Online Reporter
Fidelis Munyoro
Chief Court Reporter
The High Court has ordered Brenda Mbungo to pay US$6 000 as damages to Sandra Moyo after finding that she intruded into a marriage that was still subsisting, despite her defence that it had already broken down.
In a judgment presided over by Justice Fatima Maxwell, the court held that Mbungo’s shifting account of when she learned the truth undermined her credibility.
Moyo had claimed US$30 000.
The court held that Mbungo had intruded into a subsisting marriage and could not escape liability by shifting versions of when she learned the truth.
The courtroom narrative was one of shifting alibis, emotional collision and ultimately, judicial certainty.
At the centre of it all was a marriage that the court accepted was still intact, despite Mbungo’s insistence that it had already broken down.
Presiding judge, Justice Maxwell, was unmoved by that defence.
She noted that Mbungo’s credibility had cracked under pressure, especially when she changed her version on the knowledge of the marriage.
As the judge put it, “adultery is rarely proved by direct evidence”, but courts may rely on “conduct and surrounding circumstances” where the most probable explanation is intimacy outside marriage.
The man in question – Martin Makombe – stood at the centre of the storm, confessing to the affair and anchoring the plaintiff’s version of events.
But the judgment was not only about betrayal. It was about dignity. The court described the affair as one that struck at the emotional core of marriage – companionship, intimacy, and respect.
Justice Maxwell was particularly firm on the purpose of adultery damages, echoing long-standing legal sentiment that the law must protect the sanctity of marriage.
In words reflecting judicial concern for deterrence, the judge reaffirmed that damages serve to recognise both humiliation and loss of consortium suffered by the innocent spouse.
In the end, the financial consequence was measured but symbolic.
The ruling closed not with drama, but with finality.
Mbungo was ordered to pay costs on the ordinary scale, and the legal system, at least in this chapter of domestic conflict, declared the matter resolved.
What remained was the echo of a marriage tested in public and a courtroom that turned private betrayal into legal accountability.
