We Lost Our Wedding to 'Fire'/Fraud

We're Erin and Whitney, two girls deeply in love and getting ready to marry each other at the ceremony of our dreams in Seattle, and this week we were told we lost it all to a fire at the venue. The SFD said there was no fire and that it's likely fraud, and we don't know who to belive - but either way our venue and money are gone.

We had a dream wedding at EM Fine Arts planned - a beautiful art gallery with bare brick walls, a mezzanine bar, and a view of the Space Needle. Four monthes to the big day the venue tells us they lost their business to an electrical fire - they're refusing to refund us because it was "force majeure." They had seemed too good to be true - EM was providing the sound equiptment, lighting, furniture, and many other wedding necessities - and we put down our deposite shortly after getting engaged and were overjoyed to have found such a perfect place. Now it's all gone, and we don't have the money to start over.

This wedding was on a shoestring budget to begin with, and the prospect of finding a new venue and paying for all the expenses that EM ensured us were included is completely overwhelming. We're both deep in student debt and struggling to get by - Erin's a psychologist working customer service and Whitney's an unemployed biologist trying to find work - and this wedding means so much to us and has been our motivation to push on.  Any help from friends, family, and compassionate strangers would mean the world to us.