Commentary

Divorce Via Facebook Now A Thing

There’s an app for that [divorce]! Last week, a Manhattan Supreme Court justice ruled that a woman could serve divorce papers to her estranged husband via Facebook, after repeated attempts to reach him via other means failed, according to the New York Daily News.

The woman in question, Ellanora Baidoo, petitioned the court to be allowed to deliver the divorce papers to her husband, Victor Sena Blood-Dzraku, via private messages on Facebook, arguing that Blood-Dzraku could not be reached by other methods.

According to the ruling Blood-Dzraku has had no fixed place of residence on file with the postal service since 2011, nor does the Department of Motor Vehicles have any record of him. His prepaid cell phone, which he stopped answering, has no billing address associated with it, and he does not have a regular place of employment. Baidoo even hired an investigative detective to try to track him down, without success.

Baidoo, who never lived with Blood-Dzraku, fell out with him because he broke his promise to have a traditional Ghanaian wedding following their civil ceremony in 2009. Baidoo wanted to invite her family from Ghana for the traditional wedding. They separated after this disagreement and haven’t seen each other since.

Justice Matthew Cooper ruled that Baidoo could serve legally binding divorce papers via private messages on Facebook -- stipulating, however, that she must send one message a week for three weeks in a row.

Cooper’s decision read in part: “As recently as ten years ago, it was considered a cutting edge development in civil practice for a court to allow the service of a summons by email… It would appear that the next frontier in the developing law of the service of process over the internet is the use of social media sites as forums through which a summons can be delivered.”

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