Cocktail waitress Jaimee Grubb, who says she had a 31-month affair with Woods, has provided Us Weekly alleged text messages from him. She says she has more than 300.
Grubb has also provided a voice mail she says is from Woods. In it, a worried man's voice says, "Hey, it's, uh, it's Tiger. I need you to do me a huge favor. Um, can you please, uh, take your name off your phone? My wife went through my phone. And, uh, may be calling you. . . . You've got to do this for me. Huge. Quickly. All right. Bye."
Tracy Quan, Daily Beast expert on infidelity and author of Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, says with some sympathy, "It's like we're back in the 19th century: 'Please! Burn my letters!' "
Web site TMZ reported Thursday that Elin Nordegren, Woods' wife, discovered him texting nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, said to be a Woods mistress, shortly before the famed Woods traffic accident. Uchitel, represented by celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, denied such allegations and called a news conference, but then suddenly canceled.
Technology has changed the nature of the illicit affair. It's astonishing, frankly, that people in the public eye would ever commit their passions to cyberspace at all, ever again, in light of what has happened with e-mails and text messages lately.
David Crystal, author of Language and the Internet and other studies of texting, writes by e-mail that "it's amazing indeed that people can be so naive about e-communication. As I say . . . slightly tongue in cheek, never send an e-message you wouldn't be prepared to defend in a court of law!"
Last year, Kilpatrick, the Detroit mayor, got snarled in a sex scandal when a few of the thousands of messages sent between him and chief of staff Christine Beatty in 2002 and 2003 somehow landed in the lap of the Detroit Free Press.
