There is no divorce without marriage. There is no legal marriage if a partner is already wed to someone else, even if a fianc?e is entirely unaware he or she was previously married. A lost birth certificate turned a victim of identity theft in a serial wife, when she discovered she had four unknown husbands.
The alleged marriages were a secret, even to the bride, until the woman, from another state, was weeks away from a real wedding date. Legal issues cropped up at a city clerk's office, where the woman's marriage license application was denied.
Much to her surprise, she was already married to two other men in two different foreign countries.
Troubles for the 37-year-old bride of multiple grooms began when she misplaced her birth certificate 16 years ago. When she tried to register a real marriage in 2004, she found her birth certificate had been used in fake marriages to men in Ecuador and Mexico.
Rather than cancel the wedding, the woman married in a jurisdiction that would accept her license application. The newlywed put the strange episode behind her.
Five years later, one of her long-distance "husbands" requested a divorce. The man, from Ecuador, insisted that his "wife" sign divorce papers. When the already-married woman turned him down, the faux husband visited the home of her in-laws.
It was only after seeing a picture of his presumed wife that the man realized that the woman he married was not the person he was pursuing.
The wife was unsettled by the incident and approached an administrative law judge in January to correct her mis-marriages.
The judge found that the woman's birth certificate had been used to tie her to fake marriages. The two unwanted marriages from 1996 were cleared from the record books.
Another trip to court may be in her future. Since she whittled her list of husbands down to one in court, the woman found that her birth certificate was misused again, and a new "husband" was recently discovered in New York.
Source: Fox News, "NYC woman discovers she is married to multiple men after identity theft," Mar. 17, 2012
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