm Rosenblatt, the firm hired by the man, is now trying to turn the individual case into a larger class action.
“When I spoke to some of my friends, some of them had affairs – which I consider a much bigger breach of trust – and still stayed married after they were discovered,” the man said.
“I think it would be the way to go if the realization wasn’t so sudden and brutal and upsetting.”
One possibility for the insufficient deletion could be the fact that the device was not linked to a central iCloud account.
According to Apple’s support documents: “If you use iCloud Messaging, deleting a message or conversation on your Mac deletes it from all your devices where iCloud Messaging is turned on.”
If the account is not linked to an iCloud account, deleting messages only removes them from the local device, not the linked devices.