An ex-insurance agent has been found guilty of three charges of molestation, after a court found he had assaulted his colleague three times in a single evening after doing door-to-door sales.
Defendant Chua Kia Dong, 30-years-old and married, claimed during the trial that the acts were consensual. However, District Judge Eddy Tham gave a guilty verdict based on Chua’s confession to the police, as well as CCTV footage, Today reported.
The victim, who is around 25-years-old, has her identity concealed by a court order for safety reasons.
The court found that the molestations happened on June 01, 2018. After the two agents finished their door-to-door sales, Chua first groped and kissed the victim at the sky garden of an HDB block in Sengkang. He later kissed her in the lift on the way to the building’s basement car park, and the assault happened again inside Chua’s car at the car park.
The victim filed a report with the police shortly after, having confided in her boyfriend and her work superiors.
In court, Chua did not deny the acts, some of which were caught on CCTV, but he said that he and the victim had a consensual affair that began in January 2018.
According to deputy public prosecutor Alexandria Shamini Joseph, the victim initially gave in to pressure from Chua to have sex with him in February. She began avoiding him after that, but he promised to stop touching her a month before the incident, so she agreed to go on door-to-door sales with him. After the first assault at the sky garden, the victim said she needed to leave, and only accompanied Chua to his car to retrieve her jacket.
Chua, in his testimony, agreed that any sexual acts between them stopped in February. In a statement he gave to the police after being arrested, Chua admitted that the victim said “no” five to 10 times during the incident. He also admitted to using force to restrain the victim, who was resisting.
Despite some doubts on the victim’s testimony, Judge Tham found that Chua’s confession, in combination with the CCTV footage, was sufficient to convict him of molestation for the unwanted acts of intimacy committed on June 01, 2018, regardless of any prior acts between them.
Chua is set for mitigation submissions and sentencing on September 13, and is currently out on bail of SG$15,000.
Each of the three molestation offences carries a prison term of up to two years, a fine, caning, or a combination of all three.
