Ebony Walton Went To Get A Marriage License, Found Out She Had Already Been Legally Married For 18 Years

Ebony Walton went to get a marriage license last year when she learned something shocking — she was already married, apparently, and to a man she had never met before in her life.

The 35-year-old woman has been with her boyfriend for 18 years, but somehow the state of New York thought that she was actually married that entire time. The court records showed that Walton was considered legally married to a man from Pakistan who needed a green card to remain in the United States.

During the time that the court believed Ebony Walton was married she was really living in a Harlem apartment with some other family members, including cousins who had problems with drugs.

The New York Post came across the strange story, which authorities determined to be a case of stolen identity:

In her appeal to a city judge, Walton, 35, surmised that years ago one of her cousins stole her ID in order to use it, and get paid, for a sham green-card marriage. She often left her state ID card lying around the house, she testified. And she produced photos that showed her cousins strongly resembled her

…

“Her two cousins looked enough like her that they could have used her identification card,” he ruled on Feb. 26.

The story of Ebony Walton finding out she’s already married is not the only strange tale of matrimony making the news recently. A pair of stories bizarre wedding tales from India have made headlines recently, each giving the term “Bridezilla” an entirely new meaning.

The first took place in February, when bride-to-be Jugal Kishur dumped her man at the altar after he went into an epileptic seizure. In many parts of India, weddings are something of a business transaction and families of the bride will often research the medical, educational, and even criminal history of potential grooms. Kishur and her family believed that the groom was hiding his medical history, so Kishur decided to marry one of the wedding guests instead.

The other Indian Bridezilla story happened just this week, when a bride believed that her groom-to-be’s family was hiding his lack of education and decided to give him a math test at the altar. She asked him to add 15 plus six, and when he answered 17 she walked out of the ceremony.

“Any Class I student must be able to solve the simple problem asked by us. The family of the groom had kept us in dark about the youth’s qualification,” said Mohar Singh, the bride’s father, in an interview with the Times of India. “It was a very embarrassing situation for all of us as we had come with all preparations and it was a matter of social prestige as well. We have been cheated.”

Though it started off strange, the case from New York at least has a happy ending. A judge ruled that the green card marriage was invalid, and Ebony Walton is now married for real.

[Image via Wondrance.com]