Salesman admits to harassing, threatening ex-girlfriend after break-up
SINGAPORE — Angry at his ex-girlfriend for breaking up with him, a 30-year-old sales executive threatened to kill her and set her home on fire, told her he was going to post a video of them having sex online, and went into her email account to get his hands on her personal documents and photos.
He also posted her mobile phone number and name on online platforms such as his own Facebook page, telling others to contact her for free sex.
On Thursday (May 31), the man pleaded guilty to two charges each of criminal intimidation and harassment. Another count of theft will be taken into consideration for sentencing, which was adjourned to June 29. He is now out on S$5,000 bail.
Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Dora Tay told the court that the man and his former girlfriend — who cannot be named due to a court order to protect her identity — started seeing each other around the end of January last year, but broke up about two months later.
Upset by the turn of events, the man began harassing the ex-girlfriend in order to stop her from going out with other men.
Apart from calling her repeatedly, he was still trying to intrude into her daily life, such as trespassing at her new house and turning up at the homes of her other family members.
To prevent him from entering her new house, she fixed a chain lock with a combination code, because she suspected that he may have duplicated the keys she gave him when they were together, but he still managed to unlock the combination code.
Then he kept sending her messages listing the various passcodes for the lock, telling her how easy it was for him to guess the passcodes, and that he was very happy to take his revenge.
A month after they broke up, on April 27 last year, she lodged a police report accusing him of monitoring her and her family’s movements when she saw him loitering outside her old residence.
Three days later, when she was overseas, he entered her new house through an unlocked front door and stole various items. The door was unsecured as renovation contractors were doing their work.
The next morning, on May 1, when she returned to Singapore, she called the police to report the break-in and theft.
However, he continued to harass her throughout the day.
He called to tell her that he gained access to her personal email account — using the password she had given him before — to retrieve her past conversations with others, her personal photographs, and copies of her children’s birth certificates and family members’ identity cards.
He then sent her screenshots to show that he was in her account.
He also told her that he had a video of them having sex, and threatened to post it online if she went out with other men or did anything to displease him.
Even though she remembered deleting the video from his phone herself, he said that he had retrieved it from his phone’s cloud storage. Investigations later revealed that he did not have the video.
In a message posted on his Facebook account, he told others to call her for free sex, listing her name and mobile phone number. He even urged an online user to share the post.
Later that night, he sent her screenshots of the posts and she lodged another police report against him.
Even then, he did not stop, telling her that he would set fire to her new house, and that her nude photographs and their sex video were posted on four different websites, though he did not name the sites.
With her contact number published on his Facebook account, the woman received numerous anonymous calls and messages on her mobile phone, which caused her distress.
DPP Tay said that the victim also experienced emotional stress due to the continual fear that the accused would harm her and her family members.
On May 8 last year, the man was called up by the police for investigations. Following that, he gave her S$900 as restitution for the items he had stolen from her new house and returned her vacuum cleaner as well.
In mitigation, the man’s lawyer Sinnadurai T Maniam told District Judge Jasvender Kaur that his client knew he had a problem controlling his anger, which was why he went to a counselling centre after his arrest.
DPP Tay sought a jail term of at least nine months for the accused, noting that he had abused the victim’s trust.
For criminal intimidation, he could be jailed up to seven years and/or fined. For harassment, he could be jailed up to six months and fined S$5,000.
