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About one in every 22 people in the Chattanooga region were customers of the Ashley Madison cheating website, but relationship experts say they don't expect a flood of divorces coming down the pipe.
A Chattanooga Times Free Press analysis of the leaked Ashley Madison data found 32,075 out of 714,918 people in Hamilton County and North Georgia ZIP codes had accounts on the website. That represents 4.5 percent of the population.
Julie Baumgardner is president and CEO of First Things First, a nonprofit focused on strengthening families.
Baumgardner said 32,075 could represent a lot of potentially damaged households. The website didn't require its members to be married, but it was specifically geared toward helping spouses cheat. But even if a majority of members were married - and found out - Baumgardner is inclined to think most of them will not divorce.
"There is no excuse for the behavior, but I'm saying the behavior does not have to equal the end of a marriage," she said. "There's grieving, betrayal - there's all kinds of things people are going to have to walk through. But I don't think there's not hope."
Most marriages stay together, even in cases of infidelity, she said.
"In reality, the research shows if a couple has positive history - and it doesn't have to be a lot of positive history - if they are willing to work on their marriage, they are actually able to get through to the other side," she said.
And so far, more than two weeks after hackers dropped the stolen data onto the so-called "dark web," attorney Phil Lawrence hasn't seen an uptick in business.
Lawrence has been a divorce lawyer in Chattanooga for 45 years.
"Personally, I have not seen any impact," Lawrence said.
From his perspective, the information could come into play in a few ways. First, it could prompt a couple to seek a divorce, or it could provide evidence in an ongoing divorce proceeding, he said.
But that second part could be tricky.
The information on the leaked website might not be admissible as evidence, he said.
"There are rules against hearsay and hearsay comes in many different forms," he said. "The difficulty in authenticating that information may be insurmountable. It may never see the light of day in a courtroom."
Contact staff writer Louie Brogdon at lbrogdon@timesfreepress.com, @glbrogdoniv on Twitter or at 423-757-6481.
