Bigamist, The

Now airing as the three-part documentary series The Other Mrs Jordan on ITVX.

From whirlwind romance to gaslighting campaign: this is truth far stranger than fiction.

When Mary met Will Jordan online, she was a single mother who’d given up trying to find Mr Right. And yet here he suddenly was: articulate and attractive, with a fascinating background. Soon they were in love, and when he proposed after a month it seemed recklessly romantic.

Caught up in a whirlwind, Mary accepted that Will’s work often took him away from home, out of contact. She was his rock, supporting him emotionally when a misunderstanding led to criminal charges, and even selling everything when blackmailers threatened to kidnap their children. Together, they took on the world.

And then one day the phone rang, and a woman introduced herself as ‘the other Mrs Jordan’…

In this raw account of deception on a grand scale, Mary Turner Thomson recounts what happened after she discovered every word he’d said, from the very first moment, was a lie. This is her painful, humiliating truth—but she tells it for one reason: she too was once a strong, independent woman who would have read all this and thought It could never happen to me…

Revised edition: Previously published as The Bigamist: the true story of a husband’s ultimate betrayal, this edition of The Bigamist includes editorial revisions.