'Suck it' Facebook post costs family $80,000

A teenager's indiscreet Facebook status update has cost her family $80,000 (£47,000) as it was found to have breached a confidentiality agreement signed by her father

A teenager's indiscreet Facebook status update has cost her family $80,000 (£47,000) as it was found to have breached a confidentiality agreement signed by her father.

Former headmaster of Gulliver Preparatory School, Patrick Snay, recently settled an age discrimination lawsuit against his former employer and was handed the money as part of that deal.

Snay had told his daughter, who had attended the school, about the news and said that she would be sent on a European holiday to compensate her for the “psychological scars” of the whole incident.

But rather than keeping quiet about the source of funding for her trip she took to Facebook and wrote: "Mama and Papa Snay won the case against Gulliver. Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT."

The school argued that this was in breach of the confidentiality clause attached to the payout, and therefore did not pay out. It argued that Dana Snay's 1,200 Facebook followers would have seen the update.