Man who drugged wife and had her raped by other men fails in bid to get lighter jail sentence

SINGAPORE – A man, who was handed 29 years’ jail and 24 strokes of the cane for inviting men to rape his wife as he watched, was told by the Chief Justice his sentence was “lenient” as the court rejected his appeal for a lighter sentence.

The 42-year-old father of four was the central figure in a horrific case where men with wife-sharing fantasies had their own partners drugged and raped.

In May 2023, the man admitted in the High Court to inviting five men to his home between 2010 and 2018 to rape his wife. He had fed her with sedatives and watched as the men raped her – often without protection – in his bedroom while the couple’s children lay asleep in another room.

He also raped the wives of two of the men.

On Jan 17, the man, who was self-represented, told the Court of Appeal that he was appealing out of his love for his wife, children and ageing parents, and that he could not leave his loved ones to “fend for themselves”.

He said he was not denying that he had done wrong, but was asking for leniency.

“The sentence imposed has already choked the life out of me,” he said. “My soul has died, what is left is just an empty shell.”

He also submitted letters from his mother and sister pleading for leniency.

In her letter, his mother said he was a filial son who did not scrounge off his parents even though he did not have enough money for his family.

She described how she once saw him ordering only vegetables and steamed eggs at a coffee shop.

But the three-judge apex court said it did not think the sentence was wrong.

“If anything, I think the judge was lenient,” Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon said.

He told the man: “I know you feel shattered, you’re self blaming... You have to confront what you did, and you have to find the answer to that, but it’s not in trying to suggest the court has to be lenient to you.”

The Chief Justice added that the court has to be faithful to precedents and stick to sentencing principles.

The man was one of seven hauled to court in an unprecedented case where husbands conspired with other men to have their own partners drugged and raped.

The crimes came to light after the man’s wife discovered explicit images of herself on his mobile phone on Jan 1, 2020, and found out that her husband and another man had been “exchanging wives”.

Most of the men got to know one another on the SammyBoy online forum and other platforms where people talked about exchanging sexual partners.

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They discussed wife-sharing fantasies in private and group chats, and also exchanged details of their sex lives and shared explicit images or videos of their wives or partners with one another.

Four of these five men pleaded guilty to their respective charges and have been sentenced to between 13.5 and 22 years in prison. Three of them were also each sentenced to 20 strokes of the cane.

The fifth man was found guilty in November 2023 following a trial, and is awaiting sentence.

One of these five men invited a seventh man to rape his wife, but the attempt was unsuccessful. This seventh man was jailed three years.

This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.

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