Sheikha Meriam bint Abdullah Al Khalifa (Arabic: مريم بنت عبد الله آل خليفة; born 1980) is a member of the Bahraini Royal House of Al-Khalifa.
In January 1999, she met Lance Corporal Jason Johnson, a United States Marine and a Mormon, at an "Americanized" shopping mall in Bahrain.
[3] They exchanged whispered phone calls and clandestine meetings until being spotted by a member of the Bahrain Royal Guard, who informed her mother of the illicit relationship.
She and Johnson flew to the United States in November 1999 with Al Khalifa disguised as a female U.S. Marine and using fake military transfer documents, forged by Lance Corporal Johnson himself, and were married in a Las Vegas chapel on November 16, 1999, after which she settled into life as a military housewife, living in base housing at Camp Pendleton.
In an interview with CBS News, Johnson and Al Khalifa said that if she returned to Bahrain, she would be "lashed, executed, stoned, killed, shot".
[12] Despite her earlier claims that she feared violence or death in her home country – an assertion that she had repeated in subsequent interviews – Al Khalifa returned to Bahrain in late 2001 to visit her family.