At best, Brittany Porter’s story is a cautionary tale about not marrying anyone you just met. On the other hand, it’s also a tale of reinvention, as the woman who says she was unaware that she had married the Sultan of Kelantan is now trying her hand at pop stardom.
The 30-year-old Ms. Porter, perhaps better known by her stage name Brook Lynn, first met 56-year-old Sultan Muhammad V of Malaysia in January 2024. She claimed that the attraction was instantaneous.
“He swept me off my feet,” Ms. Porter told The Daily Mail, and the two started talking every day.
In April, he asked her to go on holiday to Oman and flew her friends along. He proposed, giving her a blue diamond to match her eyes. There, they had a religious ceremony, the nikah.
As the couple were planning to have a big celebration in January, Ms. Porter, who admitted that she did not know much about Islam, had thought that they were not yet legally married. She only found out otherwise months later, when the Sultan was no longer responding to her efforts to communicate.
She also told the publication that after the ceremony in Oman, she was put under enormous pressure to produce an heir. The California native got pregnant quickly but had a “traumatizing miscarriage” soon after.
In an Instagram post from earlier this month, she wrote, “The truth is – I was, and still am, his wife in the eyes of Allah. And then… he disappeared after my miscarriage. No explanation. No divorce. Just silence.
As a foreigner, I’m still trying to understand what this means legally and religiously. Under Islam, I can’t simply move on without a proper talaq or fasakh. I want to do things the right way – with respect, clarity, and faith.”
Her relationship with the Sultan quickly went sour after her miscarriage, and the couple began fighting a lot, in large part due to the big bills Ms. Porter racked up during her frequent shopping trips.
She admitted to having spent “hundreds of thousands.”
After she flew to California to meet with a celebrity wedding planner, however, Ms. Porter said that the Sultan grew distant, which alarmed her so much that she went back to Malaysia, only to discover that he wasn’t there.
She told The Daily Mail that the Sultan does not do well with serious conversations.
“He’s never been one to have confrontational talks. When he was upset with me about something, he would have to go in another room and text me about it,” she said.
Upon finding out that he was in Singapore, she followed him there, determined to have it out. She was not allowed by hotel security, however, to go to his room, and the next day, Ms. Porter received a message from someone on his staff informing her that he was no longer in the city-state.
She then flew back to the United States and has since decided to pivot to a career in singing, having written songs about her experience.
Ms Porter is not the first non-Malaysian woman to have been wed to the Sultan. In 2018, he married a Russian beauty queen named Oksana Voevodina, who gave birth to their son the following year.
He abdicated the throne in May 2019, but divorced Ms Voevodina just four weeks later. /TISG
Read also: Russian beauty queen flees for fear of harm against her Malaysian ‘royal’ son
