A woman in Australia has annulled her marriage after realizing that a fake wedding ceremony she took part in for a social media stunt was actually real.
The estranged bride said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to take part in the ceremony as a “joke” on his Instagram account.
She discovered the marriage was real when he tried to use it to get permanent residency in Australia.
A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after accepting the woman had been tricked into marrying, in a ruling released on Thursday.
The strange case 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 that 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 clothes – and was told to pack a white dress.
But when they arrived, she was “shocked” and “furious” to find no other guests present besides her partner, a photographer, a friend of the photographer and a celebrant, according to her testimony cited in court documents.
“So when I got there and didn't see anyone in white, I asked him, 'What's going on?' And he pulled me aside and told me that he's throwing a prank wedding for his social media, Instagram to be exact, because he wants to improve his content and he wants to start monetizing his Instagram page,” she said.
She said she accepted his explanation because “he was a social media person” who had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believes that a civil marriage will only be valid if it is concluded in court.
Still, she remained concerned. 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 intended marriage first, which they didn't.
Calmed down, the woman went through the ceremony, where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed on camera. She said she was happy at the time to “play along” to “make it all look real”.
Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependent on her application for permanent residence in Australia. Both are foreigners.
When she told him she couldn't because they weren't technically married, he revealed that their wedding ceremony in Sydney was real, according to the woman's testimony.
The woman later found their marriage certificate and discovered a notice of intended marriage that had been filed a month before their trip to Sydney – before they were even engaged – which she said she had not signed. According to court documents, the signature on the notice bears little resemblance to the woman's.
“I'm furious at the fact that I didn't know it was a real marriage, and the fact that he also lied from the beginning, and the fact that he also wanted me to add that to my application,” she said.
In his testimony, the man claimed that “they both agreed to these circumstances” and that after his proposal, the woman agreed to marry him in an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney.
The judge ruled that the woman was “mistaken as to the nature of the ceremony performed” and “did not provide real consent to her participation” in the marriage.
“She believed she was acting. She called the event a “joke.” It was perfectly logical for her to assume the persona of a bride in all matters of the contested ceremony in order to enhance the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage,” he said in the judgment.
The marriage was annulled in October 2024.