Reputation Management During a Divorce

Simply put, from the moment you believe that a divorce is inevitable, you need to be on your best behavior. Of course, that’s just common sense — but what if you’ve already been off your best behavior for quite a while? If you’re intelligent enough to notice that your behavior needs adjusting, congratulations: you’re already way ahead of most poorly-behaved divorcees. So here’s a few quick and easy rules to help you eke a bit of halo-polish out of a bad situation.

Prepare Your Summary Statement
The most common sources of reputation damage are the people who know you, but don’t really know you — the coworkers, friends, and acquaintances that are asking about your divorce primarily because they want juicy gossip. It’s hard not to load them up with the vitriol that’s brewing inside of you — but you have to.

Instead, prepare a stock two-sentence response that will shut down the question and change the subject without being rude. “It sucks, but it has to happen. Thanks for your concern.” — and then immediately bring up another topic.

De-social-media-ify
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…these are the gold mines that an aggressive divorce lawyer is going to dig through in order to find signs of your bad behavior. No matter how accustomed you are to talking openly about the downsides of your life on social media, consider it absolutely mandatory to maintain media silence on all aspects of your divorce until it is completely over.

Ideally, you should actually completely shut down all of your accounts during that time, just to keep your friends and family from making posts directed toward your account that could be damaging. But if that’s not viable, you should at the minimum restrict your posting to the most completely banal, irrelevant topics — absolutely nothing with any emotional content whatsoever.

Imagine Headlines
Whenever you feel like you want to do something that isn’t completely on the straight-and-narrow path, stop for a moment and do this:

1. Imagine the worst-case result of your decision, and
2. Imagine what the headline in the National Enquirer would say about you if you were famous and the worst-case result of your decision came true.

“Idiot Lights House Ablaze While Vengeance-Burning Spouse’s Beanie Baby Collection”
“Kids Abducted from Playground While Divorcing Parents Scream Obscenities at Each Other”
“Stressed Divorcee Gestures Inappropriately at Biker; May Recover for Custody Challenge”

See how that works?

When you feed yourself the soundbites of your own impending epic failures, you can perform an amazing amount of last-second “reputation management” in the form of not sullying your reputation (any further) in the first place — and that can actually go a long way with a sympathetic family court judge.