Saga of a legal battle spanning Lanka, US

A Massachusetts man who was on the losing end of an unusual Bristol County Superior Court bigamy case reported earlier this year by Lawyers Weekly says that, although the jury has awarded his would-be second wife $550,000, the legal battle between them is far from over.

"There's a private criminal complaint against three parties out in Sri Lanka," Ronald D. Viveiros tells Lawyers Weekly. "It was basically due to preparing a fraudulent annulment. There's also a divorce case."

According to Viveiros, the original documents from that divorce case contain sworn statements and the statement made in Massachusetts contradicted the Sri Lankan sworn statement. "Two different countries, two different courts, two different sworn statements - you can draw some interesting conclusions from that," he says.

Viveiros married Harshini Weerasinghe, a Sri Lankan native, in 2001, despite the fact that he already had a wife in Massachusetts. It took Weerasinghe several years to discover the first wife, and when she did, she left Viveiros and married another man. She then sued Viveiros for fraud and won the case in Bristol Superior Court.

But Viveiros' Sri Lankan lawyer, who asks that his name not be published due to legal concerns in his native country, says that, during the course of litigation in Sri Lanka and the United States, Weerasinghe had tried to end her marriage with Viveiros by submitting false documents to the Sri Lankan court system.

"There is no such document in Sri Lanka," he says of an annulment certificate Weerasinghe allegedly filed in the Sri Lankan court.

"If you want to get a statement from the courthouse saying that your marriage is annulled, you have to get a court judgment. This particular document is not used by the court and is not signed by any authorized person."

According to Viveiros and his lawyer, a Sri Lankan trial on the authenticity of the annulment document is slated to begin on Aug. 29. They also say that Weerasinghe has been compelled to appear in the Sri Lankan court with an arrest warrant issued by Interpol.

Weerasinghe's Worcester lawyer, Patricia L. Davidson, confirms that Weerasinghe was forced to travel to Sri Lanka to appear in the matter of a fraudulent annulment document earlier this summer and will appear in Sri Lankan court before the end of this month.

"Ron is trying to allege [that the annulment document] was obtained by [Weerasinghe]," she says.

"But we have no idea where it came from. It's true, early in the case, I was waving it around saying she got an annulment in Sri Lanka, and it wasn't until later that we amended our proceedings to correct that. But we think that one of her original Sri Lankan lawyers somehow got the document, and he's now dead. Because he's dead, nobody has any idea where it came from. It's got nothing to do with anything, because the marriage was void from the beginning."

Davidson acknowledges that the original complaint filed in Massachusetts contained some minor inaccuracies but notes that Viveiros challenged them at the time and the record was corrected.

"Initially, yeah, there were a couple little things, but nothing major that seems to contradict reality," she says.

"He was so hung up on a couple of these little things, which, in trial, [Weerasinghe] acknowledged were mistakes. They obviously had no impact [on the case's outcome]."