With your wealth of investigation experience, what advice would you give to either party?
Jimmie: You know, as a private investigator for over 35 years, my only recommendation to people is if you’re going to cheat, number one you’re going to get caught, and if you’re going to cheat you don’t put what you’re doing on Facebook or in social media because somebody’s going to see it, somebody’s going to read it, and then somebody’s going to give it to your spouse. And if you think your spouse is cheating, 95% of the time they are. So, it just becomes a matter of gathering the evidence, confirmation of your suspicions to prove that they are in fact being unfaithful.
Doing a background check on social media is always good. You know, let’s face it, let’s say a woman meets a man for the first time and, you know, they get a little excited and googly-eyed and all that. Once they know the person’s name, what do you think the first thing they’re going to do is? They’re going to Google the person’s name, they’re going to check Facebook to see if there’s an account under that person’s name.
So, right from day one in a relationship, people are going to start doing a mini background check on each other. They’re going to want to know as much as they can about this other person, and that’s common. Not only that, private investigators are now being hired on a much more regular basis by the parent, usually of the wife, to do a background check on the future husband.
And they want to say, “Okay, our daughter is totally infatuated with this guy, and you know, love is blind. She doesn’t see anything, but we’re not blind, so let’s do a background check on him. Let’s make sure this guy was never married before, doesn’t have a whole bunch of kids, wasn’t in jail. Let’s make sure his career is what he says it is and he hasn’t just fabricated everything and the guy is for real,” and we do a lot of that.
I just did a case recently where we were actually hired by the parents of the daughter to get the evidence to confirm and confront the daughter with the main fact that her husband was cheating on her. You know, some women are totally blind even if you show them or tell them that you’re husband’s cheating on you. They don’t believe it. And sometimes you just have to show them the video of the husband, you know, walking down the street holding some other woman’s hand or stopping, having a woman leaning up against a building and he’s kissing her, and they need to see for themselves to actually understand that, “Hey, my husband is cheating on me.” We get hired by parents quite often.
Stephen Levine, is a Board Certified Specialist in Criminal Defense — an honor achieved by only the top criminal law attorneys in California. Mr. Levine has over 40 years of experience in criminal defense and family law serving Southern California, and is a highly regarded Super Lawyer as well as AV Rated attorney.