A Texas pastor has filed a lawsuit against his car dealership alleging nude photos of his wife were sent to a swingers' site by the salesman whilst he was buying a Toyota last year.
Tim and Claire Gautreaux filed the suit against Texas Toyota of Grapevine, Toyota Motor North America, and car sales director, Matthew Luke Thomas, alleging breach of contract, intrusion, negligence and public disclosure of private facts.
Thomas also faces criminal charges of a computer security breach, according to Dallas News.
Gautreaux is said to have saved a relevant financing doc to an app on his smartphone. When Thomas asked to borrow the device to show the information to his manager he left the room with it in hand, and is at that point accused of rifling through the cleric’s pics.
Gautreaux apparently realized what had happened when he tried to pull up a screenshot of his payment stub and saw an old photo of his wife getting into the bath.
The photo – which he describes as a “private moment” – had apparently been sent to an unnamed couple and an email address linked to a swingers’ site.
The emails had been deleted but Gautreaux has a separate app which backs up his messages and so was able to discover what had really happened, the report claimed.
Sales manager Thomas is said to have maintained a profile on the site.
He was arrested on computer crime charges and released on bail in November last year, and faces his next court hearing at the end of the month.
His odds in the civil case do not look good given the Gautreaux’s have secured the services of famed lawyer Gloria Allred, who has represented women who have accused the likes of Bill Cosby and Donald Trump of sexual assault in the past.
"These actions have caused the Gautreauxs to suffer humiliation and mental anguish, particularly because they do not know who has seen these photographs or may see them in the future,” she told a news conference late last week.
"Were it not for the app that he had, he would not have known what happened to the photographs or that they had been viewed and forwarded.”