MANILA, Philippines — A court stenographer has been suspended after the Supreme Court dismissed his family’s appeal to overturn his punishment for cheating on his wife.
In a resolution promulgated on Oct. 6, the SC found a stenographer of the Taguig Regional Trial Court guilty of gross immorality.
He was suspended for six months, with a stern warning that a “commission of similar acts will be dealt with severely.”
Based on an administrative complaint filed by the employee’s wife before the SC Office of the Court Administrator in 2018, she chanced upon intimate videos of him with another woman while browsing the laptop.
When confronted, he admitted to his spouse that he was the person in the intimate videos and photos, but he denied this in his answer to the complaint, saying the videos were of a couple and downloaded from an adult website.
After a few months, the wife asked the SC to dismiss the complaint, stressing, “whatever transpired between her and the respondent was due to misunderstanding.”
However, the case has been transmitted to the Judicial Integrity Board (JIB) of the high court.
The SC said the wife no longer has the option to withdraw the complaint “once the matter has been raised before the court.”
The JIB ruled in 2021 that the respondent’s illicit affair was sufficient to hold him guilty of immoral conduct.
“It is morally reprehensible for a married man or woman to maintain intimate relations with a person other than his or her spouse,” the SC wrote.
“The immoral acts may be committed in a scandalous or discreet manner, within or outside the workplace. As in the case, the respondent’s acts were committed outside the confines of his work as an employee of the judiciary, but this fact does not exempt him from administrative liability,” the SC added.