In Australia, a woman canceled her wedding after realizing a fake wedding ceremony she attended for a social media stunt was actually real.
The bride, unknowingly, said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to take part in the ceremony as a “prank” for her Instagram account.
She only discovered the marriage was genuine when he tried to use her to gain permanent residency in Australia.
A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after accepting the woman had been induced into the marriage, in a judgment published on Thursday.
The bizarre affair began in September 2023 when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They began seeing each other regularly in Melbourne, where they were living at the time.
In December of the same year, the man proposed to the woman and she accepted.
Two days later, the woman attended an event with the man in Sydney. She was told it would be a “white party” – where attendees would wear white clothing – and was told to bring a white dress.
But when they arrived, she was “shocked” and “furious” to find no other guests present except her partner, a photographer, the photographer’s friend and a celebrant, according to her deposition cited in court documents .
“So when I got there, and I didn’t see anyone in white, I asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ And he took me aside, and he told me said he was organizing a wacky wedding for his social media, to be more specific, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content, and wants to start monetizing his Instagram page,” she said.
She said she accepted his explanation because “he was an avid social media person” and had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that a civil marriage would only be valid if it was celebrated in court.
However, she remained worried. The woman called a friend and expressed her concerns, but the friend “laughed it off” and said it would be fine because, if it was real, they should have filed a notice of arrest first. planned marriage, which they did not do.
Reassured, the woman attended the ceremony where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of a camera. She said she was happy at that moment to “play the game” to “make it seem real.”
Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependent on her application for permanent residency in Australia. Both are foreigners.
When she told him she couldn’t because they weren’t technically married, he then revealed their wedding ceremony in Sydney had been genuine, according to the woman’s testimony.
The woman then found their marriage certificate and discovered a notice of intended marriage that had been lodged the month before their trip to Sydney – before they even got engaged – which she said she had not signed. The signature on the notice bears little resemblance to the woman’s, according to court documents.
“I’m furious that I didn’t know it was a real marriage, that he also lied from the start, and that he also wanted me to add it to my application ” she said. .
In his statement, the man claimed they “both accepted these circumstances” and that following his proposal, the woman agreed to marry him in an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney.
The judge ruled that the woman was “mistaken about the nature of the ceremony performed” and “had not really consented to her participation” in the marriage.
“She believed she was acting. She called the event a ‘farce’. It made perfect sense that she would adopt the persona of an all-around bride during the contested ceremony in order to bolster the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage,” he said in the ruling.
The marriage was canceled in October 2024.
