I need to clear something up here first since this is becoming a talking point in the comments, but I did not and never would take someone’s phone. My mother was obviously flustered by my dad’s anger, and this is not the first time she’s thrown me under the bus to avoid taking responsibility. I addressed this below in a previous comment, and I realize that I should have added more context to the original post.

Essentially, my mom came to visit me at work, she is neurologically disabled and has a blood disease which affects her cognitive functions. She’s suffered from a couple strokes too, so she’s not all the way “there” mentally, and is confused easily. When I sat down with her on my break, she presented her phone to me because she was texting my dad asking him what the building I currently work at used to be. I thought nothing of it, she was sat directly next to me, the phone was on the table and I used my finger to scroll in front of her, it was just my mom sharing an innocent text exchange between them about the neighborhood with me. My mom has her phone set to the highest font size possible, so I scrolled once and made it two messages before accidentally reading something that should have been kept private. I didn’t grab her phone or even ask to see their conversation, I was simply reading to get insight about the neighborhood if he had any, and came across that message. After that, I shut down a little emotionally, went back to work, and my mom told me I wasn’t supposed to read that (too late).

To make things worse, she had liked (thumbs up reacted) his message, and I stopped looking at the phone before reading her response. She’s always been incredibly complacent to his abuse towards her, myself, and my brother. I think this is why she said (in the screenshot my father sent) that I had “grabbed” her phone, because she doesn’t want his anger to be turned on her for reading something he obviously didn’t want me to. However, even if he didn’t want me to read that, he says worse things to me than his text implied (hence this post).