An Australian woman asked to have her marriage annulled in Court, claiming that she was tricked into it by her husband who told her that it was just a stunt to boost his Instagram following.

The woman, whose name has not been revealed by the Court, told the presiding judge that she met her husband in September 2023 on a dating app. They started seeing each other regularly in Melbourne, and in December of that same year, he invited her to a “white party” in Sydney, telling her to bring a white dress to fit the theme of the event. The young woman accepted, but when she arrived at the party venue, he was “shocked” and “furious” to see that the only other people there were her partner, a photographer, the photographer’s friend, and a marriage officiant. Her partner took her aside and explained that he had planned a fake wedding to increase his social media following and asked her to play the bride.

Photo: Hisu lee/Unsplash

“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 organizing a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content, and wants to start monetizing his Instagram page,” the woman said in Court.

Despite the man’s explanation, the plaintiff remained suspicious, so she called a friend and asked them if there was a risk of actually getting married if she agreed to act as the bride. They reportedly laughed it off, saying she would be fine, as they would have had to file a notice of intended marriage first. She hadn’t signed any documents, so she decided to go through with the fake wedding.

In a video show in Court, the young woman in her mid-20s can be seen enthusiastically playing the bride, exchanging wedding vows, and kissing in front of the camera. She admitted that she tried her best to make it look real for her partner’s Instagram followers, but said that she never imagined she was a real bride.

Two months after the “staged” wedding, the woman’s partner asked her to add him as a dependant in her application for permanent residency in Australia, as it would have helped him obtain permanent residency. Both of them were foreigners in Australia, but she told him that she couldn’t add him because they weren’t married. That’s when she learned that the “stunt marriage” was real and that he had filed a notice of intended marriage with her faked signature a month before their Sydney trip.

Photo: Alvin Mahmudov/Unsplash

“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 woman told the judge in a Family Court.

The husband, a man in his late 30s, disputed the woman’s version of events, claiming that he proposed to her a day before the wedding and she agreed to marry him in an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney. He added that she had moved in with him shortly after they met, but evidence presented in Court suggested that they had separate residences.

There were a lot of things that didn’t add up in the man’s version of events, such as why the wedding was held in Sydney, instead of in Melbourne, where they both lived, or why none of their friends and family were present at the event, so in October of last year, a Melbourne Family Court agreed to declare the marriage annulled.

“She believed she was acting. She called the event ‘a prank’,” the judge said. “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.”