An Australian woman canceled her wedding after finding out through social media that the fake wedding she attended was real.
The unaware bride said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to attend the wedding with a “prank” on his Instagram account.
She only found out the marriage was real when he tried to marry her to get permanent residency in Australia.
A Melbourne judge granted an annulment after admitting the woman had been tricked into marrying herself in a ruling published on Thursday.
The bizarre events began in September 2023, when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They began meeting regularly in Melbourne, where they lived at the time.
In December of that year, a man proposed to a woman, and she accepted.
Two days later, the woman attended an event in Sydney with the man. She was told that it would be a “white party” where attendees would wear white and was told to prepare a white dress.
But when they arrived, she was “shocked” and “angry” to see that no other guests were present besides her partner, the photographer, the photographer’s friend and a well-wisher, according to her testimony cited in court documents.
“So I got there and there was no one dressed in white so I asked, ‘What’s going on?’ Then he pulled me aside and told me he was planning a prank wedding on his social media – Instagram to be exact. .Because he wants to boost his content and monetize his Instagram page,” she said.
She said she accepted his explanation that “he was a social media expert” with more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that civil marriages were only valid if they took place in a court of law.
Despite this, she was still worried. The woman called her friend and expressed her concerns, but the friend “laughed” and said, “If it were true, you would have had to register your marriage first, but since you didn’t, I think it’ll be okay.”
The relieved woman went through a wedding ceremony where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of the cameras. She said at the time that she was happy to be able to “play along” to make it “look real.”
Two months later, her partner asked to be added as a dependent on his Australian permanent residency application. Both people are foreigners.
When she told him he couldn’t because they weren’t technically married, he revealed that the Sydney wedding was real, according to the woman’s testimony.
The woman later discovered their marriage certificate and a notice of intended marriage submitted a month before the trip to Sydney – before they were even engaged – which she said she had not signed. The signature on the notice bore little resemblance to the woman’s signature, according to court documents.
“I’m angry that I didn’t know it was a real marriage, that he lied from the beginning, and that he also asked me to add him to the application,” she said. .
In his testimony, the man claimed that “they both agreed to this situation” and that, at his suggestion, the woman agreed to marry him in an “intimate wedding” in Sydney.
The judge ruled that the woman was “mistaken as to the nature of the ceremony being performed” and “did not give her actual consent to participate in the marriage.”
“She believed she was acting. She called the incident a ‘prank.’ Adopting the persona of the bride in every way at the wedding in question to increase the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage “She understood perfectly,” the ruling said.
The marriage was annulled in October 2024.
