An annulment is when a married couple asks the court to declare the marriage never legally occurred.  An annulment is not a divorce. Although the marriage license and the family law proceeding are still public record and anyone can access information from the file, the marriage never happened in a legal sense. If an annulment is granted, there is no property to divide, and the court does not have the power to award spousal support.

In California, there are several grounds for getting an annulment, the most common are incapacity, bigamy, and fraud.

Incapacity is when one or both of the parties enter into the marriage when they wetr unable to consent, usually because of intoxication or being under the influence of another substance. If either one of them requested an annulment shortly after they learned of the marriage, they would qualify to have the marriage annulled based upon incapacity.

Bigamy is where one or both of the parties is married to someone else at the time he/she marries his/her new spouse.  Since it is illegal to have more than one spouse, even if the second marriage was discovered years later, the marriage can always be annulled (usually with the help of an atty), even many years later. This is what we call a void marriage.

Fraud is where one or both parties rely on the statements or actions of the other spouse in order to form his/her decision to marry.  Once the parties are married, the innocent spouse learns that the statement or action was not true. In order to qualify for an annulment, the statement or action would have to be so serious that it goes to the “heart” of the marriage.  Some examples include one person marrying the other for immigration purposes, one spouse being impotent, one spouse not being able to have children, or one spouse claiming to want children when he/she really did not.