Divorce, Facebook style

Ken Savage's marriage already was strained, but the first sign that something was egregiously, electronically wrong came a year and a half ago, when his wife started taking her laptop into a different room to check Facebook.

Once, Savage walked in on her. She asked, startled, "What are you doing?" and shut the laptop with a thump.

The better question was: What was she doing?

Savage, 38, a computer guy, eventually tracked his wife's Facebook posts and chats to discover she had reconnected with a former boyfriend on the popular social-networking website and arranged a Saturday tryst in a hotel. His wife, a face painter, told him she would be working that day at a child's party.

The outcome: His wife is now his ex, and he runs a website called facebookcheating.com.

Savage, who lives in Lowell, Mass., may be single, but he's not alone. When it comes to divorce, Facebook is increasingly mentioned as a factor - whether one half of a couple disses the other online, or an innocent virtual reunion ends with a face-to-face (or other body parts) rendezvous under the sheets.

It's not somewhere L.A. Law's Arnie Becker would have checked, but these days Facebook provides an increasing amount of courtroom ammunition in divorce proceedings. Eighty-one percent of the nation's top divorce lawyers said more evidence in the last five years came from social-networking sites - MySpace and Twitter included - according to a survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Facebook philandering is so prevalent, it's central to the plot of a play being staged in Philadelphia next month. Built on a Lie, based on a true story, is about a married man who portrays himself as single in order to stoke multiple relationships on Facebook.

Though many of the 400 million active Facebook users post news about their kids' latest Little League game, other updates are, well, spicier.

Some boast about the person they slept with last night, or how sloppily drunk they got, said Philadelphia lawyer Thomas J. Petrelli Jr. Facebook was a factor in almost every divorce case he has handled in the last two years.

And it's become a factor in other kinds of cases. It permanently documents any kind of bad behavior that fuels opposing attorneys' arguments.

"If I write on your wall on Facebook, it persists. It stays there," said Matthew J. Salganik, an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University. "If we meet for coffee, there's no permanent record of that."