Man used spy pen to film sisters-in-law in bathroom, took upskirt videos of women in office toilet

SINGAPORE: During three visits to his in-laws' house in 2018, a man brought a pen with a pinhole camera that he placed in a basket of brushes and scrubs in the bathroom.

The camera captured two of his sisters-in-law, who are in their 30s, using the toilet and showering.

The man, 31, pleaded guilty on Monday (Mar 14) to three charges of insulting a woman's modesty. Six more charges will be taken into consideration for sentencing.

He and his victims cannot be named due to a gag order on their identities.

The judge called for a mandatory treatment order suitability report, as the man suffers from adjustment order with depressed mood.

A mandatory treatment order directs an offender suffering from certain treatable psychiatric conditions to undergo psychiatric treatment.

The prosecution is seeking between 16 and 20 weeks' jail; the accused will return for sentencing next month.

The court heard that on one visit to his in-laws' house, the man quickly activated and placed the spy pen in the bathroom when he realised his sister-in-law was about to shower, as she was holding on to a towel.

A few days after the third and last such incident in 2018, the pinhole camera stopped working, and the man smashed it with a hammer before throwing it away.

He also took videos of three women using the female toilet of his office on three occasions between Nov 5 and Dec 3, 2019.

He would follow the women into the female toilet, wait until they had entered a cubicle, then enter the cubicle next to it. He would then extend his phone through the gap under the partition separating the cubicles and record videos of the women.

DISCOVERY AND ARREST

During the last such incident in the office on Dec 3, 2019, the victim noticed that a mobile phone had been extended into the cubicle. She managed to take a photograph of the phone.

The accused could see on the screen of his phone that the victim was looking at it while he recorded her, so he decided to stop and wait for her to leave the toilet before he did.

After the victim left the toilet, she waited outside for the suspect to exit. She eventually walked away, and the man left about 20 seconds later after ascertaining no one else was inside the toilet.

The accused saw the victim walk into a conference room where other colleagues were, and assumed she was going to report the matter. He hurriedly deleted two videos of her, and other pornographic and obscene videos on the phone.

Meanwhile, the victim told an assistant general manager that there was a peeping tom in the female toilet. The assistant general manager reviewed the relevant CCTV footage, which captured the accused entering and leaving the toilet. She lodged a police report.

When police officers arrived at the office and spoke to the accused, he initially lied that he had stomach issues and needed to use the female toilet urgently. He eventually admitted to following the victim into the toilet and taking videos of her, and was arrested.

Investigations revealed the two other occasions when he took videos of women in the office toilet.

The accused admitted that he started taking upskirt videos around December 2017.

He said that in September 2018, a woman spotted him trying to take an upskirt video of her and confronted him, but did not report the matter to the police. He deleted all the videos from the phone he was using at the time, and transferred them to his laptop.

In October 2018, he started using another phone to take upskirt videos. In March 2019, he also started downloading at least 110 upskirt videos from the Sammyboy online forum.

RECORDED UPSKIRT VIDEOS "ALMOST EVERY DAY"

After these admissions, the accused was escorted back to his flat by police. His laptop, another phone, a hard drive and an SD card were seized.

Forensic examination of the man's two phones revealed he had taken 16 upskirt videos of various female victims.

The man admitted that he had recorded these between November 2018 and October 2019 at various locations, including a bakery, Sheng Siong supermarket, his office, an MRT station and on public buses.

Sometime in early 2019, he uploaded three of the videos to the Sammyboy forum.

His victims included a friend from university and one of the colleagues whom he had recorded in the toilet.

A woman who lived in the same block as him was also among the victims. On one occasion, they were in the lift together and he followed her to a bakery after exiting.

While she was choosing which bread to buy, he pretended to drop his wallet, placed his phone under her skirt and recorded an upskirt video of her.

He struck again at the same bakery on another occasion by pretending to tie his shoelaces, while recording under another victim's skirt.

According to an Institute of Mental Health (IMH) report, the accused developed a habit of recording upskirt videos at the end of 2017, after he realised that it helped him to alleviate stress.

The man would try to take upskirt videos "almost every day whenever I go for my breaks, my commutes", the report citing him saying. He described a sense of "anticipation" towards the act.

An IMH psychiatrist diagnosed the accused with adjustment disorder with depressed mood, which "predisposed him to his voyeuristic behaviour, as a maladaptive, dysfunctional coping mechanism".

However, the psychiatrist found that he was still aware of the nature and wrongfulness of his actions.

Editor's note: This article has been amended to correct the charges faced by the accused. He was charged with insulting a woman's modesty, not outrage of modesty.