Singapore — A man spurned by his girlfriend after a quarrel decided to embarrass her by sending a sex video of them to her cousin. He was sentenced on Thursday to 12 weeks’ jail.
The video showing the woman naked and having sex with the man was recorded on his phone, with her consent. But she later told him to delete the recording. He told her he had erased it, but he was lying, reported Channel News Asia.
A 31-year-old Bangladeshi man had pleaded guilty to one charge of intentionally distributing an intimate recording. Another charge of the same nature was considered in his sentencing.
He and his former partner started dating in 2018, the court heard. But their relationship was troubled, and became unstable in September this year.
The couple began arguing about money and other relationship issues around Sept 20 this year, and he was enraged when she blocked him on the messaging platform WhatsApp.
Days later, he forwarded their sex video to her cousin, fully aware that his former partner would be humiliated. He supposedly did it, hoping that it would force her to speak to him.
But then he took it a step further and threatened to circulate the video and make it go viral if she continued to refuse to speak to him.
That prompted her to make a police report the next day, telling the police that an intimate video showing her had been circulated without her consent.
Defence lawyer Sunil Sudheesan told the court that the chances of the video circulating further were extremely low, as it was sent to the woman’s relative.
He said his client only wanted to speak to his former partner, who is said to have moved on with a new boyfriend, thus aggravating the man even more.
 District Judge Marvin Bay described this AS “an egregious breach of trust where the victim had consented to the filming of the video, while she was in a vulnerable state of nakedness (AND) because she and the accused were romantically involved at that point in time”.
The man also failed to delete the video upon his partner’s request and lied that he had done so, the judge noted.
Despite being angry and committing the offence “upon a misconceived intention to preserve the relationship”, what he did was still “perverse”, noted the judge.
The Straits Times reported that the Bangladeshi man is not being named to protect the identity of his victim.
The judge said: “It is deeply wrong and perverse to weaponise an intimate video taken in a moment of vulnerability, mobilising it as a means to keep a failing relationship alive”.
For intentionally distributing an intimate recording, the man could have been jailed for up to five years, fined, caned or a combination of these penalties.
In a push to stop nude and intimate images from being mass forwarded on social media, four students from the Singapore Management University (SMU) have proposed watermarking a recipient’s name on the file when it is sent through messaging app Telegram.
The idea won them an award in October at the Hackathon for a Better World 2021, an event targeted at the challenges of online harm, especially against women and girls. /TISG
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