No, it's not "immoral" to look up public records
Yes, it's harder and harder to get away with lies in the digital age
A friend of a friend, let’s call her Carrie, approached me recently, voicing some concerns about her fiancé, whom I’ll refer to as Deuce in honor of Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (though to be honest, that’s an unfair comparison to Bigalow, who was actually a nice guy).
I tweeted about what happened next:
I wanted to expand on this story, because Deuce, who is now very much Carrie’s ex-fiancé, has since contacted me to try to tell his version of events, as well as to rant about what an awful person I am for looking up his court records. With Carrie’s permission, I’d like to discuss this situation and its implications:
— Carrie and Deuce met at the beginning of the pandemic. Six months into it, Deuce proposed. Why is the pandemic relevant? Well, you’ll see in a minute…
— When it became obvious that a vaccine was on the horizon, Deuce and Carrie began discussing wedding dates. At this point, Carrie realized that she wasn’t really in touch with any of Deuce’s relatives and didn’t know much about them. When she expressed her wish to at least “meet” some of them on Zoom, she noticed that Deuce became cagey, reticent, and irritated with her.
— Carrie did end up getting a friend request from Deuce’s sister. Then she noticed some sarcastic comments that his sister had left beneath some old family photos posted on Facebook. These included references to Deuce’s ex-wives.
— Carrie confronted Deuce about this, because he had previously told her that he’d never been married. Deuce said that the “wives” were live-in girlfriends and explained that he and his sister did not have the most harmonious and loving relationship. Which is — fair enough, right? But by this point, Carrie was suspicious enough about Deuce to reach out to an investigator — i.e. me.
Public court records confirmed that Deuce’s sister wasn’t lying. Deuce had been married twice. As luck would have it, both of his ex-wives were very easy to find on social media, and had an active presence there. At this point, I turned my findings over to Carrie, who decided to take a chance and contact these women.
Both women were very willing to talk about Deuce, about their marriages, and about the fact that — AND HERE’S THE BIG ONE — between the two of them, Deuce had fathered three children, none of whom he was in contact with. At all. I suspected this already, as I’d noticed an obvious resemblance in some of the kid pictures these women had posted to Facebook, but now we were 100% sure.
Apparently, Deuce was pretty damn “wild” back in the day (this was the terminology they used) and it was decided by both women that it was better if the kids had better father figures. Deuce was happy to comply.
Lying about two divorces is bad enough, but not telling your fiancé that you have three biological kids out there was beyond bad. Carrie walked. It was, and is, heartbreaking for me to confirm their worst suspicions to people. However, as she put it herself, Carrie had dodged a major bullet.
Then Deuce tricked someone in Carrie’s family into giving him my number, and we had a few rather, uh, terse exchanges. Here’s a screenshot of one of them:
Deuce’s side of the story was as follows:
He did run wild when he was young. It happened years ago. He was a changed man now, he said. He also said that he couldn’t help it if his kids were growing up without him, and that he deserved a second chance.
I’m not a relationship expert, but I do know serial liars. This is why I would’ve been more sympathetic to Deuce’s point of view if he hadn’t blatantly concealed the truth from his fiancé to begin with.
We all make mistakes! I can confirm that as a survivor of an absolutely disastrous marriage! Here’s the thing, though, I’m upfront with the people I date about being divorced and having a child. It’s the kind of basic information that, if you want to talk morals, you should absolutely share with someone. Somebody wants to judge me for being a single mom and a divorcée? Cool. Sounds like a somebody I shouldn’t be with in the first place.
Deuce’s argument was that he’d committed no crime, and that the real issue was that both Carrie and I had “invaded his privacy” by looking up public court records.
I can admit that it’s jarring to realize just how much of your information is out there, waiting to be picked over by other people. Believe me, I find it jarring when extremely online people bring up things I’d said and done on the internet years ago myself.
However, when something is public record… it’s public record. Would it have been better if Carrie was not forced to hire me to discover the truth about Deuce? Absolutely! (Well, not better for my wallet, but whatever)
However, Deuce had already told her a heap of lies by that point. The only way out of this toxic situation was for Carrie to get someone to either confirm or disprove what was going on.
And as much as I hate bringing people bad news, I also think that disappointment is better than a lifetime of lies. Just because you don’t want to know something doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know it.
The moral dimension of this situation, for me, is this one: Just because we may not realize how much information about us is publicly accessible doesn’t mean that our privacy was “invaded.” It means that we should strive to be realistic — and upfront about our individual pasts with the people we love.
On a related note — the pandemic has made it very hard for people to date. A lot of people have felt the impulse to settle. Carrie wanted me to tell you all that this impulse caused her to overlook alarm bells with regards to Deuce’s perpetual lying, and this was before she realized just how deep the lies went. As Carrie put it, “Pandemic blinders are real.” Keep that in mind as we all struggle to return to a semblance of normalcy.
In conclusion, I wish Carrie all of the luck in the world — and I really hope that Deuce goes to therapy.
Do you think you have a serial liar in your life? If you want help with that, let me know, I’m over at nvantonova {at} gmail (dot) com. Did you find out something new and important today? Please consider a paid subscription — it’s just $5 a month and it helps keep the lights on my little detective operation!