What was claimed
Two siblings won the right to marry in the US.
Our verdict
This did not happen. The story originally came from a satire website using pictures of a British couple who won the right to have a civil partnership instead of a marriage.
A brother and sister did not win the right to marry in the United States
29 August 2019
A story claiming that a brother and sister from the United States won the right to marry in a landmark supreme court case has been shared numerous times on Facebook and across the internet.
However, the ruling is entirely fictitious. The story comes from the website World News Daily Report, which features the disclaimer “World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely a miracle.”
The photos of James and Victoria Barnes are actually of Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, a British couple who won the right to have a civil partnership instead of a marriage in 2018. The Civil Partnership Act 2004 is expected to be amended to allow heterosexual civil partnerships by the end of 2019.
Some of the online pieces about this feature the supposed photo of lawyer ‘Julianne Grey’. The photo is actually of former Australian lawyer Nicola Gobbo. Between 1995 and 2009, she worked as a police informant as well as a criminal defence lawyer, and in 2018 became embroiled in the Lawyer X scandal.
Marriage between siblings is considered void in both the UK and US.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false as the story is not real and also misreports photographs of real people.