A New York judge has allowed a woman to file for divorce using Facebook’s private messaging service.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper ruled that the Ghanaian woman could use the social networking site to send a divorce summons once a week for three weeks unless her husband, also from Ghana, acknowledges them.
This decision was made as the husband had proved very difficult to locate. The couple married in a civil ceremony in 2009, but the relationship began to break down soon afterwards. The husband had promised to have a traditional Ghanaian wedding ceremony but did not follow through.
Their marriage was never consummated and the couple had never lived together. According to the ruling, the only way the husband communicated with his wife following their wedding was through Facebook and by phone.
In his decision, Judge Cooper said that the husband had told his wife “that he has no fixed address and no place of employment”, and that the last address he had given for contact was “an apartment that he vacated in 2011”.
Andrew Spinnell was the wife’s attorney. He said that they had made extensive efforts to locate the husband “including hiring a private detective — and nothing”. There was not even a record of the husband in the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The judge allowed the wife to use Facebook to issue a summons because the husband had “refused to make himself available to be served with divorce papers”.
Mr Spinnell said that his client has sent the first of her Facebook messages but is yet to receive a response from her husband.
In 2013, an attorney in San Diego served a divorce petition using Facebook after his client’s wife had left the United States a few years earlier.
Photo by Maria Elena via Flickr