Man who filmed maid showering with pinhole camera jailed 6 months
Wan Ting KohThu, 3 February 2022, 3:29 PMHandcuffs (FILE PHOTO: Getty Images)
SINGAPORE — A retired teacher inserted a pinhole camera under a toilet door to observe his family’s maid showering.
The 78-year-old man had bought the borescope device about one to two months before he began to use it at his flat on the 24-year-old victim, who was employed by his daughter.
The man was jailed for six months on Thursday (3 February) after he pleaded guilty to an amalgamated charge of voyeurism involving four occasions in March last year when he filmed the maid.
The helper cannot be named due to a gag order protecting her identity. The man is a former school teacher of 36 years who retired in 1999.
A borescope is an optical instrument designed to assist visual inspection of narrow, difficult-to-reach cavities.
On 10 March last year, the victim was showering at the flat’s common toilet when she saw a small pinhole camera with a cable slotted underneath the door about 10cm into the toilet. She quickly turned off the shower and got dressed. When she exited the toilet, she saw the man praying in his bedroom.
“When the accused was confronted about this later that night, he denied any wrongdoing. Later, he admitted to (his daughter) that he had inserted the camera under the toilet door when the victim was showering,” said the prosecution.
Court documents did not state why he did so, while the man’s lawyer S S Dhillon, also declined to tell District Judge Lim Wen Juin the reason for his client's action, except to say it was due to a “78-year-old mind”.
Later that night, his daughter, and the victim went to lodge a police report, with the man accompanying them.
The borescope device that the man had used was seized on 11 March. The device had captured the helper showering on four occasions on 8 to 10 March last year.
The videos, spanning 20 seconds to a minute, mostly captured the victim’s bare buttocks, with the longest capturing part of the victim’s front view. She was nude on all occasions.
In her statement, the maid reported feeling offended and sad as she had treated the accused like her own father, but he betrayed her trust.
In his mitigation plea, Dhillon said that his client’s daughter had employed the maid around eight months before the incidents.
The lawyer sought a three-month jail term for the man, citing his remorse and health problems. The man suffers from bilateral knee osteoarthritis and had a heart bypass surgery in 2013.
“Being an ex-teacher and being in an advanced age of 78 years old, he is baffled by his own deplorable and despicable actions. Throughout his 78 years of his life, he had been exemplary to his ex-students and the people around him,” said Dhillon.
Although the man tried to obtain testimonial letters from the Ministry of Education, he had been told his records were not available as he retired in 1999.
The lawyer pointed out that there was no evidence that the man had filmed the victim “for his own pleasure or for his own benefit”, or even that he viewed it.
However, DJ Lim replied that it was difficult to draw the inference that the accused had not taken the videos for his own viewing.
For voyeurism, the man could have been jailed up to two years, and/or fined. He cannot be caned as he is above 50. As the offence was committed against a domestic helper, the man could have faced twice the maximum penalty.
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