Gisella, the ex-wife of popular television personality Gading Marten, was also summoned twice for questioning and eventually named as a suspect on Tuesday along with Defretes. They have been charged under the anti-pornography law’s controversial Articles 4 and 8 and face punishment of up to 12 years in prison.
Neither Gisella nor Defretes have been detained, however, and the police are still on the hunt for another suspect who allegedly first shared the video.
According to the police, Gisella, a former runner-up in the Indonesian Idol singing competition, admitted that the woman in the video was her, and that she had made the recording in a hotel in Medan, North Sumatra, in 2017. She also told the police that she had later lost her mobile phone.
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“When asked why she recorded it, she said that it’s for personal documentation, and that she would never resell it,” Jakarta police spokesman Yusri Yunus said on Tuesday, as quoted by news portal Detik.
Women’s rights activists and legal experts have condemned the prosecution of Gisella, pointing out that she is a victim in this case and should be protected by the state.
“The anti-pornography law should be amended, as this law was hastily passed and wasn’t discussed in details with the public,” Olin Monteiro, a women’s rights activist and founder of Arts for Women, who had opposed the law before it was passed in 2008, told This Week in Asia.
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“The law should not prosecute us because we make adult content for personal use. Laws like this are hurting women and other marginalised groups. Victims of revenge porn, for example, will be scared to report their cases to law enforcement.”
The Jakarta-based Institute for Criminal Justice Reform pointed to an exception in Article 4 of the anti-pornography law that states the creators of personal, adult content cannot be criminalised. The article clashes with Article 8 of the same law, which states that Indonesians are barred from being a model or object in any pornographic content.
“Authorities must understand that if [Gisella and Defretes] do not want to share the video to the public or for commercial purposes, then they are victims that should be protected. The investigators must return their focus to investigating the perpetrators that shared the video with the public,” the institute said in a statement.
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Mariana Amirudin, commissioner at Indonesia’s National Commission on Violence Against Women, said cases such as this highlighted the disenfranchisement of women in Indonesia’s largely patriarchal society.
“In porn cases, women are more harmed than men as women’s bodies are more [focused on] compared to men’s, women are also often being made nude objects so it is easy for them to be a suspect in cases like this,” Mariana said.
A group of plaintiffs in October filed for judicial review of the pornography law to the Constitutional Court, 10 years after a similar request was denied by the court after it found the plaintiffs did not have the requisite legal grounds.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Outcry after singer charged over personal sex video
