A 32-year-old Indonesian domestic helper, Dina Melina, was sentenced to three months’ jail on Tuesday after she pleaded guilty to one count of giving false information to a policewoman when she had lied that her employer’s father-in-law, 71, had molested and raped her.
The court heard that Dina began working as a domestic helper for her female employer who lives at Jurong West St 61, in 2013. She began interacting with her employer’s elderly fahter-in-law who did not live in the same flat but would visit every three-four months.
In December 2016, Dina asked her employer’s father-in-law for a $1,000 loan. When she was unable to repay the loan, she asked him “if there was anything else he wanted in return”. She agreed to the man’s request to have sex and the pair did the deed sometime in April 2017.
Feeling that she had been underpaid, Dina asked the man for another $1,000 loan, using a ruse that she needed to undergo a medical examination. The man gave her $1,000 and when she was once again unable to repay the loan, he requested to touch her breast and she agreed for him to do so on 4 May 2017.
Dina, however, was not satisfied.
Posing as the man’s daughter-in-law, Dina sent him text messages telling him she knew what he had done and threatening him that she would expose him if he did not hand over $3,000. The man saw through the scam when the impostor demanded that the money be handed over to Dina.
Upset that her plan had been foiled and the elderly man had refused to give her more money, Dina lied to the police and accused the man of raping and molesting her on 8 June 2017. Police officers investigated the case and recorded two statements from the man in June and July.
Dina finally admitted the truth on 29 September last year, after sitting through a lie-detector test.
While delivering the sentence in court on Wednesday, District Judge Marvin Bay said: “The types of harm applicable in this genre of the case that may ensue can include loss of liberty, by causing another to be unjustifiably arrested and harm arising from the wastage of public investigative resources.”
Another charge of lying to another police officer about being molested by the man was taken into consideration, according to reports. The helper could have been jailed up to one year and fined $5,000 for lying to the police.