Daughter’s Facebook Brag Costs Dad $80,000

You know all those times you read about lawsuit settlements where the financial terms are undisclosed? That silence isn’t a sign that no one wants to talk about how much they won or lost; it means that agreement will likely be nullified if people start blabbing about the money changing hands. And that includes a plaintiff’s teen daughter.

Just ask the Florida man who reached an $80,000 settlement in 2011 with the school where he’d previously been the headmaster, only to have his daughter ruin that victory with a bragging Facebook post.

Soon after hearing about her dad’s settlement, the daughter went online and shared with her 1,200 friends that her parents had won their case, and that the school “is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer.”

And just for good measure, she added, “SUCK IT.”

Of course, a number of those 1,200 friends still attended the very school she had told to “suck it,” so it didn’t take long for the school’s lawyers to hear about this semi-public boasting.

None of this sat well with the school, which immediately told the former headmaster that it wasn’t going to pay because he’d violated the nondisclosure agreement in the settlement.

A court later said the dad should get the money, but the school appealed that decision. Last week an appeals court sided with the school, ruling that the dad “violated the agreement by doing exactly what he had promised not to do,” and that “His daughter then did precisely what the confidentiality agreement was designed to prevent.”

This is why I’m never having children.

Daughter’s Facebook Brag Costs Her Family $80,000 [Yahoo]
Daughter’s Facebook boast costs former Gulliver Prep headmaster $80,000 discrimination settlement [Miami Herald]

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