A real estate agent who was feeling lonely last December decided that the best place to look for companionship was on WriteAPrisoner.com, and sure enough – she’s now bagged herself a husband in the form of a 21-year-old (former) drug dealer who is doing time for selling drugs to a person who died as a result of taking them. Swoon city!
27-year-old Laura Gehrke met 21-year-old Joshua Stewart on the website after a visa issue left her stuck in Dubai alone for Christmas. The pair were soon speaking on the phone up to 11 hours a day and, after just six weeks, Joshua popped the question.
Laura flew to Washington to marry Joshua in June during a 90-minute prison ceremony. How romantic!
Laura says:
‘I was sitting here home alone feeling very sad because I couldn’t be with my family [due to the visa issue] and then I scrolled through TikTok and saw a video about WriteAPrisoner.com.
‘I thought I could just send one of them a message saying ‘Merry Christmas’.
‘I went on the website and saw my husband’s account. He was the second person I clicked on and I saw on his profile he said he liked poetry and I was interested in that.’
‘We really clicked. He was just open about everything from the beginning. He was telling me so many stories about his life. I thought he was really emotionally intelligent.
‘I wasn’t immediately asking about the crime because I didn’t want to judge him just based on that.
‘I was hearing a lot of stories about him growing up before I knew all the details about what he was incarcerated for. It made me see it all a bit differently.
‘Because I knew the backstory, it didn’t change my opinion of him.’
Who said true love is dead, eh? Despite being unable to spend their wedding night together, the pair are hoping to be approved for conjugal visits later this year.
Laura adds:
‘I flew over and we saw each other 12 times and the 13th time I saw him was our marriage. I wanted to see him first before we got married.
‘It was a prison marriage – one of the other inmates was his best man. We were all in white and had our own color theme.
‘It felt super right. Our families are super supportive. Obviously my mum had questions but she was very supportive.’
Joshua is set to be released under house arrest in December 2025, at which point Laura plans to fly out to the US to live with him. Naturally, there does seem to be some criticism of the whole thing on social media, not least because Laura once starred in the Netflix show Too Hot To Handle Germany. Come on now, what do they think, that Laura is marrying a convict who’s locked up on the other side of the world purely for the attention and a few headlines? Surely not.
Best of luck to the happy couple!
For the man who proposed to his girlfriend at a festival while Limp Bizkit played ‘Break Stuff’ in the background, click HERE. Now that’s how you do it!
