GrabHitch driver convicted of molest after accusing passenger of hallucinating the incident

SINGAPORE — A GrabHitch driver claimed that his female passenger was having hallucinations of being molested by him, but a district court judge threw that argument out the window, saying it was a “bare denial” of his offence.

District Judge Mathew Joseph on Monday (Nov 19) found the driver, 30-year-old Muhammad Fauzi Salleh, guilty of molesting his 22-year-old passenger, who cannot be named due to a court order.

The judge said that the private-hire car driver was not forthright in giving evidence and “appeared to be somewhat evasive at times”. The driver did not have a convincing reason either for his prolonged stay at a car park with the sleeping passenger, the judge added, saying that “one can fly to Kuala Lumpur” in Malaysia in the 58 minutes that the driver was there.

The molest took place on July 13 last year when the victim made a booking through the ride-hailing service to go home to Tampines after partying at two night clubs in Clarke Quay.

After Fauzi reached the car park at the foot of a housing block in Tampines, he remained there for close to an hour between 2.48am and 3.46am while the passenger slept.

When she woke up, the passenger was horrified to find herself lying on his lap.

In the course of the 10-day trial in August this year, Fauzi’s defence was that the victim had imagined the incident due to her mental state, saying she was prone to paranoia, exaggeration, illusions, and disruptions in memory or misperception. The court heard that the victim had been suffering from depression, personality disorder and bulimia.

However, the victim said that her illnesses only caused her to have extreme mood swings but not hallucinations.

“When I know that something happened, I will know exactly what happened. I won’t think that A is B, or turn A into B,” she told the court, adding that she already felt better at the time after graduating from her studies, meeting her then-boyfriend, and getting her career off to a good start.

She was off anti-depressants or any form of medication by then.

DRIVER TRIED TO WAKE SLEEPING PASSENGER

Going through the testimonies of both parties, the judge recognised that Fauzi did not have bad intentions from the start, saying it is believable that the driver — in seeing that the victim was “dead asleep” — did many things to try to wake her up.

Fauzi testified that he first called out to her from the driver’s seat. When there was no response, he tapped her knee and turned up the radio volume, but she continued sleeping.

Fauzi then got out of the car for a while before opening the right rear passenger door to tap her on the knee and called out to her several more times, but the victim still did not wake up.

District Judge Joseph said that up until this point, Fauzi’s actions cannot be faulted in any way since he was entitled to wake up a sleeping passenger with “reasonable acts”.

However, it was “fatal attraction” when Fauzi saw the victim’s cleavage and entertained the urge to touch her breast, the judge continued. “It was the opportunity that laid before him in the shape of a sleeping, dead-to-the-world female passenger,” he added.

HEAVY SLEEPER

The victim admitted during the trial that she is a heavy sleeper when she is exhausted, but she would still be able to feel it when someone is touching her, such as her mother shaking her body and calling out to her to wake her up at home.

While Fauzi alleged that the passenger had forcefully pulled his hand before collapsing on his left thigh, she said that she does not move abruptly while asleep. “When I am sleeping, I am just not moving. Why would I go and pull his hand (and) lie on his lap?” the victim asked.

In Fauzi’s car, she said that even though she was asleep, she could tell that he touched her breast, buttocks, waist and legs, before she mustered enough energy to move and sit up.

She immediately fled from the car when she realised what had happened and saw that she had already reached home.

Then she sent phone text messages her best friend as well as her then-boyfriend to inform them that she was molested, but she was reluctant to report the matter thinking that the police would not believe her.

When she went to work several hours later in the day, the victim said that Fauzi called her at about 2.30pm — something the driver denied, claiming that the victim was the one who called him.

The victim’s employer testified that Fauzi was put on a speaker phone because the victim was “very afraid and scared” by the call.

The employer heard Fauzi asking if the victim was “okay”, but she appeared intimidated by him.

The employer then told the woman to take a day off from work and to make a police report, which she did.

Fauzi is out on a S$10,000 bail and will return to court on Dec 11 for sentencing.

He could be jailed up to two years, fined, and/or caned for outraging the woman’s modesty.