Airing your dirty divorce laundry online can backfire. Ask Tricia Walsh-Smith.
Recent estimates show that over 10 million Americans write blogs, and over 65 million read them, sneaking peeks at every and any niggling post, be it about the blogger’s new puppy, to new shoes, or some personal essay on a love affair gone bad.
Expressing yourself on video has become easier, too, thanks to such websites as YouTube.com. While most video uploads are happy or funny or thought-provoking, some homegrown directors give into the irresistible temptation to air their dirty laundry in a very public way.
That is not a smart thing to do.
Take, for example, the angry ex-husband who was so upset with the fact that his wife brought him into to court over 30 times that he started a website called psychoexwife.com, now complete with the sale of T-shirts emblazoned with the blog’s brand.
All over the Internet there are wives complaining about cheating husbands, husbands ranting about cruel and faithless wives. But nothing to date compares with Tricia Walsh-Smith’s now infamous YouTube clip that documents her feelings over one of New York’s divorce battle royales. To date it’s been viewed to date by well over three million visitors.
The story begins in 1999 when Philip Smith, 76, the president of New York’s famous Shubert Theater Organization, married Walsh-Smith, 51, a well-known British actress and playwright. Two weeks prior to their marriage, Smith asked that his wife sign a prenuptial agreement stipulating that in the event that they should divorce, she would have 30 days to vacate Smith’s nine-bedroom Park Avenue apartment and she would receive a one-time lump sum payment of $750,000.
In what famed divorce attorney Raoul Felder called “A stupid moment of love,” Walsh-Smith signed that prenup, which is why, as she explained tearfully in one of her several YouTube.com videos, she was now facing eviction from her apartment.
In her most shocking YouTube moment, Walsh-Smith–while temporarily living by herself in the Park Avenue residence which she had once shared with Smith prior to his moving out and filling for divorce–informs viewers that her husband and her had not had sex for several years.
Walsh-Smith’s most outrageous stunt was to call her husband Philip’s office in order to speak to him on-camera. When told by his personal secretary that her boss was in a meeting, she asked, “Did you know that he kept Viagra, condoms, and porn movies, in his room?”
She then walks through her apartment, pointing out pictures of former friends and inlaws who she now considers evil. She reserves particular scorn for Smith’s adult daughters.
Unfortunately for her, this public attempt on Walsh-Smith’s part to humiliate her husband online had Harold Beeler, the New York City judge presiding over her divorce, empathizing with Philip Smith.
In July of last year, as reported in the New York Post, Judge Beeler, who ruled in Philip Smith’s favor, blasted Tricia Walsh-Smith for her video stunt, which he called “a calculated and callous campaign to embarrass and humiliate her husband and to pressure him into settling the case on more favorable terms than were stated in their prenuptial agreement.” The judge then added, “She has attempted to turn the life of her husband into a soap opera by directing, writing, acting in, and producing a melodrama.”
Smith was suing for divorce on the grounds of “cruel and inhuman treatment.” No doubt in her anger Walsh had not considered that, by humiliating her husband in such a public way, she was taking her case beyond the usual “he said, she said” of so many divorce proceedings and proving her husband’s contention that she was indeed cruel to him and his daughters.
The anger of divorce can burn like a fire that rages out of control. And the explosive ability of the Internet as a place to share that anger can be an irresistible temptation to those who feel they have been wronged.
Walsh-Smith would have been well advised to work with a counselor or therapist regarding her issues of anger. Instead she worked with a director and cameraman, in order to let her husband have it with both barrels.
Anger, however, is inevitably self-destructive. That was true in the age of Shakespeare and it’s just as true today in the age of the Internet.
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Other MVL Articles on Divorce
3 Steps for Mending a Broken Heart
Can You Ever Forgive Him? Yes, and Here’s How
Date Again, But Don’t Sleep Around
Divorced? Don’t Hurt Your Chances for Finding Love Again
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Is John Gray’s book specifically for those who are divorced
and looking to move on from grief to love.
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