BLOWING open yet another scandal for the world to see, the eponymous online social activity facility, Facebook, has revealed the face of a husband married to two women at the same time in America, where such is criminalized as bigamy.
Facebook’s automatic efforts to connect users possible “friends” led two Washington women to find out they were married to the same man, at the same time.
Court documents filed Thursday said O’Neill married a woman in 2001 before moving out in 2009. He later changed his name and remarried without divorcing his previous wife.
The first wife first noticed O’Neill had moved on to another woman when Facebook suggested the friendship connection to wife No. 2 under the “People You May Know” feature.
“Wife No. 1 went to wife No. 2’s page and saw a picture of her and her husband with a wedding cake,” Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist told The Associated Press.
Wife No. 1 then called the defendant’s mother.
“An hour later the defendant arrived at (Wife No. 1’s) apartment, and she asked him several times if they were divorced,” court records show. “The defendant said, ‘No, we are still married.'”
Neither O’Neill nor his first wife had filed for divorce, according to charging documents. The name change came in December, and later that month he married his second wife.
O’Neill allegedly told wife No. 1 not to tell anybody about his dual marriages, that he would fix it, the documents state. But wife No. 1 alerted authorities.
“Facebook is now a place where people discover things about each other they end up reporting to law enforcement,” Lindquist said.
O’Neill, 41, was previously known as Alan Fulk. He has worked as a Pierce County corrections officer for five years, sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said.
He was placed on administrative leave after prosecutors charged him Thursday. He could face up to a year in jail if convicted.
O’Neill and his first wife had issues that went back to 2009. In 2010, his first wife was arrested after an altercation with the woman who later became the second wife.
Lindquist said it’s unclear why O’Neill and wife No. 1 didn’t go through the divorce.
“Every few years we see one of these (bigamy) cases,” he added.
O’Neill is free, but due in court later this month, which is standard procedure for non-violent crimes, Lindquist said.
“About the only danger he would pose is marrying a third woman,” he said.
Story courtesy of the Associated Press