Should Husband Be Able to Blog About His Marriage?
Husband says blog is fiction, but his estranged wife calls it harassment.
Jan. 11, 2008 — -- Imagine your marriage is falling apart and your spouse goes online and blogs about it — writing about the relationship in detail for anyone and everyone to read.
That scenario has played out for one Vermont couple, and the woman who says she's being blogged about is taking her estranged husband to court to make him stop.
It's a new wrinkle in the annals of nasty divorces. In his blog, William Krasnansky lashes out about a marriage gone bad, saying: "It is my great fear that the ending of this tragic tale may be so very much worse than this terrible story's already horrific beginnings."
The Web site has been up for weeks, brimming with lurid allegations described in excruciating detail from the mundane to the sensational.
Krasnansky says his profanity-laced diatribes are just fiction, but his wife's attorney has said that the blogs are "inaccurate, derogatory, defamatory and inappropriate" and that they amount to harassment.
"Even though he says it's fiction, it's fiction 'wink wink,' so you start to think, ah hah, I know what that person's really like. That's a devastating thing to do to somebody," said family law attorney Lynne Gold-Bikin, who is not representing either party in the case.
A Vermont judge has ordered Krasnansky to shut down the Web site, but Krasnansky says that would violate his free speech so he has refused as "an act of civil disobedience."
The case raises some important legal questions about the Internet and free-speech issues.
"The Internet has become the world's soapbox … which is why this is such a cutting-edge legal question," Krasnansky's attorney Debra Schoenberg said today on "Good Morning America."
Psychological warfare has been used in a number of very public celebrity divorces.
When Heather Mills and former Beatle Paul McCartney separated, the rumors were salacious.
"I've had worse press than a pedophile or a murderer," Mills said.
Alec Baldwin faced scrutiny when he left a shocking message on his 11-year-old daughter's voice mail. Baldwin said his ex-wife Kim Basinger leaked the recording to the press as part of their ongoing custody battle. Basinger denied that accusation.
