EXCLUSIVE: How multiple Canadian women discovered they were married to the same man

W5's Jon Woodward speaks to a B.C. woman who was surprised to discover that she wasn't the only person married to her husband.

This is part one of a multi-story series. Part two is tomorrow.

When Sara was approached at a B.C. gym and complimented by a strong, confident and charming man in his late thirties, the pair immediately hit it off.

The man, Jason Washington, told her he was a former U.S. Marine and a mixed martial arts fighter, and came on strong. He proposed in just a week, and eight months later, he and the single mom were married in a simple ceremony.

“Here was this big, strong man that I thought could be a strong shoulder to lean to, a protector, a husband and a father and a good role model to my son,” Sara recalled to W5 in an interview.

After the marriage in 2018, she says he changed, alleging he was violent in disciplining her son. Court records show he served one day after an assault conviction about a year later.

Sara felt her safety was at stake – one reason CTV News is not using her real name – and fled. She says she didn’t prioritize completing the divorce paperwork, and the pair’s B.C. marriage certificate is, technically, still valid.

But she was surprised to find out that it wasn’t the only one.

A W5 investigation has found that Washington had four marriage certificates over the course of about a decade that were, as of late last year, still valid at the same time in three different jurisdictions in North America.

Three of those four women were surprised to find out they married a married man, and have questions for the bureaucrats who processed and approved their marriage licence applications.

Sara says if she’d had any clue that the man who proposed to her was keeping something secret about his past, she would have never made those vows and saved herself years of pain and trauma.

“It would have been a huge red flag,” Sara said.

‘Are we dating the same guy?’

A social media page called “Are we dating the same guy” featured a picture of Washington. One of his wives – a woman we’re calling Emma – recognized him instantly.

Memories from years earlier, in Richmond, B.C, came flooding back to the single mom, including a wedding proposal after only a month.

“I caught him messaging another girl, and he said, ‘No, I love you, I just want to get married, and I was trying to buy a ring, but I didn’t know who to ask,’” Emma recalled.

“He actually went to my dad and asked for my hand, crying,” she said. “You know, he’s telling me, he’s telling my dad that he was going to protect me.”

B.C. authorities granted the marriage licence without any issue, she said.

Looking back, Emma said she believed he was “love bombing” her to distract her from anything that went wrong in the relationship. She said she was vulnerable at the time and found him creating a wedge between her and her close friends.

“I couldn’t get him to leave. I felt so stuck and so scared,” she said.

But she said when he spanked her son, she resolved to separate – and got him another apartment. She wanted him out of her life and didn’t press him to sign divorce papers.

“I just needed him out of the house so that my kids and I were safe again,” she said.

The marriage certificate for Emma and Jason Washington was also still valid.

More marriages – and prison time

Both women were also surprised to find out that court records indicate divorce proceedings involving Washington started in 2013 in B.C. and never concluded. That’s another marriage still on the books.

Wedding photos posted online show Washington at it again – another marriage in 2021, this time in Buffalo, N.Y. A wedding cake is shown in the photo with gold lettering: Mr. and Mrs. Washington.

Bigamy – marrying more than one person at a time – is a crime in both Canada and all 50 states within the U.S., as is making a false declaration on a marriage application, though it appears those crimes are rarely prosecuted.

While he was in Buffalo, Washington would receive his most serious criminal conviction yet: second-degree manslaughter. The Erie County District Attorney’s Office said he crossed a double yellow line while driving drunk and killed another driver in a head-on collision.

Records show he spent a little over three years in a U.S. prison before being released in 2024.

‘These are women I loved for many, many years’

W5 reached Washington by phone. He said he had been married four times and loved each of his wives during the marriages.

“These are women I loved for many, many years,” he said.

As for making sure the divorce paperwork was finished and correctly filling out paperwork for a subsequent marriage, he said it was up to his wife to check the paperwork for each one.

“That was a woman’s job. That was my soon-to-be-wife’s job to do all that,” he said.

When asked how his soon-to-be-wife would know about the previous marriages, Washington said: “I’ve always been up front, 100 per cent, about who I’ve been married to. They all talk to each other, bro. They’re women.”

As for that manslaughter conviction, Washington said he still bears mental scars from his time in the Marines.

“I was convicted of manslaughter because I have dissociative episodes from f---ing combat,” he said.

American military records show that Washington’s service began in August 1997, and he was given a Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, though under deployments, the record is listed as “none.”

He was court-martialed in 2001 and given what the records call a “bad-conduct discharge.”

U.S. court records show that Washington’s wife in Buffalo had applied for, and received, a divorce as of December 2025.

Sara and Emma say they’re trying to get their marriages to Washington annulled, arguing no Canadian officials should have processed the paperwork with existing marriages on the books.

“I think this is a huge, huge gap, a huge hole in the system that I fell through, and other women have fallen through,” Sara said.