Angelene Judge speaks about discovering her former friend had been secretly filming women and children. Video / Alyse Wright
Opinion by Angelene Judge
Angelene Judge is a New Zealand tech entrepreneur and CEO
For years, Auckland man Micah Fala secretly filmed 22 women and girls in bedrooms and bathrooms across New Zealand. Angelene Judge, the survivor who first reported his offending, writes about unmasking one of her best friends as a criminal and her hopes that she can one day live a life where she’s not constantly looking for a hidden camera.
It wasn’t until the police officer slid the first piece of paper across the desk that I finally knew what had happened to me.
It was no longer just a hunch I carried around, a theory to gaslight myself with. Instead, I felt everything at once: disgust, relief, fear, elation, grief.
In front of me was a video frame with a date from more than a decade ago, New Year’s Eve. I’m staying at a property with him on a summer break.
In the video, I am about to use the toilet and get undressed for a shower, my long hair waving down to my waist. Despite the age of the footage, every part of the image is crystal clear to the point I can make out the distinctive seam of my towel beside me on the bathroom counter.
This was finally validation of something I’d long feared: a man named Micah Fala, someone I had once considered one of my closest friends, had hidden spy cameras to make countless intimate visual recordings of me and many others.
Auckland man Micah Fala at the Auckland District Court for sentencing for his offending against 22 women and girls. Photo / Dean Purcell
I spent the morning going through police evidence spanning my 20s and 30s across various locations, mostly taken in bathrooms and bedrooms.
Sometimes he had been filming me just sitting around in the lounge, his lens focused close up on my feet. In another, it looks like I’m down on my hands and knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor.
He’d labelled hours upon hours of these videos with the names of his targets, sometimes hundreds on a single victim, carefully filed away in folders and frequently with screenshots from his favourite moments that he was watching back or photographs of our underwear.
Across the desk from me sat the police officer, a quiet observer, her lips often pursed together with the pained regret of someone who has seen too much of a world most of us would rather pretend didn’t exist. Without her having to tell me, I know that she’s seen me naked.
We share a vindication. I’d reported to police without any actual evidence, just second-hand information, gut feel, and a wild imagination. She had led a nine-month-long investigation culminating in raids at nine properties across the country, starting with little else to go on.
My first task was trying to work out where all these cameras were. As well as looking for physical evidence, the search warrants had helped in identifying locations for some of the footage, only for police to discover his offending had happened in a far wider scope, to the point he’d even hid cameras in children’s bedrooms.
Some of the bathrooms had been renovated over the years he’d been filming, making them even harder to identify.
When I get home I throw in the bin the white orchid I’ve grown for years; it reminds me of one of the bathrooms he frequently used as a trap for his victims.
His cameras were usually positioned at waist height and incredibly close up. It is clearly me, without a doubt.
I recognise my pink underwear with the lace trim I wore in my 20s, then my blue and white striped bikini still in my wardrobe. The footage marks formative memories over my adult life - the first is just before my wedding, others from holidays and celebrations.
The investigation would reveal evidence of Trade Me spy camera purchases. I know now that the cameras could have looked like a toothpaste tube, or a cellphone charger, smoke alarm, lightbulb or cabinet screw. Over all those years, I never saw a single lens, never suspected a thing.
The officer pulled out a stack of folders and pushed another video frame across the desk. In it, I recognise a person I haven’t seen in years. Another is a woman I met once at a party. There are many other women as well as young girls. I wonder how much of this is on the internet.
All in all, the police will count 22 victims from this set of footage off a single SD card he kept in a bedside drawer. Some victim folders contain screenshots but not the original videos.
I come to the conclusion that this SD card is his classic hits album. Trophies he’s clung on to despite an apparent clean-up of evidence like the cameras and his laptops.
A few weeks after the raids, Micah was arrested on 42 charges relating to intimate visual recording, making and possessing objectionable material, and accessing computer systems for dishonest purposes.
One of the women will remain unidentified even after Micah receives a discount on his sentence for his eventual co-operation.
Micah Fala pleaded guilty to 42 charges for his offending. Photo / Supplied
He had installed spyware on some of the children’s phones, the ultimate tool to harvest information to groom young victims with. I break down in tears when I hear the charges include multiple counts of sexual conduct with a child aged under 12.
Our reason for sharing this story is to shine light on what I believe is a hidden epidemic.
Fewer than one in 10 cases of sexual harm are reported to police. That’s the statistic for crime where most victims are aware of what has happened to them, whereas if there were spy cameras in your home, or your work, or your child’s school - you would be oblivious.
Often, intimate visual recording offenders commit a significant volume of this crime over many years of operating. How much of it is really out there?
In Micah’s case, his covert addiction continued despite being caught multiple times over many years, the 1355 files found in his possession potentially just the tip of the iceberg.
In sentencing, the judge noted that counsel were unable to find a comparable spy camera case of a similar level of premeditation and scale.
The prosecutor referred instead to upskirting offender and former teacher Malcolm Davidson whose full catalogue totalled nearly 11,000 images of 133 victims.
The day after Micah’s sentencing, concert security guard Joseph Mosen was given home detention after being found with upskirting footage of about 40 victims.
Well-known Kiwi musician Pat Urlich was jailed in 2023 for repeat offending, caught filming a teenage girl through a window, having previously been charged with intimate visual recording in 2017.
Other offenders have been caught in a gym, a massage therapist, and a retail store. These businesses, one owned by the offender, have their names suppressed. You wouldn’t know if you’d been there. When you start noticing this crime, there’s a lot of it.
A spy camera available on Amazon. Photo / Supplied
We’re not alone.
French rapist Dominique Pelicot’s undoing was triggered by upskirting in a supermarket.
In Michigan, the United States, a doctor was convicted of spy camera crimes in a hospital. In Phoenix, a teacher was caught recording girls in a school changing room.
In Scotland, an electrician was caught installing these devices in his customers’ homes. Royal Caribbean had a room attendant caught recording guests in their cabins and American Airlines had an attendant caught filming passengers from within the toilet of a jet lavatory.
Under deposition, Airbnb revealed it has received 35,000 customer support tickets about surveillance devices.
Amazon continues to sell spy cameras despite being sued after selling a camera disguised as a robe hook that was used to abuse a child. It has already paid out another multimillion-dollar settlement after an employee of its Ring doorbell camera unit spied on female customers with cameras placed in bedrooms and bathrooms.
Human Rights Watch points to South Korea as the canary in the coalmine, where the problematic spy camera problem has been dubbed “Molka”. It’s so prevalent the Government set up a 8000- strong police force to inspect public bathrooms on a daily basis after 6800 reports of this crime were filed in one year.
Cases like the “Nth Rooms” point to the depths of depravity and scale and the online community that men who commit these crimes are part of.
Uncovering a hell hole of sexually exploitative footage, the investigation found 60,000 users buying videos in a club where admittance often required men to submit intimate visual recordings of their mother, sister, or daughter along with photo ID. It is a haunting number.
It is hard to understand what brings someone to commit this crime.
Micah used his charisma, intelligence and wealth to prey on women and children from just about every aspect of his life. Seemingly every interaction, every situation, every relationship was engineered in the pursuit of his compulsion.
In the years of grappling with the question of “why”, I am left with the assumption he had a profound, masked misogyny that played out in the illicit enjoyment of secretly humiliating his victims. I wonder if it was an attempt to briefly transfer his own shame of who he really was, only to discover new depths of his own depravity each time.
Angelene Judge, the tech CEO who helped take down a serial predator. Photo / Jason Dorday
With improving camera technology, the widening perils of the internet and now AI-generated porn created in victims’ likeness, cases of digital sexual harm are on the rise.
We live in a different time to the days of the line “We’ve got bush” from Revenge of the Nerds and Robert De Niro’s teddy bear spy camera in Meet the Parents.
Times have also changed since the Government’s last major legislation on digital harm from a decade ago.
If we don’t address the cultural and legal issues that help shape men like Micah in a technological age, we will have generations of boys growing up with the impression that access deems acceptance in the case of spy cameras that are legal to buy.
These generations are already exposed to unprecedented toxic masculinity online. Intimate visual recording and other digital sex crime are an easy gateway that often comes with or escalates to serious contact offending.
Spy cameras are a weapon used to harm people, usually women and children, sexually.
People who argue against banning consumer spy cameras use the excuse of security, an old debate for things that infringe on privacy.
I’ve got cameras positioned outside my home. They’re obvious, there’s even signage - half the point is the deterrent. I can’t understand the argument of someone saying they need to hide a nanny camera in their child’s bedroom to catch child abuse. Isn’t it better to prevent it?
Through Micah’s case, the Government has acknowledged a legislative gap where digital sex crime like this isn’t recognised as sexual violence by automatic name suppression laws.
He had already begun a lengthy co-ordinated campaign to protect his own privacy with name suppression before his victims finally received theirs.
We then watched, muted in the public gallery, as his lawyers easily navigated a justice system too soft on suppression for sex offenders. He even continued to receive interim suppression after he pleaded guilty.
I hope we tip the scales back in favour of open and transparent justice and respect for survivors.
Despite being on the child sex offenders’ list, the thought that Micah could one day change his name is frightening.
Compounding this, neither the Government nor sports bodies require sports teams to background check training staff working with young people. Micah, before his case, had become a children’s sports coach.
We had to accept the lawyer’s redactions on contextual information to our victim impact statements we read in court, information we believe was important for those in Micah’s vicinity to be aware of.
We also learned that there’s a statute of limitations, which means he was only charged with possession for the older footage.
The victim experience in our justice system is fraught with insults like these that compound trauma and complexities that are difficult for victims to navigate without the benefit of the expensive King’s Counsel offenders and their families have.
Despite it all, we are grateful for a custodial result and above all, the fact we are able to say his name and share our story.
Micah Fala admitted dozens of charges relating the covert filming of 22 women and girls. Photo / Dean Purcell
My mate, the monster.
People often ask if I saw any red flags - none of us did.
He had his enablers, too. Those in positions of power who knew what he was capable of yet provided him with resources and access.
It turned out I’d often sat across the dinner table from them, while they knew the risk he posed, while I was being filmed.
It’s an unnerving feeling, rewriting years of your life that were part of a story you didn’t know you were in. It shapes you.
I hope one day the state of hyper-vigilance I now live with will begin to fade. One day I’ll shower at the gym or enter a hotel room without looking for a lens.
For now at least while he’s in jail, I’ve stopped looking for him at the supermarket, stopped holding my breath every day when I drive past his house on my way home from work.
My last words to Micah at sentencing were inspired by those who fight digital sex crime.
I told him to remember the women in his life that got justice, not the blank faces taking their clothes off. I said to him, as he stared at me: our lives are not your porn.
