SINGAPORE — Wanting to contribute to a Telegram channel that shared sexual content in the form of pictures and videos, a regular serviceman from the Republic of Singapore Navy subjected a woman he met online to harassment from strangers.
This was after he submitted a pornographic video along with photos he got from her Instagram account.
Don Weng Kai Jun, who turns 24 on Wednesday (Sept 13), pleaded guilty on Tuesday to distributing pornographic material and to making an insulting communication under the Protection from Harassment Act.
He is set to return to court on Oct 19 for sentencing after both the defence counsel and prosecution make further submissions on their proposed sentence for him.
The victim, who is 21, cannot be named due to a court order to protect her identity.
TODAY has reached out to the Ministry of Defence to ascertain Weng’s current status of employment with the Navy.
WHAT HAPPENED
Weng and the young woman first got acquainted through the Bumble dating application in November last year and then met in person for dinner.
Contact between the two stopped later but it was not attributed to any dispute or disagreement between them.
During that time, Weng was a member of Local SG Leaks, a channel on messaging app Telegram that had about 25,000 members who would share pictures and videos with sexual content.
Although he had been viewing the shared content, Weng had never sent or posted anything then.
On Feb 3 this year, he watched a pornographic video on a website that showed the back view of a naked female.
The video, which was slightly more than a minute long, did not show the female’s face but this reminded Weng of the young woman he met on Bumble because both women had white-painted nails.
He then went to browse the young woman’s Instagram account to save her photos before sending them together with the pornographic video to the Telegram channel.
Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Cai Chenghan said that in doing so, Weng created a false impression that the victim and the female subject of the video were the same person.
Even though there were no captions for the photos or video, other members in the Telegram channel were able to identify the victim and to provide her Telegram contact information. No details were given in court on how they managed to do that.
One of the woman’s friends, who was also a member of the channel, saw her photos and informed her about it. A screen recording of the message and the sender’s Telegram username were also sent to the woman.
Recognising that the username belonged to Weng, she sent him a message via phone to ask why he published her photos on the Telegram channel.
Weng did not reply and later deleted the video and photos from the channel as well as his own Telegram account.
As a result of his actions, the woman received messages from four to five strangers on Telegram asking if she was the person in the video and how much it would cost to have sex with her for one night.
Feeling harassed, she made a police report on Feb 16 and also made a post the next day on Instagram to clarify that she was not the female subject in the video.
On March 8, Weng was called up by police for investigations.
He claimed to have done what he did because he had a “fear of missing out” for not contributing to the Telegram channel. He also knew that his actions would cause others to think that the woman was the person in the video, DPP Cai said.
Weng was arrested the next day and has been out on police bail.
For distributing the pornographic video, he could be jailed for up to three months or fined, or both.
For making insulting communication, he could be fined up to S$5,000.