My husband moved out in January, and our custody case started in April. In June, his attorney filed an exhibit containing a hundred and forty entries from the community’s camera system showing when I came and went over the previous eight months. The problem was that our association has cameras only at the two gates and the clubhouse, and the written policy says footage is retained for thirty days and released only to law enforcement. His exhibit covered eight months. I filed a motion, and the judge ordered the association to explain how footage that supposedly no longer existed had ended up in my husband’s custody case. The property manager testified that she had never released anything and started crying when the attorney asked whether she had ever given my husband access.
The camera system is run by an outside vendor, and under subpoena the vendor produced the access logs. There were four accounts with permission to view and download footage. Three belonged to management staff. The fourth had been created in 2022 and had downloaded footage two hundred and eleven times, including clips from dates that later appeared in my husband’s court exhibit. The account wasn’t registered to the association, the management company, or law enforcement. It was attached to a resident email address. My husband had never lived in the community and had never been given a login, so I asked the vendor who had requested the account in the first place.
The request had come from the woman who chairs our safety committee. I knew her, and she knew my husband, although I had never understood how well. The vendor records showed that her account had been used to download footage of my car repeatedly, including mornings when I took the children to school and nights when I came home late from work. Then I compared the download dates with my husband’s court filings. Every time his attorney submitted a new batch of surveillance against me, footage had been downloaded from her account the day before — and the phone number used to create that account was listed in the vendor’s records as my husband’s emergency contact.
