A woman in Australia has annulled her marriage after realising that a fake wedding ceremony she took part in for a social media stunt was in fact real.
The unknowing bride said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to take part in the ceremony as a “prank” for his Instagram account.
She only discovered the marriage was genuine when he tried to use it to gain permanent residency in Australia.
A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after accepting the woman was tricked into getting married, in a judgment published on Thursday.
The bizarre 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 lived at the time.
In December 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-coloured clothing – and was told to pack a white dress.
But when they arrived she was “shocked” and “furious” to find no other guests present except for her partner, a photographer, the photographer’s friend and a celebrant, according to her deposition quoted in court documents.
“So when I got there, and I didn’t see anybody in white, I asked him, ‘What’s happening?’. And he pulled me aside, and he told me that he’s organising a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content, and wants to start monetising his Instagram page,” she said.
She said she had accepted his explanation as “he was a social media person” who had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that a civil marriage would be valid only if it were held in a court.
Still, she remained concerned. The woman rang a friend and voiced her worries, but the friend “laughed it off” and said it would be fine because, if it were real, they would have had to file a notice of intended marriage first, which they had not.
Reassured, the woman went through the ceremony where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of a camera. She said she was happy at that time to “play along” to “make it look real”.
Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependent in her application for permanent residency in Australia. Both of them are foreigners.
When she told him she could not as they were technically not married, he then revealed that their Sydney wedding ceremony had been genuine, according to the woman’s testimony.
The woman later found their marriage certificate, and discovered a notice of intended marriage which had been filed the month before their Sydney trip – before they even got engaged – which she said she did not sign. According to the court documents, the signature on the notice bears little resemblance to the woman’s.
“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,” she said.
In his deposition, the man claimed they had “both agreed to these circumstances” and that following his proposal the woman had agreed to marry him at an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney.
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.
“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,” he stated in the judgement.
The marriage was annulled in October 2024.
