Gunter v. Alutiiq Advanced Security Solutions, LLC

What happened

The plaintiff brought a whistleblower retaliation claim against their employer. During the litigation, disputed text message records became relevant to the central issues in the case. The plaintiff falsely testified that the messages did not exist. The court ordered a forensic examination of the plaintiff's phone. The examination revealed that the messages did exist, that targeted deletions had occurred, and that message content had been altered. The court awarded $10,000 in forensic examination costs against the plaintiff and dismissed the claim with prejudice as a sanction. The case is a clean illustration of the vulnerability of mobile messaging evidence: text messages and chat records on personal devices are controlled entirely by the device owner, can be deleted, and content can be altered, making any party's own device-based messaging records inherently self-reported and challengeable.