For years, Auckland man Micah Fala, 41, secretly filmed nearly two-dozen victims in properties across Aotearoa. Katie Harris sits down with Angelene Judge, the survivor who exposed his offending.
Angelene Judge walked into a police station with a gut feeling but “zero evidence”.
It was 2023, and years since she first learned an acquaintance had found proof that her former friend, Micah Fala, had a penchant for secretly videoing women in private places while they got undressed or showered. But the fear of what he could be capable of had finally brought her to a police interview room.
“I had been groomed.”
In the year that followed all her worst suspicions would be realised, and Judge would be tasked with identifying many of his 22 victims.
“It was horrific.”
There was always a reason.
An explanation for why Fala – who worked in supply chain management - had such a prescriptive interest in where people slept, bathed and changed.
“He’d be like, ‘The cleaners don’t want to clean all the bathrooms so just use this one’. Or, ‘There’s so many of us, all the guys can use this shower, you two girls use this one’.
“He used the excuse of, ‘Try out this new shower head’, as a reason I should use a certain shower,” she alleged.
Judge, an Auckland tech CEO, says their friend group existed under Fala’s control.
But she trusted him. Who wouldn’t? The pair had been tight since they were teens.
“He was always very present in my life. He would be around at my house a few times a week, he house-sat for me and my dog whenever I was overseas.”
Despite their close friendship, when she heard rumours in 2017 about his conduct, she believed them.
“It was enough for me to go, ‘Oh that feels like it’s right’. But it wasn’t enough for me to go running off to the police station and report on my best friend, so I cut off contact with him.”
In the following years, knowledge of the allegations tormented Judge, and she wondered whether Fala had been filming her secretly too.
“How much of it is there, where is the footage, is it published on the internet?”
All these questions looped in her mind.
Judge had tried to forge on, pushing the niggling thoughts to the back of her mind. But in 2023 she saw Instagram posts showing Fala had hosted a large 40th birthday party.
“There were people at the party who I thought knew [about the allegations], and it turns out they didn’t.”
This, she says, was her tipping point.
“I have to go to the police, I don’t have any evidence, I have this really nasty feeling that he’s still doing it. I was scared that it had got worse.”
In May 2024, about eight months after Judge reported her suspicions to police, a search warrant was conducted at several homes he had access to in the central North Island and Auckland.
“About a week later they called me into the police station and said, ‘We need your help’.”
The police wanted her to identify as many of the at least 22 victims as she knew.
“The damage is just horrific. The scale of it is just beyond imagination and there’s no coming back from it. There’s no undoing any of it.”
It was during this meeting that she says police also showed her footage of herself.
“In a way I felt glad that I was one of the victims. I was relieved that I’d caused this investigation and I’d caused all this hurt that all these victims had to go through, triggering it, and I was glad that I had to experience it firsthand myself.”
Judge says Fala’s laptops “mysteriously disappeared” after she claims he was made aware of the police investigation.
Police confirmed no laptops were seized.
“The only thing that worked in our favour was that because they’d taken nine months to [execute the search], he’d got sloppy and pulled out the old disk that had maybe his ‘classic hits’ on it or something, and had it in his bedside drawers,” she says.
Judge believes crime like this is far more prevalent than the public realises and often goes undetected.
“I’m quite a neat freak. I’m the kind of person that when I have a shower, I wipe down the bathroom cabinet and lift everything up and I never saw anything.”
It wasn’t until after the offending came to light that she realised just how accessible spy cameras are in Aotearoa.
“They can be shampoo bottles, toothpaste tubes, USB chargers, like a cellphone charger and they can be towel robe hooks that you put on the back of a bathroom door. They can even make them so small that they’re a screw in a cabinet.
“I think these are a weapon that can be used to harm people sexually and abuse them.”
She pointed to Trade Me and Amazon, which stock spy cameras for Kiwi consumers.
Trade Me policy and compliance manager James Ryan says, generally speaking, if something is legal to sell in New Zealand it is able to be sold on Trade Me.
Ryan says surveillance equipment can be legally sold in New Zealand and other retailers also sell the products.
“People find them useful for home security purposes.
“Like some other items they can be used improperly, so we strictly forbid these items to be advertised in any way that implies they could be used illegally, such as making an intimate digital recording.”
Any listing breaching this rule would be removed and the seller warned.
“We will consider banning them if we think that’s appropriate too.”
Amazon was approached for comment.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said banning spy cameras was not currently part of the Government’s work programme.
The footage police obtained during their search spanned almost a decade and featured multiple locations and homes. And Judge believes the real number of Fala’s victims may be far greater than 22.
Going through the process of identifying the victims was “horrific”.
“You’re looking in on this really intimate moment of theirs and they’re oblivious of this crime happening to them.”
Judge was also tasked with going through her camera roll to figure out when and where certain videos were captured.
In one shot, she says all they could see behind her was the top of a door and a man’s bathrobe hanging over it.
“I worked out I was in the master bedroom with the door closed behind me and I was getting changed out of my bikini.”
On that trip, Judge recalls she had been staying in the garage as there weren’t enough bedrooms and Fala had encouraged her to get changed in that room.
“He managed to put a camera in a bag.”
Fala’s arrest wasn’t immediate, but when he was charged in July last year it was “beyond a relief”.
In all, police laid 42 charges, including covertly making and having objectionable videos and material.
Detective Sergeant Rick Veacock said at the time police also charged Fala with sexual conduct with a child, as well as using a computer for illegal purposes.
“He has a terrible, horrific, deep pyschological rupture in him,” Judge says.
Though Judge was relieved when police laid charges against Fala, he then undertook a campaign to keep his identity secret.
His victims were informed that although Fala could keep his name secret in the interim, they did not get automatic suppression and a prosecutor had to apply on their behalf.
A week before sentencing Fala dropped his fight for secrecy.
Judge’s aim in speaking publicly about Fala’s offending is to raise awareness about how common covert visual crimes are and how far-reaching the impacts on victims can be.
“I knew to be scared of dark alleys, and not to walk home by myself at night but I never knew this sort of thing could happen.”
For her, even going to the gym and showering on site is difficult now.
And travelling for work presents more issues.
“I rip through hotel rooms when I arrive, everything comes off every shelf. Remotes, tissue boxes, shampoo bottles, I go through the light vents.”
Judge knows that her reporting his crimes helped uncover offending that caused a “huge amount” of pain to many people.
“I didn’t ask for their permission to do that. I didn’t know some of them when I triggered that, and that definitely sits heavily with me.”
But she takes comfort knowing that coming forward hopefully prevented an “untellable” number of future victims.
“It’s important that we talk about the men that commit these sorts of crimes and the things that create them, the people that enable them and the culture that supports them and the impact that they have on their victims and the community. I think that it’s potentially a silent epidemic.”
Katie Harris is an Auckland-based journalist who covers issues including sexual assault, workplace misconduct, media, crime and justice. She joined the Herald in 2020.
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