We don’t blame you if you just recoiled when you read this title. This is by far the worst wrongdoing we’ve seen in the court system.
During their divorce, a judge in Utah shocked a woman by telling her to give her ex-husband a book of naked pictures. The pictures were in “boudoir style,” and the ex asked for them as part of their divorce.
Lindsay Marsh, the woman, said that she had the pictures taken early in their marriage and wrote loving, personal messages for her then-husband in the album. Chris Marsh wanted to keep the album “for the memories” when she asked for a divorce in April 2021, after they had been together for 25 years.
It’s violating and it’s incredibly embarrassing and humiliating,
Lindsay said.
The only way I can hopefully protect someone else from going through the same situation is to tell my story and expose that these are the types of things that he thinks are OK,
she continued.
Marsh was shocked when her ex asked for the pictures, and she was probably even more shocked when Judge Michael Edwards sided with her ex.
Edwards told Marsh that she could take the book to the photographer and have a copy made without her body. That was this jerk’s solution.
Marsh tried to play ball, but the photographer wouldn’t. In August, a judge said Marsh had to give the book to someone else who would edit the pictures.
That person is to do whatever it takes to modify the pages of the pictures so that any photographs of [Lindsay Marsh] in lingerie or that sort of thing or even without clothing are obscured and taken out,
Edwards wrote in the ruling.
He wrote that the words would be kept, “maintained for memory’s sake”
Marsh was shocked when she found out she had to give the book to a stranger. She even asked the judge’s clerk to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood the decision. She recalls saying,
The judge has ordered me to give nude photos of my body to a third party that I don’t know without my consent?
When the original photographer found out what was going on, she decided not to do it. Still, everything about it is so wrong.
Lindsay said,
Because these are things that were sensual and loving that I wrote to my husband that I loved. You’re my ex-husband now.
She has to keep the originals until December in case the ex “objects” to the changes. Then she’s going to throw them into a fire.
Chris Marsh said that the books were full of memories and that they were not “wrong.”
I cherish the loving memories we had for all those years as part of normal and appropriate exchanges between a husband and wife, and sought to preserve that in having the inscriptions,
he said.
A professor of criminal law at the University of Utah called the case “very strange.”
In my opinion, the judge here has just made a mistake in the balancing of interests and has tipped things too far in one direction,
Paul Cassell said.
We, for one, hope that she can appeal and that she really does so.
