Indonesia woman gets jail after exposing philandering boss

An Indonesian woman who exposed her cheating boss has been slapped with a sixmonth jail term for her trouble. The supreme court’s shock ruling overturned an earlier court decision that had cleared the woman, Baiq Nuril Maknun, of breaking a controversial law against spreading indecent material.

“I’m saddened and shocked by this sentence,” Maknun’s husband Lalu Muhamad Isnaini said Friday in reaction to the ruling, which was issued last week. The odd case stretches back to 2012 when Maknun recorded a conversation in which the principal of the school where she worked on the island of Lombok revealed graphic sexual details about an affair he was having with another colleague.

Co-workers of the school administrator -- who herself had rebuffed the principal’s repeated advances -- later convinced Maknun to release the recording in a bid to expose the man’s history of lecherous behaviour, according to her lawyer Joko Jumadi. “The principal shared very graphic details about his affair with the school’s treasurer in the recording,” he told AFP.

In response, the principal fired Maknun and filed a complaint with authorities. Maknun was initially cleared of the charges by a local court in Lombok, next to holiday hotspot Bali. But, last Friday, Indonesia’s top court reversed that decision, finding her guilty of violating the electronic information law and sentencing her to six months’ jail along with a 500 million rupiah ($34,000) fine. The 36-year-old Maknun told local reporters that the ruling was unfair.