Is this revenge on the OW fair or not?

[pinkgown]

Obviously we don't have the whole story, but would you be tempted to do this, to take revenge on the OW on your mother's behalf? I think I might, if I felt my mother and my family had been torn apart by her actions.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9j9lpgjxlo

I have never said it's acceptable behaviour. IMO cheating is as bad also reprehensible behaviour but goes unpunished

So you’d be relaxed if an ex posted your nude pictures online claiming you were a prostitute, tried to harass your partner and damage his business and harrassed your child. Really? You’d genuinely be ok with that?

Thankfully the adultery nuts of Mumsnet are not in charge of the law. Otherwise cheating on your partner would see people in prison and revenge porn/ harassment would be fine (as long as it’s a woman doing it).

@SanctuaryCity If the adultery nuts on Mumsnet were in charge of the law, women couldn't actually commit any offence because all their criminal wrongdoing would lead back to a man as the root cause. And the man would be the one punished!

Where exactly did i say revenge porn shouldn't be illegal? Do you make a habit of twisting other people's words so you can argue against them? Thats narc behavior.

Or should I say... 'Ohhhh so you'd actually like it if your partner cheated on you multiple times from the beginning to end of your relationship, gaslighted you and emotionally abused you to the point you were medicated and need long term therapy?'

By 'adultery nuts' do you mean people with morals who don't make decisions to go around hurting their supposed loved ones?

Well her father had an affair, why not exact the same revenge on him?
The OW wasn’t an innocent but absolutely no way should nude pics be shown to anyone without her consent and this act of revenge is utterly disgusting.

@lalalapland Adultery is not and should not be illegal. It’s shitty behaviour but the justice system does not get involved with every instance of shit behaviour.

I am continually baffled by people who seem to think that being cheated on is a free pass to break the law or damage their children. Emotionally incontinent and vindictive parents (like Eleanor’s mum) are toxic & arguably a worse person than the dad who shagged someone else 10 years ago.

Yes. Summed up perfectly!

There are clearly a lot of bitter ex’s on this thread.

But the thing is, this man isn’t an ex is he? She took him back, and stayed with him. We know nothing about their marriage, what they went through to put it back on track, whether they may have gone through counselling etc.

all we know is that she whipped her children into a frenzy and encouraged them to wage war on not only the woman who had the affair with the still husband, but also against her husband and daughter.

So, would it have been ok if the daughter of the OW had targeted the father in this case’s wife and daughters? Because she was presumably just as much of a victim, or wasn’t she?

This isn’t just a case of posting some nude pictures of someone. It goes much, much deeper than that.

And tbh the wife sounds deranged to the point that I don’t blame the bloke for cheating, in fact he was a mug to go back to her.

They are all police officers as well, my encounters with the force have told me that cheating is practically normal in the police, not right, but certainly not unusual or especially scandalous.

I actually think the fact that adultery is not a criminal act and is not even a civil wrong that can be sued for is the big issue here. I really don’t understand why people can cause such immense pain to their nearest and dearest (sometimes lasting years and years) and not face any punishment?

my parents’ house was burgled while they were asleep. Obviously this scared them and made them afraid in their house for a while but they got a good security system and were over it after around 3 months. The criminals were unfortunately never caught but faced a maximum of 14 years in prison if sentenced. Meanwhile, my friend’s mother had an affair which tore the whole family apart, and has had immense mental health impacts on the dad and on my friend, even now, 15 years on. She receives literally no punishment. How on earth is that right?!

Yes, their lives are ruined. Because whereas the husband moved on from a relationship that had clearly ended, the mother stewed on it for over a decade and then encouraged her daughters to break the law with one losing her career and the other ending up in jail.

Yours is yet another post that refuses to accept that women should be held responsible for their own choices.

@NotOneOfTheInCrowd I completely agree with you. I don't know why let alone how anyone can tie this criminal behaviour back to the husband. Clearly, the person who is a wrong'un and has gotten away with it is the wife. She's destroyed both her daughter's lives by encouraging them to break the law or commit gross misconduct because she cannot get over an affair that happened 12 years ago.

Oh please! I really hope no one is suggesting that adultery should be made a crime? Are we going down the road of the Taliban? What punishment do we think is appropriate? And can you not see that it would be women who would bear the brunt of the punishment? I mean we are all temptresses or witches aren't we?

I definitely wouldn’t and other women wouldn’t either.

I can try to find a decent partner, it is much harder and impossible to remove nude photos off the internet. Women who have fought to try to remove nudes that were put on the internet without their consent have spent years trying to and living with the worry that they will be used against them.

I believe the penalty for adultery in Saudi is beheading isn’t it?

Thing is, most people will cheat at some point in their lives. Around 65% of people, both men and women admit to having cheated, so the figure is going to be much higher than that as plenty of people absolutely won’t admit it.

Absolutely not. The man in the relationship blameless is he?

From a criminal law perspective and probably from a moral perspective too, yes he is and for good reason too because if he wasn't, where do you stop? Let's consider some of the crimes the wife could commit; at what point do you think she's the one responsible?

1. Slapping the OW?
2. Criminal damage against the OW property?
3. Stalking the OW?
4. Leaving threatening messages on the OW's phone?
5. Hacking into the OW's personal devices?
6. Breaking into the OW house and snooping or stealing?
7. Putting naked pictures of the OW online?
8. Committing grievous bodily harm on the OW including a permanently disfiguring injury?
9. Committing arson on the OW's property?
10. Murdering the OW?

At what point do you accept that a woman is capable of regulating her emotions enough to commit a criminal offence in her own right? Because at the moment you and many other people her are trying to suggest an innocent man should get the blame for a woman who broke the law because he was unfaithful over a decade ago. You seem to be implying women cannot be criminally culpable in the same way as men, at least up to a point.

So, what is that point and why?

Well we don’t live in Saudi and the death penalty isn’t lawful here. I would suggest at the very least the wronged party should be able to sue. Only in cases of marriage. Literally any other action that harms someone comes with a legal consequence. I really don’t understand how you can tear someone’s life apart (including your children’s) and suffer no penalty whatsoever.

and no, I haven’t been cheated on, before anyone accuses me of being a “bitter ex-wife”!

@Feelinadequate23 Anyone who has had to sit through an episode of Top Gear or listened to a Coldplay record could beg to differ. Lots of harms don't have laws against them for the very good reason that it's for people to sort out themselves without recourse to an independent arbiter. Can you imagine what it would be like for a judge to try and manage an adultery case? Can you imagine what it would be like to be falsely accused of adultery (something abusive partners are rather fond of) and end up in a court room?

@ShinyShona that’s the argument used against bringing rape cases - “so many false accusations! Could ruin an innocent person’s life!” There could easily be penalties for falsely bringing a claim so I don’t think that argument holds.

I have no idea what your reference to top gear or Coldplay means? Adultery literally ruins lives, or at the least, years of lives. No other behaviour with those repercussions goes unpunished so why this one?

Because you would have to make it illegal. When was adultery illegal in the UK?

And what about when it’s not clear cut? Woman in abusive relationship meets someone who eventually helps her escape.

Someone in miserable relationship or abusive relationship meets someone.

Just as many other crimes aren’t clear-cut, neither is cheating, no matter how much people want to believe it is.

I mean look at this thread, there are plenty of people here who are justifying what these women have done, even though what they’ve done is criminal, and yet having committed adultery over ten years ago is worse than uploading revenge porn, threatening a husband and daughter and posting naked pictures of a woman on escort sites? Really?

And who decides at what point it constitutes adultery and worthy of punishment?

Some people would argue that it’s the point when someone has a friendship with someone of the opposite sex.

When someone confides in someone else it’s titled an emotional affair on here.

So when exactly should you be able to sue someone?

And what of abusive relationships where one or other partner is being accused. My ex used to constantly accuse me of having an affair. Claimed I’d been seen with a man and he knew everything. And yes, I was out with a male friend, and he knew that, but he had to take it further and tell me that I’d been seen, and been seen in an intimate position with said man. When actually he’d put a tracker on my phone and so knew where I was.

But unless you have physical proof that a couple have had sex you can’t prove it.

Oh and just to make things more complicated, if you separate and have a relationship with someone within six months of doing so, if you’re still married it’s classed as adultery. So should the separated partner be able to sue?

I going to guess their was a bit more to the story and the OW was a trusted family friend who had really mislead them.

Not an excuse but otherwise it's just bonkers that all three of them behaved this way.

No, it's not the same argument at all. Rape is a crime done to the person so there is a much, much stronger public interest argument for it to be a crime. Crimes for hurting people's feelings on the other hand and where false accusations could be very easy to fabricate ought to be treated with extreme caution (unless you think rape accusations are easy to fabricate too? I'm not convinced).

By the way, Coldplay and Top Gear are so bad that they give me a headache. But that's not a reason to have a law against them. People do stuff we don't like and can do us harm all the time - fracking, Brexit, TV shows that offend us - but you need to be resilient enough to get over it. You cannot police everything and the state certainly shouldn't be policing personal relationships (or art, if Coldplay can ever be considered art rather than an irritating noise).

Nope. Never advocated that. Women on the receiving end of a cheating husband should get a good solicitor and negotiate a fair settlement. They should ensure their children are protected both financially and emotionally as much as possible. Or they can decide to take him back. Either way, they are entitled to tell whomever they please, rant and rave, take him to the cleaners - whatever they need to do.

As long as it's fucking legal. And not emotionally abusive to their children. Anyone here arguing that cheating is emotional abuse - the abuse inflicted on the children of this marriage by the mother inciting them to commit criminal acts of this nature FAR outweighs a cheating dad.

A cheating parent is a difficult life circumstance to navigate but it's not trauma. What could cause trauma is how the parents the manage the situation to protect the children emotionally (or not).

A woman who gets knowingly involved with a married man has made a questionable life choice but it doesn't negate every other aspect of her personality and life and make her an automatoc figure of derision and castigation, who deserves illegal public humiliation of the worst kind.

Neither the father nor the OW are responsible for the criminal behaviour of the daughter (and borderline criminal behaviour of the mother and sister). As adults, they are absolutely responsible for that themselves.

Even if you argue that what happened in the daughter's life consititutes a trauma, it doesn't absolve her of responsibility for her own behaviour, both morally and legally. If a parent who has experienced a traumatic childhood then goes on to inflict criminal abuse on their children, do we say that it's ok, they're not capable of managing their behaviour, it's someone else's fault? No. If someone violently attacks someone else because they had a traumatic childhood, do we say that it's ok because they aren't able to manage their actions? No. If someone shares nude photos without consent, threatens people and conducts a sustained campaign of harassment, should we say that it's ok, no real consequence required, they just aren't able to manage their behaviour? No, we absolutely bloody don't.

This woman is solely responsible for her actions. The OW did not deserve what she did and neither did her family. The woman commited criminal acts and was sentenced accordingly, taking into account the lack of mitigating factors.