Investigating His Trail
For a variety of reasons, you may need to collect and document evidence of your husband's addiction.
You are likely to learn a lot about his addiction by looking at his computer or his cell phone.
If he's smart, he's doing basic things to cover his trail. However, many of our addict husbands just aren't that smart. If you Discovered him only recently, likely he hasn't worried too much about covering his trail, and you can learn a great deal before he wises up. If YOU WANT TO. And maybe you don't.
I suggest it would be wise to collect what you can as quickly as you can, and save it for later. It's hard to know what will be useful and what will not. Your impulse may be to delete or destroy the evidence that you find... to protect your children, to protect him, to attempt to erase it from your own memory. I suggest you document everything just in case you need it later.
Downloaded Porn: Photos and Video
Check the computer, especially if he has his own private computer. Look in the photo and video file folders. Also be sure to check the Recycle/Trash folder. My husband had a staggering amount of porn videos that he had dragged to the Trash can, but he failed to delete or erase it.
Check the Outlook or other email program on the off chance that he isn't hiding his email. (Likely he is using web-based email access, but occasionally they slip up.)
If his computer is password protected, there is a workaround:
If that link doesn't help you, just do a Google search for "password recovery" and the specific operating system.
If you have access to his computer, by all means take advantage of it. DO NOT erase anything. Document it! If you know how to make a copy of the drive to another hard disk, do it.
Browsers & Search Engines
Maybe you already know this, but your computer(s) usually have multiple browsers installed on them. The popular browsers are:
FireFox,
Internet Explorer,
Safari,
Google Chrome,
Opera...
See what you've got on your computer. Your husband may be using the "family" browser or a different one.
The popular search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo. There are others, but not used as commonly. Your husband may use an "alternate" search engine to hide his internet searches from you.
Browser History
You may be able to glean great amounts of information from your husband's Browser History. He may be smart enough to clear the browser history or to use the Private Window feature (which leaves no browser history), but he may not think of some other things, such as the fact that when you start typing into the search box, it begins to fill in your favorite searches for you. Go to the computer he uses and type in a few leading words such as "escort", "free porn", "naked women" etc., and see what comes up. You may just find a list of the sites he frequently visits.
Another trick is to use the option to Restore Previous Session or view Recently Closed Tabs in your browser after he has used it to see where he has been most recently.
Log-ins and Passwords
While your husband may be clearing his browser history, he may not realize that internet log-ins and passwords are commonly stored in your computer. Here's how you may be able to find his accounts and recover his passwords:
Free Password Recovery Tools for Windows Computers
How to Recover Passwords on a Mac through the OSX Keychain
Look for passwords to any dating websites, the home or cell phone companies, email accounts, and financial institutions. You may need these! If you access any of his dating accounts, be sure to get screen shots of what you find before it disappears. Email digital copies to yourself, a trusted friend or family menber, or save on a thumb drive.
Cell Phones
He may have a special phone he uses for his addiction. Or he may have a cell phone on a shared plan with you.
If your husband uses a cell phone on a shared plan with you, you already have access to his cell phone records. All you need to know is the log-in on your provider's website. This should give you access to all the cell phone records for all phones on the plan. These records should include both calls and text messages. You may be able to download this data into a spreadsheet to figure out who he is calling and texting and when.
Once you have his phone records in a spreadsheet, you can sort them by number, and see who he is calling often.
Three ways to match a phone number with a name and address:
Use the White Pages to do a Reverse Phone search.
Paste the phone number in your search engine and see what comes up. (I found one of my husband's callers was an escort whose number and photo came up immediately.)
Use a phone tracer service, which will include information on many cell phone numbers that won't come up in the White Pages search. (see below)
Free Phone Tracer
I ended up subscribing for a one month free trial of Free Phone Tracer in order to get the names of my husband's girlfriends. It was easy to cut and paste numbers from my downloaded spreadsheet of phone records into the Free Phone Tracer search box. More than half the phone numbers resulted in a name and address. I called several of them to ascertain that these were women he was actually in contact with. Most of them were surprised to find that he was married, and were forthcoming with tidbits of information about him.
He travels for business, and he had women everywhere!
I mostly did this whole search and discovery to prove to myself that this man was lying to me left and right. (At the time, he was claiming to be doing his 12 Steps, and proudly proclaiming that he was treasurer of his Sexaholics Anonymous group.) I also did it to prove to my children and my attorneys that the man was lying, because he was truly such a convincing liar.
In the end, for divorce, proof of his rampant infidelity was meaningless legally. Be aware of that.
iPhone
If your husband happens to use an iPhone and syncs/backs-up with one of your home computers, you're in luck. You actually have access to any text messages he has not deleted from his phone.
Here's how:
Read iPhone SMS (text) back-up from a Mac or Windows computer
Find my (hidden) iPhone backup in Mac OS X Lion
This is a multi-step process that takes a bit of effort. I exported my data from the SQLite database to Excel, because it was easier for me to work with. The payoff was I had full text message data from my own text exchanges with my husband, the phone number that was used, along with a time and date stamp.
Adult Sites: You may be able to get his info with a court order!
Most dating sites, as stated in their privacy policies, will turn over data if they get a court order. Isn't that interesting? Indeed, check out what it says in the AdultFriendFinders Privacy Policy:
We may be required to disclose your Personal Information in order to comply with a court order, subpoena, search warrant, or as otherwise compelled by law. In addition, we expressly reserve the right to disclose your Personal Information when we have a good faith belief that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, to enforce our agreements, policies, and rules governing your use of the FFN Websites, to cooperate with law enforcement, and/or to report information concerning a threat of serious injury or death.
I do not know that gathering his information is helpful in divorce proceedings (it may be) but I suspect it may be helpful in a custody battle if you're concerned about the children's exposure to porn.
Threat of accessing data via court order may also be helpful.
