The bride's furious post-wedding Instagram post is true
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Judge annuls marriage after admitting wife cheated
A woman in Australia has canceled her wedding after realizing a fake wedding ceremony she attended for a social media stunt was actually real.
The bride, who knew nothing, said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to attend the ceremony as a "joke" for his Instagram account.
He only discovered that the marriage was real when he tried to use it to obtain permanent residency in Australia.
A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after accepting that the woman had been cheated into the marriage, in a ruling issued on Thursday.
The strange affair began in September 2023 when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They began meeting regularly in Melbourne, where they were living at the time.
In December of that year, the man proposed to the woman and she accepted.
Two days later, the woman attended an event with the man in Sydney. He was told it was a "white party" — where attendees would join in the white robe — and he was told she was wearing a white dress.
But when they arrived, she was "shocked" and "furious" to find other guests present besides her partner, a photographer, a friend of the photographer and a celebrant, according to her statement cited in court documents. "So when I got there and didn't see anyone in white, I asked, 'What's going on?'" He took me aside and told me that he was planning a fake wedding for his social media, in especially on Instagram, because he wanted to promote his content and start making money on his Instagram page," he said.
She said she accepted his explanation because "he was a social media guy" who had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that a civil marriage would only be valid if it was performed in court.
However, she remained concerned. The woman called a friend to express her concerns, but the friend "laughed" and told her that everything was fine, because if it was true, they would have made a marriage proposal earlier, which they did not.
Calmly, 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 the moment that she "played it" to "make it look real."
Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependant on her application for permanent residence in Australia. Both are foreigners. When she told him she couldn't because they weren't officially married, he revealed that their Sydney wedding ceremony had been real, according to the woman's testimony.
The woman then found the marriage certificate and discovered a notice of intended marriage that had been filed a month before her trip to Sydney - before they were engaged - and that she said she hadn't signed. According to court documents, the signature on the notice bore little resemblance to the woman's.
"I'm angry that I didn't know it was a real marriage, and that he also lied from the start and that he wanted to add to my application," she said.
In his evidence, the man said they had "both come to terms with these circumstances" and that after his proposal, the woman had agreed to marry him in an "intimate ceremony" in Sydney. The judge ruled that the woman had "misunderstood the nature of the ceremony that was taking place" and "had not really consented to her participation" in the wedding.
"She thought she was acting." She called the event a "farce." "It was completely logical for her to adopt the persona of a bride in all circumstances during the contested ceremony, to strengthen the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage," he said in the decision.
The marriage was annulled in October 2024.