Common
Runaway bride case
Case of Jennifer Wilbanks, who faked a kidnapping
Runaway bride case
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. 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. 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. Wilbanks repeated the false claims that fell apart under FBI interrogation...
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