A recent precedential Superior Court case arising out of Bucks County, Bordone v. Bordone (No. 3155 EDA 2024) addressed a rarely encountered issue in the form of annulment. The parties were married in Connecticut in 2000, but only discovered in 2021 that wife’s divorce from her first husband was not finalized until one day after their wedding. In other words, wife was an unintentional bigamist for a day.
Annulment is a mechanism to legally void a marriage due to an impediment which prevented the parties legally entering into the marriage. Through annulment, the marriage ceases to exist. While bigamy is an obvious issue for annulment, there can be other grounds for annulment such as the lack of the capacity (this could be age or mental disability) to enter into a marriage or being closely related by blood.
The potential impact on having the marriage annulled is significant: it would have allowed over twenty years of accumulation of a marital estate to be immediately turned into assets owned by the titled party and joint assets determined by proportional interest on the title. If the parties’ assets had been accumulated heavily in the name of one party instead of the other, annulment could result in a “distribution” of the estate heavily benefiting the titled party and avoiding the risk of an opposite outcome through the equitable distribution process within the family court.
The issue on appeal dealt with the Bucks County Family Court’s dismissal of Husband’s complaint seeking a declaration of annulment of the marriage. On appeal, Husband raised jurisdictional issues (Connecticut law, not Pennsylvania law, should apply); whether the marriage was void at the time of the ceremony, and; whether the subsequent cohabitation after the removal of the impediment to marriage (i.e. wife’s first marriage) “rehabilitated” the marriage.
Husband’s pursuit of annulment under Connecticut law stems from the state law’s lack of recourse to cure a bigamous marriage by subsequent cohabitation after the impediment (the prior marriage) is removed. In contrast, Pennsylvania law provides a statutory mechanism (23 Pa.C.S.A. § 1702(a)) that allows a marriage entered into in good faith to become valid if the parties continue to cohabit as spouses after the impediment is removed. The court determined that Pennsylvania had the most significant interest in the matter, as the parties resided in Pennsylvania, raised their family there, and only the ceremony occurred in Connecticut. Accordingly, Pennsylvania law governed.
Under Pennsylvania law, a marriage that was void due to bigamy can be rehabilitated if, after the impediment is removed, the parties continue to cohabit as husband and wife in good faith. The court found that both parties believed in good faith that the wife’s prior marriage had been dissolved at the time of their wedding. After the prior divorce was finalized (one day after the ceremony), the parties continued to live together as spouses for over twenty years, raised four children, and held themselves out as married.
The court emphasized Pennsylvania’s strong presumption in favor of the validity of a second marriage entered into in good faith and found that the statutory requirements for rehabilitation of the marriage were met.
The husband’s efforts to annul the marriage may have stemmed from an economic motivation where the elimination of the marriage would, by operation of law, result in the parties keeping the assets titled in their name. While we cannot tell what that may mean based on this appeal, this action was filed in Bucks County in 2022, but a divorce action initiated by Wife was filed in 2021, so one can assume that the economic upside may have been worth the effort of having the marriage annulled. It is quite possible the error of overlapping marriages was discovered through the production of the parties’ marriage certificate for the Bucks County divorce complaint and a copy of the divorce decree from the first marriage as part of the parties’ divorce process.
However it was the issue arose, this decision underscores the importance of state-specific statutory provisions in resolving questions of marital validity and highlights Pennsylvania’s policy favoring the rehabilitation of marriages entered into in good faith, even where a technical impediment existed at the time of the ceremony.
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