Imagine getting jail time for finding out that your wife cheated on you. This is the prospect that Sean Donis, 37, faced when he discovered his wife in bed with her boss.
Sean was minding his kids in April of 2016 when he went looking for his son's iPad. He could not find the device and decided to use the "Find My iPhone" app to track it. When he saw that it was traveling to the New York State line, he began to get suspicious - his wife was supposedly out for dinner with her friends. He asked his mother to mind the children and went looking for answers.
He tracked the iPad to a home he did not recognize. His wife's car was parked outside. Sean went through the unlocked front door and found his wife in bed with her 58-year-old boss, Albert Lopez. He managed to film two videos of the tryst, which he forwarded to his wife's relatives and shared with the NYPost - he reportedly broke down crying while doing so.
The first video shows Nancy Donis and Albert Lopez in the master bedroom having sex. The second, longer video shows Sean's reaction to the situation while his wife and her lover dressed.
“All on video! All on video!... I can’t believe you, Nancy. I can’t believe you,” Sean says.
“Stop. Please, stop. Stop. OK, I get it. I get it. Stop,” she begs him.
Nancy worked for Lopez, who is the COO of the company, in the billing department of Gotham City Orthopedics in Clifton.
There were red flags everywhere.
“She would hide her phone. I’d touch the phone — she would get very nervous and say, ‘No, don’t touch my phone.’ She’d go to work looking extra pretty. And she lost a lot of weight also,” he recalled.
Although Nancy filed for divorce and the couple was separated in February of 2017, this was just the beginning of Sean's troubles.
By July, he had received a letter telling him that a Rockland grand jury had indicted him on charges of felony burglary and unlawful surveillance - if convicted he faces a 15-year jail sentence. Apparently, when a man is being cheated on, the only solution is to allow the perpetrator to carry on screwing him over.
“He commits a trespass that in a sane jurisdiction is a violation and not a crime, and he uncovers the greater evil of his wife screwing some stranger,” Sean's lawyer, Howard Greenberg said. “No jury is going to convict this man of anything, let alone a felony.”
“I feel like it’s unjust what they’re doing to me,” Sean Donis, 37, said to The NYPost. “It’s like I’m being punished twice.”
On the day of the trial, which took place earlier this month, Lopez claimed that he was the victim, claiming that he was "in fear".
“I kept telling him you need to get out of here,” Lopez told the jury hearing Donis’s felony burglary case.
“He wouldn’t leave, so I grabbed him by his shirt” and escorted him out, Lopez said. So fearful was he that he could grab a non-violent man by the shirt.
Apparently, Lopez was so fearful that he threatened Donis by asking him "if he wanted to die".
He claimed Donis responded by saying "Kill me. I don’t care".
"I was in fear," Lopez told jurors. "I didn’t know what to expect."
“The defendant should be given a medal for the amount of restraint he showed when he entered that scene,” Greenberg told the jury.
“Did you even think what effect the defendant finding out about you two would have … on their child?” Greenberg asked.
Lopez answered, “Yes.”
“But you banged her anyway?” Greenberg asked.
Lopez claimed that Nancy had told him that she was separated from her husband.
“Did you take advantage of your position as his wife’s superior to get her into bed with you?” Greenberg asked Lopez
“No,” Lopez replied.
“By the way,” Greenberg added, “who the hell are you to sleep with another man’s wife?”
"It was never discussed because he was out of the picture as far as I was concerned."
Rockland county prosecutor Nabeela Mcleod claimed that even though Lopez had slept with a married woman, in the end, he was still the victim. “Sean Donis broke into his home and invaded his privacy” by using a cellphone to record the startled couple in bed “without their consent or permission,” she said.
Here's his GoFundMe campaign to fund the anticipated legal costs, which has received a paltry $375 as of the time of writing due to the lack of media coverage up till recently, though it looks like he won't need it now that thankfully he's been acquitted of all charges.
Justice is served.