Wait, Was Jessey Really Married To Someone Else Before Bling Empire?

Season 1 of Bling Empire ended with a surprise engagement for Jessey Lee and Cherie Chan after Cherie proposed to him at their baby son’s 100-day party. It was the kicker after a long season of Cherie impatiently waiting to make things official with Jessey, but it turns out, there may have been a good reason it took a while for them to head down the aisle. According to Season 2 of Bling Empire, Jessey was married to a woman named Crystal before his relationship with Cherie.

In the first episode of Bling Empire Season 2, Leah Qin told Jaime Xie that Cherie met Jessey when Jessey was still married to Crystal. Not only was that part of the Cherie-Jessey timeline a surprise to Jaime (and the rest of the Bling Empire cast, once she told them), but so was the entire fact that Jessey was once married at all. Throughout Season 2, the cast of Bling Empire tried to investigate Jessey and Cherie’s past, but they didn’t have much luck actually confronting them about it.

According to the Cinemaholic, Jessey and his first wife, Crystal Hoang, got married in 2011, had two kids together, and filed for divorce a few years later, which resulted in a bench trial in 2016. Bustle reports that they became officially legally divorced in 2019. In Season 2 of Bling Empire, Leah said that Cherie was friends with Crystal while she was married to Jessey, and Crystal has a pic of Cherie on her Instagram grid from 2015.

On the show, Leah insinuated there was some overlap between Jessey’s relationship with Cherie and his marriage to Crystal, but Cherie cleared things up in a recent interview with Brides. She said, “I met Jessey in Vegas, when I was visiting with some mutual friends who I had gone to UCLA with. We didn’t talk to each other at all, but knew of each other through those friends. After his divorce, he reached out to me half a year later.”

It seems like Jessey and Cherie may have started seeing each other while Jessey was in the middle of his divorce proceedings, even though his divorce wasn’t made official until 2019. Jessey and Cherie later secretly tied the knot in a small private ceremony in France in September 2021, after filming Season 2 of Bling Empire.

Crystal is now busy building her own business empire. She’s the CEO and founder of Votum, a tech brand with the goal of “empowering women with financial independence” to invest and save money. Perhaps she’ll make an appearance in the next season of Bling Empire to tell her side of the story.

Season 2 of Bling Empire is streaming on Netflix now.