SINGAPORE: A month after he was released on parole in the United States, Amos Yee has landed back in jail. He was released on parole by the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) on Oct 8, though the conditions of his parole were not disclosed.
This parole date had come early, as Yee had not been scheduled for release until 2026. The Singapore-born offender was taken into custody in Oct 2020 and served jail time for having groomed a teenage girl and asking her to send pictures of herself unclothed.
Read related: Amos Yee released on parole in US
On Wednesday (Nov 8), Yee was admitted under DOC custody once more. A message from the victim notification network indicated that Yee is now being held at a maximum security prison in Crest Hill, Illinois, the Stateville Correctional Center.
Details of his latest incarceration have not yet been released. But Yee posted two blog entries while released, The Straits Times pointed out. The first was posted on Oct 23, with Yee defending the actions that got him imprisoned in the US in the first place. He also said he intended to return to Singapore, even though he knew he would have to serve time there for having defaulted on his National Service obligations. On Nov 5, he posted another entry titled “6 Impressive Things I Want to Do,” wherein one item on his list was “Make ‘defending Pedophiles’ popular.”
Amos Yee’s backstory
In 2015, when Yee was only 16, he gained notoriety in Singapore when he criticized the government as well as a number of religious figures. He also criticized the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew.
Yee ended up being jailed twice for his actions and moved to the US in December 2016, just before he was required to begin National Service. He was granted political asylum the following year after a judge ruled that he faced persecution in Singapore for his political opinions.
In October 2020, he was charged with solicitation and possession of child pornography. After his arrest, he pleaded not guilty in a Chicago court to all charges related to his arrest.
Yee was then accused of having exchanged nude photos and “thousands” of messages with a teenage girl from Texas while he was living in Chicago, according to a report by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Read related: Amos Yee groomed girl, 14, for child porn, gets 6 years’ jail and may be deported back to Singapore
Prosecutors said they obtained messages Yee and the girl exchanged between April and July 2019 that included nude photos he requested and received from the girl and nude photos of himself that he sent to her.
The prosecutors added that the girl repeatedly mentioned her age in the messages, but Yee instructed her to remove her age from her profile on WhatsApp.
When their relationship eventually soured, she reached out to a group interested in exposing paedophiles, and that led to his arrest. /TISG