A corrections officer is facing bigamy charges after authorities said a Washington woman using Facebook discovered that she and a potential "friend" were married to him at the same time.

美国政府机关称，一位华盛顿女性通过Facebook发现她丈夫和某潜在“好友”的丈夫竟是同一人。这两位女性的丈夫是一名惩教官，他即将面临重婚罪的控诉。

According to charging documents filed Thursday, Alan L. O'Neill married a woman in 2001, moved out in 2009, changed his name and remarried without divorcing her. The first wife first noticed O'Neill had moved on to another woman when Facebook suggested the friendship connection to wife No. 2 under the "People You May Know" feature.

"Wife No. 1 went to wife No. 2's page and saw a picture of her and her husband with a wedding cake," Pierce County Prosecutor¹ Mark Lindquist told the reporters.

Wife No. 1 then called the defendant²'s mother.

"An hour later the defendant arrived at (Wife No. 1's) apartment, and she asked him several times if they were divorced," court records show. "The defendant said, 'No, we are still married.'"

Neither O'Neill nor his first wife had filed for divorce, according to charging documents. The name change came in December, and later that month he married his second wife.

O'Neill allegedly told wife No. 1 not to tell anybody about his dual³ marriages, that he would fix it, the documents state. But wife No. 1 alerted authorities.

"Facebook is now a place where people discover things about each other they end up reporting to law enforcement," Lindquist said.

Athima Chansanchai, a freelance journalist who writes about social media, said Facebook over the years has played a role in both creating relationships and destroying them.

"It's just the latest vessel⁴ by which people can stray（流浪，迷路） if they want to," she said.

O'Neill, 41, was previously⁵ known as Alan Fulk. He has worked as a Pierce County corrections officer for five years, sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said.

He was placed on administrative⁶ leave after prosecutors⁷ charged him Thursday. He could face up to a year in jail if convicted.

O'Neill and his first wife had issues that went back to 2009. In 2010, his first wife was arrested after an altercation⁸ with the woman who later became the second wife.