The woman who horrified millions of netizens, after filming herself pinching and dousing her baby with dish soap, has been arrested, says Bali Police.
Mariana Dangu, of Sumba, East Nusa Tenggara, will be charged for the physical abuse of her own child, Bali Police Criminal Investigation Unit Chief Commissioner Sang Made Mahendra Jaya said on Monday.
Footage went viral last week that Dangu took of herself, getting rough with her seven-month-old baby son, as she whacked, pinched, and dumped water and dish soap on the child.
What wasn’t so clear from watching the sickening footage was why the mother would film such abuse, herself, in the first place.
Police are now saying that the mother’s motive was to extort the child’s father.
“So, the motive of Baby J’s biological mother, the suspect, was to get money from the child’s biological father,” Jaya said, as quoted by Tribun Bali.
In a psychological examination, Dangu claimed to be totally responsible for her actions and that she was not suffering from any psychiatric disorders—netizens had speculated bipolar disorder may have been a factor in her treatment of Baby J.
Nevertheless, Dangu will be further evaluated by police’s medical and health division, says Jaya.
Baby J is currently being looked after at an orphanage at the Metta Mama & Maggha Foundation in West Denpasar, where he was taken a couple of months ago after social services got wind of his abusive home.
His mother tried to take him from the orphanage last week, but the two videos, reportedly filmed from a Seminyak boardinghouse in March 2017, were released as an apparent attempt to keep him from going back home. In just 24 hours, the videos had reached a shared view count of over nine million hits. The viral videos, however, have since been removed.
Meanwhile, it is understood that the baby’s father, Otmar Daniel Adelsberger, who is a foreigner, is making plans to fly to Bali from Austria to visit the baby.
“He said he will go in August to Bali, but is not sure about the date,” Yulius Benjamin Seran, Adelsberger’s legal counsel said.
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