British man arrested after 'mock wedding' with 'child bride' at Disneyland Paris
22 June 2025, 23:44 | Updated: 23 June 2025, 00:24
A British man was arrested on Sunday after he allegedly attempted to stage a mock wedding with a nine-year-old girl before a crowd of 100 guests at Disneyland Paris.
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The man, 22, was allegedly acting as the "groom" in a staged ceremony with a nine-year-old girl on Saturday morning in front of the Sleeping Beauty castle in the Disneyland theme park near Paris, France.
The man told police his intention was to make a video for social media.
Staff at the theme park intervened to halt the ceremony and contacted police when they saw the girl, a nine-year-old Ukrainian, wearing a wedding dress.
The organisers of the disturbing event had rented the park for what they said would be a genuine wedding ceremony.
The “guests” were recruited online through adverts seeking 200 adults and 100 children aged between 5 and 15 to act as guests at a “rehearsal” for a wedding at Disneyland.
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Footage obtained by BFM TV showed about 100 seated guests awaiting the ceremony as a violin trio played at dawn in front of a stage covered in with flowers.
The event had cost the organiser €130,000, BFM said.
Alexandre Verney, assistant prosecutor for the Seine-et-Marne département, told The Times: “Four people were arrested and questioned: the groom, who was believed to be the organiser of the event and is presumed to be British and aged 22; the mother of the child, a 41-year-old Ukrainian woman; and two Latvian nationals aged 55 and 24.“
"It wasn’t a wedding but a staged wedding that was to be filmed with a hundred extras. They privatised Disneyland, claiming that it was a real marriage.”
The mother and the 55-year-old Latvian were released after a medical examination of the girl showed no mistreatment or constraint.
The Briton and the other Latvian were held for questioning over possible money laundering and fraud offences, the prosecutor’s office said.
A witness told Le Parisien: “We were not told at any time that it was about a film shoot. We all thought we were going to part of a wedding. Everyone was stunned. No one expected this. Disneyland does things very well. They immediately cancelled when they understood that the bride was a kid. We were sickened by that.”
The extras in the bizarre event said they were driven from central Paris on buses at 5am and given pink bracelets with the names of the “bride and groom” printed on them.
One of the extras, named Yeleen, who went to the ceremony with her daughter, said: “I saw a little girl dressed in white. I saw her hair prepared with curls and a lady picking her up in her arms. At that moment, I was shocked. I realised when I saw the child. It was atrocious.”
