Tricia Walsh-Smith
(AP Photo/Diane Bondareff)
Why breaking up via YouTube is bad manners, and great TV
What happened
A Manhattan judge this week ruled that socialite Tricia Walsh-Smith could continue lashing out at her husband, 77-year-old Shubert organization president Philip Smith, via YouTube provided she stop filming the series in Smith’s luxury apartment. Smith is trying to evict Walsh-Smith under their prenuptial agreement. Walsh-Smith reveled in the attention—calling herself a YouTube superstar—but said she never expected her video clips to be seen by millions of people. “If I had stabbed (my husband) to death,” she said outside a New York City courtroom this week, “I don't think it would have got as much press as me going online and saying, ‘My husband never bonks me.’” (Gothamist)
What the commentators said
Is the human race now officially beyond redemption? said Dan Reilly at Switched.com. “Before technology allowed people to communicate so effortlessly, the act of breaking up over the phone was considered too impersonal.” But the embarrassing YouTube videos Tricia Walsh-Smith is using to get back at her future ex-husband, Philip Smith, 77, make a curt phone call seem positively polite.
“Everyone's favorite psycho estranged wife” is not just breaking up with her “extremely rich” husband, said Charles Winters in The Socialite Report. She’s trying to “destroy” him. “Tricia is your typical publicity hungry gold digger,” trying to get even after finding herself on the wrong end of a prenup that gives her husband their swanky Park Avenue apartment. It’s hard to say what she hopes to accomplish, “but it is definitely good TV!”
Her first rant was a classic, said the Los Angeles Times’ Web Scout blog, with a live phone call to her husband’s secretary, and allusions to porn and “con-doms” that she found even though, according to her, the marriage was sexless. The second installment was a bore by comparison, so let’s hope Walsh-Smith, who is a playwright, after all, gets “a good story doctor” for the “next episode.” Otherwise, what started out as a viral-video runaway hit could end up “looking more like a runaway train.”
