A 36-year-old Indonesian domestic worker has been sentenced to one week’s jail for falsely claiming that her employer’s husband had raped her.
According to CNA, the police received the report around 1.30am on 25 Feb this year.
Officers later found the woman at a housing block in Ubi, where she alleged that her employer’s husband, a 40-year-old Singapore permanent resident, had repeatedly forced himself on her and turned off closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras to touch her inappropriately.
The helper was taken to a hospital the same day for a medical examination.
There, she repeated her allegations, saying the man had raped her four times between September 2024 and February 2025.
She explained that she delayed making the report because she feared being sent home.
The woman also said the man had occasionally given her between S$50 and S$100 in “extra pocket money” but maintained that the encounters were not consensual.
That same night, the Serious Sexual Crime Branch interviewed both parties.
The husband said all sexual activities were consensual, while the helper later recanted her claims in a separate interview.
Source: MB Lifestyle on Canva, for illustration purposes only
She admitted she had lied to the police because she “felt guilty” and wanted to end the affair, suspecting that her employer’s wife had discovered their relationship.
The woman had been employed by the family since May 2023 to care for their one-month-old child and perform household chores.
According to her lawyer, Josephine Chee from Rajah & Tann, who represented her under the Criminal Legal Aid Scheme, the husband began making advances around August 2024 by entering her room late at night.
Although the helper was reluctant, she did not know how to reject him as he was also her employer.
Their sexual relationship began the following month, with the man giving her money and a necklace.
After several months, she felt guilty and wanted to stop the affair.
Believing that filing a police report would end his advances, she decided to make the false claim.
Ms Chee urged the court to impose no more than seven days’ jail, describing the husband as “clearly the more dominant party” and noting that her client had little external support.
The helper, a divorcee with two daughters in Indonesia, earned S$647.50 a month, though much of her early salary went towards repaying her agency loan.
Her father, a farmer, struggles to make ends meet.
Ms Chee said her client had been “caught between a rock and a hard place” and did not gain anything from the falsehood apart from the mistaken relief she thought she could achieve by ending the affair.
The court heard that the helper will be repatriated to Indonesia after serving her sentence and is unlikely to return to Singapore for domestic work.
For giving false information to a public servant, she could have been jailed for up to two years, fined, or both.
Also read: S’pore woman falsely accuses man of rape for not paying her S$1.2K after sex, pleads guilty
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Featured image by MS News.