Sex worker pleads rights; bare essentials; monk loses cool

Marriage agreement under fire

The outside of the bare house.

A Rayong woman has vowed to sue her husband for divorce after she caught him at home with his long-term fling in a testy encounter filmed on her phone.

Da (no surname given), 44, climbed the fence of their marital home and clambered along a wall to surprise her husband, “A”, as he was having a meal with his lover, “Fon”, on a porch.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Da asked A as she emerged from the shrubbery. She warned him against hitting her, as she was livestreaming the encounter.

“Up to you,” he replied nonchalantly.

His lover Fon piped up, “Why don’t you talk to your husband about these things privately?”

Perhaps surprised that she would put up a fight, Da asked what she was doing there, when her husband was still bound by their marriage agreement. They had been together five years with the marriage formally registered.

“We can do what we want. I can’t see a marriage registration document strung from your neck,” Fon replied testily.

The argument spilt from the porch to the bathroom inside. Da said she found the woman’s clothing, which she recognised from her TikTok account, and used condoms discarded on the bathroom floor.

The clip ends in an unseemly tussle over the used condoms as A tries to stop his wife leaving with evidence of his infidelity.

Speaking to the media later, Da said she left her husband on June 5 after tiring of his philandering and abusive behaviour. However, she was still shocked to find how flagrantly the pair were carrying on when she returned to the house four days later to fetch their cat.

News reports said A’s lover staked her claim to be there based upon the fact she was not in a romantic relationship with him but a mere sex worker he met on a dating app.

A agreed with his lover that he could do as he liked in their marital home, presumably because his wife wasn’t there, which upset Da further.

Da told the media that A had been seeing the “other woman” on the sly for the past five months. He would hit her when she challenged him about his conduct. He also threw her out of their home recently before she decided to leave herself.

“He started hitting me about a year into our marriage. I wondered then if it was because he had started seeing someone else. I did catch him being unfaithful, but he would say they were just talking,” she told reporters.

The clip emerged as Da sought the help of social media activist Guntouch Pongpaiboonwet, alias Gun Jompalang, about how to assert her rights as the wronged spouse. She asked whether she can also sue Fon, who denied she was seeing her husband as a “third hand”.

Fon, according to Da’s inquiries, worked as head of sales for a local company but offered romantic services as a sideline via a dating app, where the pair first met.

Da discovered her husband was seeing Fon about five months ago when she found a naked picture of the woman on his smart watch.

Da also was able to find out where the woman worked and in March made contact, pretending to be a customer.

However, when she turned up at her office, Fon, who no doubt caught wind of what was happening, failed to show. Fon later sent Da a text message threatening legal action if she “trespassed” at her workplace again.

Da says that when she asked her husband about his affair, he hit her. Then, on May 23, he hit her again. She lodged a complaint with Muang police following a medical check before finally leaving on June 5.

Da said she was gone just a few days but shocked to discover that her husband had already invited his lover back to their place.

As she is filming, her husband, who follows her into the house, refuses to let her leave with the condoms. The two start tussling over them, which shocked even activist Gun, who is regularly called on to intervene in marital disputes.

“Mother of god, I have never seen such a thing,” he exclaimed, after taking Da before reporters to share her story. He also marvelled at her agility in gaining entry to the house, comparing it to a stunt from Mission Impossible.

On the day they met, Gun took Da to see Kosonlavat Intujunyong, director-general of the Department of Civil Rights Protection and Legal Aid under the Attorney-General’s Office. She asked about whether she would have grounds to sue her husband.

He said a lawyer assigned by the court in cases of a contested divorce would generally encourage a couple to talk first, to see if the marriage could be saved. However, he said Fon’s claim that she was merely offering sex to a customer was unlikely to hold, if inquiries showed her husband was regularly having sex with her outside marriage.

He said the prosecutor’s office in Rayong would invite the couple for talks. The saga continues.

Living in a shell

The outside of the bare house.

An unemployed man in Rayong has promised to keep the noise down after neighbours complained he was shouting to himself as he sits alone inside his empty house.

Anusorn, or Keng (no surname given) aged 41, admits he sits alone ranting in his townhouse in Muang district because he hears voices in his head. The noise problem is exacerbated by the fact that he has removed the windows and doors, removing any sound-proofing barriers which neighbours could hope to rely on as they seek to get a moment’s peace.

Neighbours told reporters that Keng had been shouting to himself for six or seven years, but the problem had grown worse over the past 12 months. Locals were missing sleep, and also alarmed to see him wandering about clutching a knife.

Reporters who dropped in to see Keng were surprised to find he was keen to share his side of the story. Earlier, when they filmed from outside the house, the sound of a man hollering could be heard clearly.

Keng, a labourer, said he lost his job about a year ago and turned to selling used items for recycling. “However, I asked why I should bother wandering about looking for stuff, when I could start by selling the furnishings inside my own home,” he said.

He had sold the front door of the house, window frames, louvred windows, electric wiring, and even an inside staircase to the first floor. Now if he wants to visit the upper storey he has to pull himself up with the aid of a piece of wood sticking from a wall.

As for the noise, he said he hears voices, and shouts a reply. It was as if someone had inserted a hearing aid in his head, he said.

Keng said he would like to go back to work so he could buy some replacement furnishings. However, for the time being he would have to put up with living in a bare shell. As for the noise, he apologised to his neighbours and said he’d try to stay quiet.

District authorities said they would seek help for the man.

Scrounger cops it

Phra Sunthorn walks alone after his alms round.

A monk killed a Chumphon man who begged for food from him once too often.

Thung Tako police, joined by their counterparts from Police Region 8, nabbed Phra Sunthorn Phusa, 42, for killing Supaphong Kongkaew, whose beaten body was found in a river.

Supaphong went missing from his home on June 14. His wife and relatives went looking for him at his favourite haunts, including Khao Pip cave, where two monks live at a nearby temple. They claimed they had not seen him.

The next day, locals found Supaphong’s body, which had been struck with a hard object. He was found in a river on a local’s palm plantation, about 200m from the cave.

Police spoke to the monks, a father and son, and looked at CCTV images, which raised questions about their responses.

Images taken on the day the victim went missing showed Phra Hat, 66, the father, walking ahead his son on their morning alms round, about four minutes apart.

On the way back, however, Phra Sunthorn was walking alone.
When his father returned, he was about an hour behind his son. This was at odds with their normal custom, when they would return together.

While questioning Phra Sunthorn, police noticed a long scratch on his right shoulder, which he claimed came from a mosquito bite. After two hours of interrogation, he admitted killing Supaphong.

He was waiting for him when he arrived back from his alms round, and begged for the food which locals had given him, even though the monk himself had yet to eat, Phra Sunthorn complained. “Some days he takes almost all my food. We started to argue and hit each other,” he said.

He stabbed the victim with a small spoon but swore he did nothing else. Later he saw Supaphong washing his face in the river, and claimed he must have fainted and fallen in.

Phra Hat, the father, said his son had a brain operation following an accident when he was young, and could lose his temper easily. He said he regrets they did not return together that day as usual, as the attack may not have happened.

Police took Phra Sunthorn to be defrocked and charged him with murder.