Jail for man who tried to secretly film young girl using toilet

SINGAPORE — To spite his wife over their marital problems, a 44-year-old man hid a video recording device in a toilet at their home, so that he could secretly film two 11-year-old twin girls she was tutoring.

Even when the device was discovered and he was confronted with it, the man still tried to lie that it was just a thumb drive, instead of a video recording device.

It was only when his wife refused to let him see their children that he came clean to the police.

On Friday (June 9), the accused, an assistant manager, was sentenced to 10 weeks’ jail for his intention to insult the modesty of one of the twins. The involved parties are not named to protect the children’s identity.

The court was told that man’s wife was a 35-year-old private tutor who held classes for the twins at home.

On Sept 27, 2015, the twins went to the couple’s home for their lesson in the afternoon. The man hid a video recording device in a black velvet pouch, which he placed in the toilet in their kitchen.

When one of the girls went to the toilet, she saw a black, thin, rectangular-shaped object with lens partially hidden in a basket on the right of the toilet bowl.

She told the wife, who picked up the object from the toilet. Realising that it was a recording device, she confronted her husband in private, hoping he would confess and apologise.

But the man flatly denied, said Deputy Public Prosecutor Ho Lian-Yi. He then replaced the device in the pouch with something else and lied to the twins and his wife that it was actually a thumb drive the girl saw. The twins accepted his explanation and did not tell their parents about the incident.

The wife and a close friend of the couple later tried to get the man to confess. While he kept up his denial initially, the man eventually admitted to the friend in private that he had intended to record the girls using the toilet.

He then removed the memory card from the device, broke it into a few pieces and threw the device into a rubbish bin.

Initially, the wife wife chose not to lodge a police report against her husband.

But later, she discovered broken links in the man’s Internet browsing history for terms such as “G-String” and “Upskirt”. She made him move out of their house and filed a police report on May 15 last year.

The man surrendered himself to the police the following morning because his wife would not let him see their children otherwise, said DPP Ho.

The prosecutor added that the man claimed that he had committed the offence because he wanted to “get back” at his wife for their marital problems by targeting her students. He also wanted to seek counselling for his obsession with pornography, said DPP Ho.

In meting out the sentence, the district judge said the accused’s offence was more aggravating than the act of taking upskirt videos. There was a breach of trust as the twins had gone to his home to be tutored, and ended up being innocent victims of the fallout from their marital woes, the judge added.

For insulting the modesty of a woman, the man could have been jailed up to a year, or fined or both.