On the Bedroom Court that we have invented

By Filip Çakuli

In Albania we seem to have invented a new court: the Bedroom Court. It has no Constitution, no prosecutor, no evidence. It has a phone, a video and a crowd that delivers the verdict before the investigation has even begun. But an intimate video does not become a public matter simply because one of the persons is a public figure.

The bedroom is not a state office.

The first questions are legal: Who recorded it? Who published it? Why? Was there blackmail? These require evidence, not speculation.

Then comes the political question: is what happened connected to the exercise of public duty? That is where the boundary lies.

A politician does not surrender their private life when they take office. But if private behaviour is linked to corruption, conflict of interest, abuse of power, coercion or fraud in the exercise of duty, then the private touches the public.

And it is precisely here that morality enters. Because political morality is not the policing of the politician’s bedroom. It is the question of whether their behaviour matches the trust they ask of the citizen.

That is why law and morality cannot replace each other.

The court asks: Is there a criminal offence?

Morality asks: Is the behaviour worthy of the trust this figure requests?

Politics asks: Does this damage public trust?

A “no” answer from the court is not automatically a “yes” answer from morality. And a negative moral judgment does not automatically turn the behaviour into a crime.

The classic example is Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The relationship was acknowledged by Clinton as inappropriate, while the American institutional debate itself focused on whether the private matter had crossed into the territory of public conduct, especially through testimony and allegations of obstruction of justice.

So it was not simply the question of what Clinton had done in his intimate life. The question became what a president had done and said when faced with public responsibility.

That is the difference.

In ancient Rome, Pompeia, the wife of Julius Caesar, was rumoured to have had an inappropriate relationship and was acquitted at trial. But from that story remained the famous idea and the saying “it is not enough that you were acquitted, you are Caesar’s wife”. Because Caesar’s wife had to be “above suspicion”.

Today that cannot be a legal standard. But it is a powerful metaphor for politics: the law demands evidence, morality demands character, politics lives on trust.

Therefore, in the case of intimate videos, these must not be mixed into a salad.

Who recorded it and who published it — a legal matter.

If there was blackmail — a matter of evidence.

If privacy was violated — a matter of the person’s rights.

If the behaviour is linked to power — a matter of public responsibility.

And if that behaviour touches citizens’ trust, then we have entered the territory of political morality.

Because a public figure should not be judged for every secret of the bedroom. But neither can they demand that every consequence of their own behaviour, when it touches public trust, be hidden behind the door of privacy.

The law may say: “There is no crime.”

Morality may say: “Trust has been lost.”

Both can be true at the same time.

And this is the paradox that intimate videos bring into the open: a court can close a file, but politics is not closed by a court decision. Because the law decides whether someone should be punished.

The public decides whether they should still be trusted. And public trust, unlike a video on a phone, has no “delete” button.