IF YOU ARE LGBTQ, I DO NOT RECOMMEND!
My wife and I decided to elope and hired Pamela as our wedding officiant. Everything was great until during the ceremony, Pamela believed we did not have wedding vows for one another. When hiring her, I m...ade it clear that my wife and I would be reading personal vows on the day of the wedding. So it’s frustrating that she didn’t think we had any vows. I thought that was VERY clear. However, as a result of this, we did not read our vows until the ceremony was over. She did apologize after the ceremony and my wife and I got over it. We are thankful it was an elopement because that would’ve been a horrific mistake for a big ceremony.
FURTHERMORE, Pamela recorded our elopement on her personal iPhone, for “documentation purposes.” She stated that same-sex marriages and couples of color’s paperwork are often misplaced and that she wanted to have documentation of the wedding. She also said that she would send me the video via “Air-Drop” but never did. Fast forward to a couple of days later, Pamela posted a snippet of the video she recorded during the ceremony being pronounced wife and wife on her social media platforms TikTok and Instagram. We wanted to support her as a wedding officiant and contribute to her social media content, but this quickly turned into a NIGHTMARE!
We received hateful comments from all over the world as the video she posted on her TikTok reached over 1 MILLION views. The video was also reposted and “stitched” over 20 times on TikTok on users’ personal TikTok pages in a negative manner, as Pamela did not protect the video with any privacy settings. We kindly asked Pamela to restrict comment access to all users, because of the terrible things people were commenting. She left the comments on. She then blocked us on her social media. Users continued to make a mockery of and shame our marriage by reposting it and saying hurtful things. Pamela gained over 6,500 followers, 19,000 likes, over 2500 shares and 1.3 million views from the video she posted of my wife and I on TikTok. She also received over 600 comments, with only 24 being “positive/non-offensive.” I then texted Pamela on her cellphone to delete the video entirely, and she refused. She had very few followers and likes before she posted the video of my wife and I. So to us, it seems like the social media attention she has received holds more value than our feelings, and wishes to remove the video from her social media platforms entirely.
A HUGE mistake my wife and I made is that we never signed a contract or gave Pamela written consent to record and post a clip of our wedding ceremony on her social media. So if you do hire her, I recommend a contract to protect you from her posting you on her social media. Our wedding was supposed to be something sacred and meaningful but it quickly turned into a moment tainted by hate and harassment.