A woman who thought she was taking part in a social media stunt asked a court to annul the ‘joke marriage’ that turned out to be real.
A judge in Melbourne, Australia, granted the annulment after finding that the man the woman was technically married to had tricked her into doing so, according to reports from the BBC. The standard And The Guardian.
Citing an anonymous family law judgment published on January 9: The standard reported that the Melbourne-based woman in her 20s met the man in his 30s on a dating app in September 2023. Two months later, in December, he invited her to a “white party” in Sydney and told her there that he had been playing a “prank” to increase his followers on Instagram.
“When I got there and didn’t see anyone in white, I asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ she told the court, per The Guardianadding that he had proposed to her just a day prior to this situation in Sydney.
“He told me he is organizing a prank wedding for his social media. More specifically, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content and start monetizing his Instagram page,” she reportedly continued.
Two months after the event, the man asked the woman if he could depend on her application for permanent residency in Australia, but she said she could not because she believed they were not legally married.
Then she realized that the marriage was legal and not a sham The Guardianadding that the woman was “furious” at being “lied to,” especially noting that she would never get married without her parents’ permission, without them attending the ceremony, without a wedding dress or without a reception.
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The groom argued in court that the “intimate ceremony” was not a social media stunt and that they planned to have an official wedding at a later date, which he said the bride knew. The standard reported.
The media noted that the judge in October dismissed the man’s claims and annulled the marriage after learning about the brief engagement and discovering that he had signed a letter of intent to marry weeks before proposing.
“She believed she was acting. She called the event “a joke.” “It made perfect sense for her to assume the personality of a bride in every respect during the ceremony at issue, in order to increase the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage,” the judge said in his judgment, according to the BBC.