What Does Made Jati Say She Did?

With a maze of events unfolding after more than five years of investigation, it is easy to lose track of the pattern behind these cases.

There was a logic to Made Jati's actions, however, based upon her understanding that there were loopholes in Indonesian law which would allow her to defraud her husband.

The explanations are tortuous and technical, but the easiest way to trace them is by examining Made Jati's own documents and explanations, because a thread runs through them which ultimately leads back to a single clause in an article of Regulations Regarding Marriage in Indonesia issued in 1974. Made Jati's explanation of that clause reveals why she created this entire complex web of documents.

Hold on to your hats, this gets bizarre...

Events of a Marriage - Made Jati's Theory of Indonesian Law

Made Jati began preparing false documents in April 1986 with a certificate claiming that she resided in Tabanan and was unmarried, just six months after she and I were legally married in Los Angeles in 1985. In fact at that moment Made Jati resided in Los Angeles with me and she obtained a U.S. Residence Card on that basis, and secondarily, when in Bali she resided at her parents' home in Kuta.

She continued to use her secret double identity in Tabanan over the next ten years to acquire many other “Unmarried” documents which she used to set up land purchases as a single woman.

At the same time, from her home with me in Sanur she continued to file documents as a married woman and mother of two children. She also gathered numerous documents which she presented me for my signature with false explanations about their meaning or purpose.

In September 1996 she obtained a new Marriage Certificate in Denpasar falsely claiming that we were married in a fictitious Hindu ceremony in Tabanan in June 1996.

In April 2005 she filed an Accusation of Divorce falsely claiming that we were married in a fictitious Hindu ceremony at her home in Kuta in September 1996 and denying the existence of a marriage in Los Angeles in 1985.

Made Jati initially won that divorce, but by early 2006 it became clear that neither the September 1996 ceremony in Kuta nor the June 1996 ceremony in Tabanan had ever occurred and the photos that she presented as evidence were proven to be from a Hindu ceremony at our true family home in Sanur in May 1994. Made Jati then falsely claimed in court documents and explanations to the police that the Certificate of Marriage from Denpasar was the registration of the true 1994 Hindu ceremony in Sanur.

This explanation ignored the fact, however, that the actual document she used to acquire the 1996 Certificate of Marriage was a Certificate of Hindu Marriage for the fictitious Hindu ceremony in Tabanan in June 1996.

In mid 2006, Made Jati advanced a new theory based on a clause of the Regulations Regarding Marriage in Indonesia issued in 1974 which stated that foreign marriages are valid in Indonesia and must be registered within one year of returning to Indonesia. According to Made Jati, this meant that the California marriage of 1985 had been ended by an automatic secret administrative divorce in 1988, one year after we moved to Bali, because it had not been registered within one year.

There is in fact no such thing as an automatic secret administrative divorce in Indonesia and this explanation was rejected by the Mahkamah Agung, the Supreme Court of Indonesia. By August 2006, Made Jati changed her story yet again. She admitted that there had been a valid marriage in Los Angeles in 1985, but that its registration in Denpasar was illegal because it had been done by my lawyers without her permission, and “laws of Indonesia are for the protection of Indonesians, not for use by foreigners.” Therefore, she claimed, the only legal marriage in Indonesia was her 1996 marriage.

When the Supreme Court rejected this argument, Made Jati then argued that marriage law is governed by trademark law: the first registration of a trademark in a country establishes priority and so the 1996 Marriage Certificate had priority over the 1985 Los Angeles marriage which had been registered in Denpasar only in 2005.

When the Supreme Court rejected this argument and declared the 1996 Marriage Certificate invalid and acquired in a manner Contrary to Law and clarified that the requirement to register a marriage within one year was an administrative requirement, Made Jati then argued that the 1985 marriage only took effect in Indonesia from the moment of its registration in Denpasar in 2005, meaning that we had been married internationally in 1985, but that she was single in Indonesia up until the moment of registration in 2005.

The common thread is the consistent preparation of a careful plan through twenty years of marriage: failure to register the California marriage in Denpasar, a requirement Made Jati never told me about, set the premise for the entire plan.

It appears that Made Jati was already working to develop this plan from the first months of our marriage in 1985. The first I heard about any of these theories was as Made Jati used them in arguments in her presentations to the courts in the divorce.