A judge in Melbourne annulled the marriage of a woman to a man via an Instagram stunt. - Photo illustration: Unsplash
MELBOURNE: A woman in Australia was asked by a man to take part in a “fake Instagram wedding” in a bid to boost viewership numbers, but she later found it had been an elaborate ruse all along to marry her legally.
The woman first met the man through an online dating app in September 2023, and the two began dating, the BBC reported.
Both lived in Melbourne at the time.
In December the same year, the man proposed, and the woman accepted.
Two days later, he asked her to join him in a “white party” in Sydney, where he said all guests would be in white. He told her to come dressed in white for the event.
However, when she reached the party venue, she was “shocked” and “furious”, she said, to discover that there was no party. The only people there were her partner, a photographer and his friend, as well as a celebrant.
Her partner then told her she was there to help him stage a “prank wedding”, designed to boost the numbers to his Instagram page. He had only 17,000 followers at the time.
The woman agreed because she said she knew that a civil marriage is valid only if it is held in court.
She also took the extra step of speaking to a friend, who told her not to worry because for the marriage to be recognised by law, she and the man would have to file a notice of intended marriage first before they could get married.
Reassured, she took part in what she thought was a social media stunt – happy at the time to “play along” and “make it look real”.
Two months later, the man asked her to add him as a dependant in her application for permanent residency in Australia. Both were foreigners.
When she told him she could not as they were not married, he confessed and told her that their Sydney wedding ceremony was no sham, but was legally valid and real.
The woman later found the marriage certificate, as well as a notice of intended marriage filed the month before she and her partner flew to Sydney – before they got engaged. Worse, she said, she had not signed the marriage notice.
According to court documents, the signature on the notice bore little resemblance to the woman’s, said the BBC report.
“I’m furious with the fact that I didn’t know that that was a real marriage, and the fact that he also lied from the beginning, and the fact that he also wanted me to add him in my application,” the report quoted her as saying.
In his defence, the man said the woman “agreed to these circumstances”.
He insisted that she did agree to marry him at an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney after he proposed and she accepted.
But the judge ruled that the woman was “mistaken about the nature of the ceremony performed” and “did not provide real consent to her participation” in the marriage.
The judge said: “She believed she was acting.
“She called the event ‘a prank’. It made perfect sense for her to adopt the persona of a bride in all things at the impugned ceremony so as to enhance the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage.”
The marriage was annulled in October 2024, and the judgment was published on Dec 9. - The Straits Times/ANN
