by KYW's Amy Feldman

When a weblog entry starts “My ex-wife is a piece of” you know that sentence isn’t going to end with the word “cake.”  In fact, if you type the words “I hate my ex” into a web browser, you will come up with more than eight hundred thousand entries of people all too happy to put into cyberspace what they would have written in their diaries back in the day—then hidden the key so no one could see the terrible, horrible things they thought about another human being.  And so here presents itself a legal issue that many fail to consider.

In the course of a divorce, exes will write agreements detailing the end of the relationship down to the last salad fork—but don’t contain confidentiality or nondisparagement clauses.  When writing up your final divorce papers, consider including a clause that would preclude the other from writing nasty things about you and posting them in cyberspace where a future employer—or your own child—might someday find it.  If you need to say something nasty, get one of those old fashioned diaries, say what you need to say in it—and then throw away the key.