An unhappy wife, on the other hand, needs a considerable amount of leverage to get divorced from a man who won’t agree to it — sometimes even going as far as having to reimburse the dowry and give up custody and visitation of children.

But a local daily reported on Wednesday that a wife in Jeddah found just the kind of leverage she needed to get away from her suspicious husband who trusted her about as far as he could throw her: The threat of 75 court-ordered lashes for assaulting his wife’s honor with an unfounded, photoshop-enhanced accusation of infidelity.  You see, somebody took an innocent photo of the woman, and with the magic of modern image editing software managed to depict the woman as dancing seductively, baring skin to a roomful of strangers. It turned out that the photo was taken at the women’s section of a wedding, but had been “enhanced” to depict the woman as being, let’s say, a little too free with her favors.

Using this fabricated footage, the husband publicly accused his wife of being a slut. During the hearing, the woman said she would forgive him the humiliation and pain of being whipped for making unfounded accusations against her so long as he granted her divorce. The man agreed to a painless divorce instead of a painful whipping.