A mother-of-three has admitted bigamy and could face up to seven years in jail after marrying her lover and having his child while still married to her husband of 18 years.
Brinda Kantamanen, 42, falsified her father’s name on the marriage certificate during her wedding to her lover Matthew Hall, 45, at Ealing Town Hall in west London in October 2017.
But 18 years earlier, in May 1999, she had married Ravi in North Carolina. The couple held a traditional Indian ceremony later that year and went on to have two children together, reported the Mirror.
Her husband was ‘sad and distraught’ when he found out Kantamanen had married another man and hidden a pregnancy from him.
Kantamanen, a computer consultant, has now been warned she faces imprisonment as magistrates revealed all sentencing options were open.
Prosecutor Ravinder Chodha told the court Kantamanen and her lover lived just three minutes from each other’s homes during their affair.
She said: ‘The complainant [Ravi] confronted the defendant about the marriage. She accepted that she had in fact married him and that they had a child together.
‘The child was born while she was still married to the complainant.’
Ravi, who works as a director for an international consultancy firm, told the court their marriage started to break down in 2017 when he became suspicious of his wife’s long periods away from home.
He said whenever he tried to confront her she would either ‘become affectionate or threaten suicide’.
In December 2017 he finally uncovered Kantamanen’s second marriage.
A magistrate said the aggravating features of the case were that Kantamanen had a child and hid that pregnancy.
The maximum sentence for bigamy is seven years in jail.
Ravi said he now ‘finds it difficult to trust anyone’, adding that his parents were ‘distraught’ by the revelations.
Kantamanen’s marriage to Ravi was formally dissolved in 2019 and she now runs her own computing consultancy firm from her home in Guildford, Surrey.
She will be sentenced next month.
Seriously?