Police in Valladolid intervened in a street fight between two women that had started because both women discovered they were legally married to the same man at the same time. They were not impressed.

This incident took place around nine in the evening one Wednesday towards the end of last month with the husband present at the time.

When the police arrived, tipped off by a call from a witness to the scuffle, the officers set about trying to separate the two women and establish the identities of those involved.

Despite a lot of ‘flying fur,’ both women refused medical assistance from an ambulance that had been despatched and said that they would make their own way to a nearby hospital to get patched up.

Spain, like all First-World countries, does not take kindly to bigamy and criminal legislation exists, so the police informed the judicial authorities.

Article 217 of the Spanish Criminal Code is clear and carries a prison sentence: “Whoever contracts a second or subsequent marriage, knowing that the previous one legally subsists, shall be punished with a prison sentence of six months to one year.”

So, how does bigamy normally crop up? Well, there are unregistered foreign marriages where a citizen gets married in their country of origin and, upon moving to Spain, marries again by taking advantage of the fact that the first union is not registered in the Spanish Civil Registry or the consulate. This is considered pretty sneaky, and entails a good wodge of duplicity.

Then there’s the Lack of ‘exequatur’: a person formally divorces abroad and remarries in Spain without first completing the exequatur (the mandatory judicial process to validate a foreign ruling in Spain). Without this official approval, the first marriage remains fully valid under Spanish law.

Which brings us to confusion with de facto separation: a person has been separated from their spouse for decades and mistakenly assumes that the marriage has expired due to the passage of time. Ahem…

Finally, and probably the most prevalent kind are the cases of convenience marriage fraud: marriages entered into in exchange for financial compensation, where it is later discovered that one of the parties already had an active marriage, thereby exposing bigamy.

What was the case in this incident? Damned good question, but the result, all barring the last example, could be the separation of the bigamist from his testicles carried out by one or both of the aggrieved parties.

(News: Valladolid, Castilla-Leon)

Keywords: Wives Fight, Bigamy, Street Squabble

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