Circulating online for about the last decade is a news story about a Chinese man that divorces his ugly wife and is awarded $120,000 compensation. Weird, right? But is it true? There are after all so many stories that get made up that it becomes difficult to determine fact from fiction.Don’t get me wrong, there certainly are some weird stories out there that seem stranger than fiction, but are one hundred percent genuine. So is this story about the Chinese man who divorces his ugly wife true?
The story of the Chinese man that divorced his ugly wife
A recently divorced man from northern China successfully divorced and sued his wife for 750,000 Yuan ($120,000) compensation because she was ugly. So why would he marry her and then sue her for being ugly?
The story goes like this. The two were happily married until they had their first child. The man was astounded at the sight of the baby and was adamant his wife had been unfaithful. A DNA test proved that his wife was indeed faithful, he was the father. Still the man could not believe the child was theirs as it looked nothing like either of them. His wife then revealed that before they met she underwent extensive plastic surgery to change her appearance.
The husband sued his wife claiming that his wife tricked him into marrying her under a false pretense. The court agreed and ordered his ex-wife to pay the compensation.
However…
The story that first appeared was courtesy of the Heilongjiang Morning Post, a newspaper that is well renowned for publishing fictitious articles. They have routinely printed articles that fail to contain any valid reference to support the claim. This was just one of them. But a reputation of printing false and misleading articles shouldn’t completely exclude this particular story from being fact. There had to be much more to discredit this story, and one needn’t look much further than the pictures. As the old saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words.
Always accompanying the article are a few pictures, either of the before and after shot of the wife, or the family. Without looking to hard it becomes obvious that there are several problems. One problem is the picture of the family contains several children. Firstly, China has a one child policy, making this picture almost impossible. But the same picture has another glaring failure. That is once again the additional babies, that should never exist since they got a divorce after the first born child. So what gives?
It turns out that they have just picked any old picture off the internet. In fact, the picture of the family originated from a Taiwanese plastic surgery company. It’s highly probable that the second image of the wife, who also fails to resemble the woman in the family portrait, was from a similar clinic.
