Teen's Facebook Post Cost Her Father $80,000
A teen's Facebook post cost her father $80,000 from a settlement that required a confidentiality agreement. Patrick Snay settled against his former employer Gulliver Preparatory School in Miami, but since daughter Dana posted about it online, he now has to forfeit his winnings since a ruling Wednesday.
The teenager's Facebook post was celebrating her father's settlement in an age discrimination lawsuit, according to the Miami Herald. 69-year-old Patrick Snay's contract as headmaster of Gulliver Preparatory was not renewed by the school in 2010, and the organization settled the case against them. After being informed that her father's fight against the school had been settled, the teen went to brag about it on Facebook.
"Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT," Dana posted on the social media site.
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Before long, friends of Dana's who formerly attended Gulliver discovered the post and news of it made its way back to the school's attorneys who initially settled the case. The settlement stipulated that Patrick Snay and his wife couldn't tell anyone about what happened, but the father said he did so immediately because she had suffered "psychological scars" from the incident while attending the school.
"Snay violated the agreement by doing exactly what he had promised not to do," Judge Linda Ann Wells of Florida's Third District Court of Appeal wrote in the ruling. "His daughter then did precisely what the confidentiality agreement was designed to prevent."
Patrick Snay had taken the case to court to uphold the ruling and won, but the school appealed the verdict and Wells overturned it. Now he has the chance to appeal in Florida's Supreme Court, but some legal voices believe he has little chance of winning.
"Some confidentiality agreements stipulate that the client cannot tell people who are not involved in the case: others prohibit anyone from knowing," Bradley Shear, a lawyer, told Yahoo! Shine. "Facebook is a public forum, even if her profile is set to private, and that's where the mistake was made."
