SINGAPORE: The main culprit in several wife-sharing rape cases carried out by men who met on an explicit online forum was sentenced to 29 years in jail and 24 strokes of the cane by the High Court on Thursday (May 4).
The 42-year-old Singaporean conspired with five other men to have his own wife drugged and raped over a period of eight years. He also conspired with two men to rape their wife or ex-wife.
The man, named only as J, is at the centre of the cases that the prosecution described as unprecedented.
He faced the most charges among the offenders, pleading guilty to six charges on Thursday. Another 11 charges were taken into consideration. He was previously represented by two different sets of lawyers, but dropped them and acted for himself.
All parties in the case cannot be named due to gag orders imposed by the court.
J, a safety officer, married his wife, now 41, in 2008. They have four children together. J asked his wife if she was interested in a threesome but was rebuffed, so he hatched a plan to sedate his wife for other men to have sex with her.
He met his accomplices as early as 2010, on the forum Sammyboy and other platforms for wife-sharing fantasies.
The case came to light when J’s wife woke up before her husband in January 2020 and noticed a video playing on his phone. She saw explicit images of herself in a Skype chat with accomplice K.
As she scrolled down, she discovered that the men had been exchanging their wives for sex. She slapped J awake and got him to take her to K’s home. The men were later arrested.
In mitigation, J said he was pleading guilty to take responsibility and accept his “due punishment”.
“Right now, my main concern is the safety of my wife as well as my children, so I would like to seek your honour’s consideration in putting me to go for legal assessment and diagnosis of what’s really going on in my mind,” he said.
He asked to receive treatment so that he could “be considered safe enough to be returned to my home, my family, as my family nucleus is still very much intact”.
J is currently receiving psychiatric attention and counselling in prison.
He claimed that his wife has forgiven him, but the prosecution rebutted this by reading from his wife’s victim impact statement, where she said: “I kept thinking about how cruel he was to do this to me.”
J also claimed that he committed the offences because his wife had affairs in 2010 and 2014.
He also tendered a letter from his mother, who asked the court to be lenient to her “filial” son who is a “responsible and loving good father” to his four daughters.
Four of the men involved – K, L, M and N – were sentenced in November, receiving jail terms of between 13-and-a-half years and 22 years. Three of them received 20 strokes of the cane, while the fourth did not as he was above 50.
The sixth man, P, was sentenced in January 2022.
The case for the last man, O, is pending.