Nanny for Wealthy Family Found Evidence That the Husband Is Cheating — Should She Tell the Wife?

This story, posted to Reddit's "Relationship Advice" subreddit, feels like the beginning of a thriller starring Blake Lively and Timothy Olyphant. In fact, I would watch that movie very gladly. 

The post comes from a 26-year-old live-in nanny to a wealthy family. She writes, "Friday, I went to turn on the computer in the shared home office to check the younger boy's school work, and as soon as I turned it on the printer started spitting out papers.

"I grabbed the pages to see if I should save them or throw them away, and they were screenshot print-offs from a forum where men were talking about the best places to find prostitutes on a certain island where the father will be taking a solo vacation in a few months. 

"He takes these vacations on his own twice a year, always to someplace exotic with a beach (we live in the Midwest). The mother explained to me once that her schedule isn’t as flexible as his, and she doesn’t require as much R&R as he does, and he likes the sea more than she does." He also likes prostitutes more than she does, apparently.

The nanny says she is "certain" the wife has no idea her husband is visiting prostitutes on his vacations. "She would be humiliated to know he was doing this, and I know she would feel deeply betrayed," she writes. "She told me once that her first husband cheated on her, and she feels so blessed to be married now to a man of such excellent character."

Well. That doesn't seem to be the case. Now the nanny is torn. She doesn't know whether she should tell the wife or not. She writes, "I don’t want to be responsible for breaking up this seemingly perfect family. I don’t want to hurt the boys I take care of. I love them. And I can’t afford to lose this job, which is the only outcome I can imagine if I spill the beans."

Quite the predicament. So, she turned to Reddit for advice. She is completely disgusted by the husband's behavior, but she needs to look out for herself, too. And many people on Reddit believed that, if she were to spill the secret, she would be fired. 

"Look, the correct advice is to tell her," one person wrote, "BUT, she will NOT and can NOT believe. And why would she believe you, the nanny, over her husband, who will deny this? He'll claim that you created this fake information to hurt them."

Another commenter wrote, "In my opinion there are two circumstances where it's OK to not tell someone they are being cheated on if you don't want to: 1) They're your parents; 2) It impacts your employment.

"How badly do you need this job? Consider that she may be so humiliated she fires the messenger."

She doesn't want to get fired; she loves working for this family, but it's also got to be so hard to consider doing nothing with the information she found.

The most popular suggestion for what to do came from someone who asked their mother, a former nanny for high-profile families: "She said that in this position, she typically found small but incriminating items, and moved them slightly (if moving them was possible without incriminating herself) to give the wife the potential to find them herself."

Many others backed up this idea. I mean, if the husband was stupid enough to leave the documents up in such a way that they started printing the second the computer was turned on, it's feasible that he's so bad at keeping his own secret, the wife would have found out about it on her own anyway. 

Why not nudge her along in a way that doesn't make it clear the nanny was the one who planted the evidence? Of course, this is risky. Maybe she leaves the papers out and then the husband finds them first and destroys them. Maybe she thinks she's being stealthy and then the wife confronts her about it anyway. 

It's definitely a sticky situation, and one I do not envy. We don't know the nuances of the nanny's relationship with that family. She's certainly in a precarious situation. I only hope that, whatever happens, she is treated as blameless in this debacle.