Runaway bride case
Case of Jennifer Wilbanks, who faked a kidnapping to avoid a wedding / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The runaway bride case concerns Jennifer Carol Wilbanks (born February 28, 1973), an American woman who ran away from her home in Duluth, Georgia on April 26, 2005, to avoid her wedding with John Mason, her fiancé, on April 30.[1] Her disappearance sparked a nationwide search and intensive media coverage, including media speculation that Mason had killed her. On April 29, Wilbanks called Mason from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and falsely claimed that she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a Hispanic man and a white woman.
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Wilbanks gained notoriety in the United States and internationally, and her story persisted as a major topic of national news coverage for some time after she was found unharmed. Many critics of the mass media attacked the coverage as a "media circus". Journalist Howard Kurtz wrote that the runaway bride had become a "runaway television embarrassment", comparing the story to a TV soap opera.[2]
Wilbanks repeated the false claims that fell apart under FBI interrogation resulting in a felony indictment of providing false information to law enforcement, a charge that could have resulted in up to five years of imprisonment.[3] On June 2, 2005, she pleaded no contest to this charge. As part of her plea bargain, she was sentenced to two years of probation and 120 hours of community service, and she was also ordered to pay $2,250 in restitution to the Gwinnett County Sheriff's Department. As part of the plea bargain, a misdemeanor charge of filing a false police report was dismissed. Wilbanks's criminal record was expunged after her probation ended.