This is part three of a multi-story series. Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.
Police in B.C. are now investigating the strange case of a former U.S. Marine and MMA fighter who married four women in a row without divorcing his previous spouses.
While advocates are applauding the rare move – which authorities say would be the first bigamy prosecution in that province in at least a decade – they’re calling for provincial agencies to do their due diligence and stop issuing licences in those situations.
“We would expect any licensing entity to be keeping track of who they’re giving licenses to,” said Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of the Vancouver-based Battered Women’s Support Services.
“What we don’t want is for the provincial governments to create an opportunity for predators, frankly, to misuse this opportunity to do harm,” said MacDougall, who said she would be writing the B.C. government to improve the system.
MacDougall was commenting in the wake of W5’s investigations into how Jason Washington, over the course of a decade, could be married to multiple women in a row without divorcing them.
Two wives told W5 that they fled their marriages with Washington – who had previous convictions for assault, uttering threats and manslaughter – and prioritized their own safety, rather than finishing divorce paperwork.
An existing marriage didn’t stop B.C. authorities from issuing subsequent marriage licenses. A fourth marriage in Buffalo ended with divorce in December, U.S. court records show.
Washington has said he didn’t do anything wrong and that he was in genuine, loving marriages with each woman, who he believed had the responsibility to fill out the marriage paperwork.
This week, police in the Vancouver suburb of Delta, B.C. said they are investigating the situation.
“I can confirm that we have received a complaint and that an investigation is currently under way,” said Sgt. Mike Whiteley.
B.C. officials said the deterrent of criminal penalties was enough to stop people from lying on an application form or entering into a bigamous marriage. In Canada, Quebec is the only province that requires officiants to check histories and be liable for issuing illegal licences.
‘What is true? What is not true?’
Several women from across Canada contacted W5 to say that they were tired of being told their cases were rare or one-offs and were relieved to hear that they weren’t alone.
One woman, who W5 is calling Sharon, said she married her spouse in 2020, knowing that he had a previous marriage that ended in divorce.
She said the couple moved near Kamloops, B.C., but soon her online sleuthing discovered he had more marriages than he was letting on.
“There was one I knew about. The other three I didn’t know about,” she said in an interview. “It’s quite the roller coaster.”
Three of his four previous marriages didn’t end in divorce, she said, meaning including her, he’s still technically married to four women in Canada and the U.S.
“You realize you barely know this person. You realize you’ve been conned, and you’ve been deceived. You go, ‘What is true? What is not true?’” she said.
She wanted her marriage annulled on the basis that no marriage licence should have been issued. But she found another significant roadblock: that officials at the Kamloops Courthouse required her to prove that her husband hadn’t been previously divorced.
That meant making requests of every licensing agency across North America, finding that some states wouldn’t provide her that proof. She says she’s still struggling with the paperwork.
“So, although it’s illegal in Canada, bigamy, they make it impossible to follow through,” she said.
Ontario family lawyer Hilary Angrove raised another concern: that the people entering into subsequent marriages may find that if they try to claim assets in a divorce, a court may find they weren’t married in the first place.
“It was a void marriage. She can’t even apply for a divorce. It would be nullified because it wasn’t even a marriage to begin with. You can only be married to one person, and he was married to that first person,” Angrove said.
There are other legal means to try and get assets from a bigamous marriage, Angrove said, but the spouse has to go to court to make a claim to those assets on another basis.
“The only person who has rights in this scenario is that first marriage,” she said.
