Q: An abuser deleted my messages to them which shows the truth of lies they are trying to harm me with, what can I do?
The father of my children lies outright and manipulates situations to make him self look perfect, and me like an absolute awful human. He claims, for example, that I manipulated my way onto the house title.. I told him I could prove that wasn't true with our messages. The next morning, I discovered he had deleted all of our messages from my account. This has psychologically stressed me out, because in 5 years of messages, there was so much evidence of abuse and protection for myself from lies like this. He implies he intends to "bury" me. I am stressed beyond belief and feel entirely vulnerable. I can't recover the messages with a recovery program or facebook, where they were sent through. He laughed at me and told he "you'd like that, wouldn't you?" when I told him it's unjust for him to have a copy and me not and requested he delete his too if it was like that. It feels like torture to have lost everything while someone continuously threatens me. What can I do?
A:
Depending on how the messages were sent, there may still be a way to recover these. This could be something more complicated such as a subpoena or more simple such as your phone records or looking in your archived messages. Many cell phone providers do store text messages with your monthly bill for at least a short period of time. You generally need to act quickly to recover lost messages as the provider generally only stores these for a short period of time.
If you are in an unsafe situation, you need to get you and your children to a safe situation. That is the first priority. A custody case or protection order may also help provide you some protection. Keep in mind that the longer you stay in a home that you feel is unsafe for you and your children, the harder it may become to convince the Court that you felt unsafe while there.
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