No matter the hurt, it’s wrong to wash dirty linen online
He hAS come up against gangsters and football hooligans and had his critics on reality tV shows such as Dancing On Ice and the Jump. Now it looks like investigative reporter Donal MacIntyre is facing his fiercest opponent to date — his wife Ameera.
Prompted by God knows what, enraged by not-a-clue, Mrs MacIntyre erupted over social media this week in a rage that must have had hubby quaking in his Crocs.
their marriage seemed to be in crisis after she branded him ‘a lying, cheating scumbag’ on Facebook and said she was ‘praying for my babies’.
to add to the tenpenny drama, Ameera — who has been married to the awardwinning journalist for nine years — made the comments below a picture of the couple with their three children.
She wailed on with the question: ‘how could you ruin this beautiful family?’
hmmm. Whatever Donal has or has not done—and his friends say it’ s a misunderstanding — I’m guessing it’s something rather more serious than forgetting to pick up the dry-cleaning or missing his turn to take the kids to tumble tots.
his wife is as mad as hell — and determined to let the world know about it.
her rage and upset are quite awful to behold, reminding me of actress Suranne Jones playing avenging wife Gemma in a recent BBC series. Yes, it’s Doctor Foster all over again.
In the five-part drama, Gemma Foster is driven half-mad with hurt and drags her son into a confrontational scene as a way of showing that when husbands cheat on their wives, they cheat on their children, too.
Yet what seems strong and powerful within the confines of fiction can often look unhinged and reckless in real life. Or simply plain wrong. Just like this sorry situation. For broadcasting your husband’s unnamed failings to the world via social media is only going to make a bad situation worse.
Particularly if your family’s security and financial well-being happen to hinge around the fact that your husband is famous.
Ameera wants to damage Donal by going public, she wants people to think worse of him and have sympathy for her.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to understand why. She may even have felt a lot better once she got it all off her chest. For a moment.
Ultimately however, the person she is going to hurt more is herself. And the children.
Like others who launch themselves on to social media at moments of high drama in their lives, Ameera has unpicked the seam of her own privacy, leaving the relationship vulnerable to the speculation and comment of untold strangers.
It is like she has flung open the front door of their home and invited everyone in for a good old filthy gossip. And I can’t help but feel she has made a terrible mistake.
Without actually saying what MacIntyre has done, she has trashed him completely; a million clicks l ater and his good guy reputation is now in shreds.
this must have been what she wanted.
to then weaponise the children by squawking on about her fears for her ‘babies’ is almost unforgivable.
If she was so worried about them she might have chosen a more discreet course of action in the first place.
All this is bad enough. What is even worse — far worse! — are the associates and random celebrities who have rushed to her cyber-side to tweet their sympathy and support. they are like vultures, keen to feast on the carcass of someone’s marriage, eager to show their ever- so caring side to the world at large.
A real friend would have called up, gone around, been there in person to urge a distraught woman to cease and desist.
to slam shut her laptop, to get her off social media and to encourage her to sort out the mess in private.
But it’s all a bit too late for that now, I’m afraid.
the MacIntyre family nightmare has only just begun.