HARASSMENT FALLOUT AT HOME

Last week, a 38-year-old husband lost his job for sexual harassment, and his wife learned the fallout came with a mess she could not neatly separate from home life.

The wife, 37, said she and her husband had been married for eight years and had two kids together. Then came the firing. According to her account, he admitted that "he was flirting with a coworker" who was not his direct report, but was lower in the company hierarchy than he was. He also said, "she initiated the first flirtation," but after that, he found the woman on Facebook and started messaging her himself.

The part that ended his job came next: the coworker showed the messages to HR, and he was fired.

The wife said he deleted the messages, so she did not know exactly what had been said. What he told her, though, was enough to raise questions. She said "he claims he asked her to send a clothed picture." She also said she knew he had messaged at least one other woman before. She had seen those messages, and "they were not sexual but they were flirtatious."

That left her with a problem bigger than the firing itself. She said "I only work part time," and leaving him would mean finding a new job and figuring out how to support herself and the children. The housing situation was no simpler. "He doesn't have anywhere else to stay," she said, which meant the two of them were stuck under the same roof for the time being, at least until the job situation was resolved.

Then came the edit. After commenters focused on the "clothed" part of his explanation, she asked him about it again. This time, he changed his story.

"He claims they were talking about Halloween," she said, and that he asked the coworker to send "a picture in her costume."

So the details shifted, but the core of the story did not: a husband was fired after a coworker took his messages to HR, and his wife was left sorting through what he had done, what he admitted, and what he kept trying to explain after the fact.