Are Nicole Richie and Joel Madden Secretly Married?

by Libby Pelham | More from this Blogger

01 Nov 2009 12:53 PM

Nicole Richie and Joel Madden just added another bundle of joy to their expanding family, but are they secretly married? Well, they are if you believe the story in this week's Star!

In case you haven't heard, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church just performed another mass wedding ceremony (or as the church refers to is - "blessing ceremony") for which he has become famous or infamous, depending on your opinion. As best I can understand it, Rev. Moon figured that performing mass wedding ceremonies of couples paired from all over the world was the best way to promote world peace. He's been going this for years. The church was founded in 1954 and Moon started marrying off couples in 1961, not long after his own marriage in 1960. The really weird thing was that, for the longest, Moon would marry couples that had never even met each other. And we are talking thousands of people. The most recently ceremony, believed to be possibly the last as Moon is approaching 90 years of age, consisted of 45,000 couples.

The Star is claiming that Nicole and Joel were among those couples. The couple, who have been together since late 2006, had planned on marrying the weekend of October 17th. It was believed that Nicole had finally decided to marry Joel after losing former finace DJ AM earlier this year. But, whereas she wanted a big ceremony with DJ AM (insisting she wanted elephant rides and swans), she wanted a low key ceremony with Joel. Apparently word got out and for fear of it turning into a media circus, she and Joel decided to wed in the mass Unification Church ceremony.

So is it really true? Well, it is Hollyweird, so anything is possible. To back up the claim, Star notes that Nicole's dad, singer Lionel Richie, gave away the secret at the Noble Humanitarian Awards. When announcing Joel, he said "I want to welcome him to our family!"

My question is, even if the couple did marry in the ceremony, is it binding? I honestly don't know if these people are really married or not after these events. And if so, what is the divorce rate like?

(This image has been (or is hereby) released into the public domain by its author, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. This applies worldwide.)

Learn more about Libby Pelham

Libby Pelham is a work-at-home mom located in Jacksonville, NC. She has a beautiful little boy, Will, born in July of 2004.

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