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As divorce cases go, it is as explosive and sordid as it gets: a woman catches her husband having sex with a prostitute, forgives him, but finally throws in the towel after discovering he has been unfaithful again. Yet absolutely none of it happened in real life.

Amy Taylor is divorcing David Pollard, her husband of three years, on the grounds of "unreasonable behaviour" after she discovered his character in the online community game Second Life had been having an affair.

It was the second time that Ms Taylor, 28, had caught her husband's virtual alter ego being unfaithful. Before they were married, she had once awoken from an afternoon nap to discover him sitting at his computer watching his online character – whom he had named Dave Barmy – having sex with an on-screen call girl(Second life linden).

She said: "I went mad – I was so hurt. I just couldn't believe what he'd done. I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It's cheating as far as I'm concerned."

Ms Taylor later forgave him, and the couple, who met in an internet chatroom in 2003, married at a register office in Cornwall in 2005. Dave Barmy and Amy's avatar, Laura Skye, held a lavish ceremony in the virtual world to mark the occasion. But in April this year, she caught his character in flagrante for a second time. "I caught him cuddling a woman on a sofa in the game. It looked really affectionate," she said(Secondlife linden). "He turned off the computer monitor, and I turned it back on and demanded to look at his chat history.

"But he turned off the computer so the history was all deleted – and I ended up going off to his mum and dad's in floods of tears. He never did anything in real life, but I had my suspicions about what he was doing in Second Life."