Can text messages and screenshots be used in court?
Yes. Text messages are used in family court constantly, and screenshots of them are ordinary evidence. What varies is whether yours are usable, and that turns on how you obtained them and whether you can show they are genuine.
Two things will sink otherwise good evidence: getting it from an account that is not yours, and presenting it in a way that cannot be verified.
Preserve the original, not just the picture
A screenshot is a picture of a message. It is accepted all the time, and it is also the easiest thing to challenge, because a picture can be cropped, staged, or edited.
So preserve the underlying record too. Export the conversation where your phone allows it, back the device up somewhere off the phone, and keep the original messages rather than deleting them once you have the screenshot. If a thread ever becomes seriously contested, the ability to produce the source rather than an image of it is what settles the argument.
Capture the context, not the line. Screenshot enough of the thread to show what came before and after, including timestamps and who is speaking. Showing that the phone or the account is your spouse's does not by itself show they wrote the message, and messages have been excluded on exactly that gap, so keep the number, the account name, and their replies alongside it. An isolated sentence invites the other side to produce the fifty messages around it, and that reversal does more damage than the original message did good.
Do not edit anything, including cropping to hide something inconvenient. Being caught trimming a thread costs you the judge's belief in everything else you present.
The line that turns evidence into a problem
Getting messages from your spouse's phone, email, or accounts, even with a password you have known for years, can be a crime in its own right, entirely separate from the divorce. It can also make what you found unusable, and it hands the other side a genuinely damaging story about you.
If you believe something exists that you cannot legitimately reach, tell your attorney it exists. Formal discovery is how it gets retrieved, which means asking your spouse for it directly. Federal law stops carriers and platforms from handing over the contents of messages on a civil subpoena, so what that route reaches is records and call detail, not the messages themselves.
Recording calls is its own trap. Whether you may record a conversation you are part of depends on where everyone on it is, not just where you are. Federal law allows recording by someone party to the conversation, but that permission falls away if the point of the recording is to harass your spouse or gain leverage, which puts you back on the wrong side of the same law. A number of states require everyone's consent regardless, and when the people on a call are in different states the safe assumption is that the strictest state's rule applies. Getting it wrong is a criminal offense, not only a reason the recording is excluded: California allows up to a year in jail, and a federal wiretap violation carries up to five. Never record on the assumption that being part of the conversation makes it lawful, and ask your attorney before you record anything. If you are documenting abuse, do not announce it. Talk to an advocate about how to preserve evidence safely first, because telling someone you are recording them is a known escalation trigger. The safety resources page has the numbers.
Less is more, genuinely
The instinct is to gather everything. Judges read a fraction of what they are handed, and a stack of three thousand messages reads as a person who cannot tell what matters.
Pick the ten or twenty exchanges that actually show something a court cares about: an agreement, an admission, a threat, a pattern of missed exchanges, a refusal that contradicts what is being claimed. Keeping a factual log alongside them turns a pile into a timeline, which is far more persuasive.
And assume the reverse applies to you. Everything you have written is available to them on the same terms, which is the real reason not to reply at eleven at night.
What courts actually care about
Not who was the worse spouse. Messages tend to matter when they bear on money or children: admissions about income or assets, agreements about the schedule, threats, evidence of who was where when, or conduct affecting the children.
Rudeness alone is rarely the point. Judges have read a great deal of it.
Whether a recording is lawful, and what a court requires before accepting a message as authentic, vary by state. The recording question in particular carries criminal exposure, so confirm your state's rule with a licensed family-law attorney before you record anything.