‘It feels like a life sentence’: Victims of smiling voyeur worry videos may still be online

Victims of the man dubbed the smiling voyeur are fearful that videos he took of them on separate occasions in the shower at the organisation they belonged to are floating around online.

The three women, who are in their 30s, said they had been betrayed not only by convicted voyeur Darren Yeo Wei Hong, who was their childhood friend, but also by those whom he sent the videos to.

They said the people who received the videos were mutual friends, but none of them warned them that Yeo, 34, was circulating the images via Instagram.

Ava (not her real name) said: “It is one thing to be seen naked by strangers, but to know that our close friends received the videos, looked at them and never spoke up... It is something we have to live with forever.”

“None of them, including Darren, contacted us to apologise. They have our numbers, so if they wanted to, they could have,” she added.

Yeo was sentenced to a year’s jail on June 1 for insulting a woman’s modesty and transmitting obscene videos, among other offences.

At the sentencing, Senior District Judge Bala Reddy called him out for smiling in the dock.

Another of Yeo’s victims, Mia (not her real name), said: “He gets a year’s jail but it feels like a life sentence for us. There is no expiry date to our sentence because we don’t know who else or how many people have seen these videos.”

There is a gag order on where the offences took place, to protect the identities of the women.

The women have been friends since they were teenagers and frequently meet up now to support one another.

They said they learnt of the videos only when they each received a call from the police in 2019. They were individually asked to view screengrabs of the videos and confirm it was them in the images.

Yeo had used a hidden camera disguised as a smoke detector to film at least five women, including his friends, while they were in the shower. He did this on almost 100 occasions between 2013 and 2015, and downloaded the clips onto his laptop.

He then created two Instagram accounts to send videos of the women to others, admitting to police that he circulated the videos because he was “curious” to see how the recipients would react. 

Ashley (not her real name) said she was in shock when she was called to the police station four years ago to identify photos taken of her while she was in the shower. “I was still a student in university when he filmed me. I had to look at the screengrabs of the videos, knowing that my innocent, younger self had no idea what was happening. I didn’t even know how to feel,” she recalled.

The women said they were shocked when they heard that Yeo had saved the videos according to their names.

“We were friends who grew up together. We celebrated birthdays together. We were schoolmates who attended classes together. And he did this to us,” said Ashley who, together with two of the victims, met The Straits Times on June 19.

Said Mia: “Not only did he not apologise, he turned up in court smiling. We’ve not got any closure.

“We also don’t know if any action will be taken against our friends who said nothing when they received the videos from him.”

ST understands that no action has been taken against those who received the videos.

The victims say their trauma is not over. They now worry that the videos may still be circulating online.

Said Mia: “Did people who saw the videos save them? Could the videos have been uploaded to a porn site? These are questions we don’t have answers to. They could be anywhere on the Internet.”

Checks on messaging platform Telegram showed there are groups dedicated to saving and distributing images of women in Singapore, many of whom did not know they had been filmed. Some of the videos are of incidents that were reported years ago.

Ms Kelly Leow, senior communications manager at the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware), said survivors of sexual violence, including victims of voyeurism, experience fear and anxiety after the incidents.

“This can manifest in various ways: They may have a newfound fear of returning to the location where the voyeurism took place, or doing the activity they were doing when it happened,” she said.

Ms Leow added that around eight in 10 perpetrators of sexual violence seen at Aware’s Sexual Assault Care Centre (SACC) were acquainted with their victims.

“In 2021, perpetrators of technology-facilitated sexual violence at SACC included not just intimate partners, friends and colleagues, but also classmates, neighbours, even a landlord and a pastor,” she said.

Dr Annabelle Chow, principal clinical psychologist at Annabelle Psychology, said such crimes have a long-term impact on victims.

“A victim who did not know their perpetrator would already feel exposed, but in cases such as this when the voyeur was a friend and at some point someone they trusted, the victims may feel even more betrayed,” she said.

Dr Chow added: “The betrayal can be very difficult to recover from. The ability of victims to trust others in the future may also be affected.

“Some people may expect victims to get over it after a certain amount of time, but there should be no timeline to grief. Instead, they should be given time to process what happened, and space to express how they feel about it.”