SINGAPORE: A former actor at comedy channel Wah!Banana was found guilty on Friday (Mar 21) of raping a woman he met on dating app Tinder.
Lev Panfilov, a Singapore permanent resident from Russia, was convicted by a High Court judge on all four charges he claimed trial to – rape, sexual assault by penetration and molest.
The victim cannot be named due to a gag order protecting her identity.
Delivering the guilty verdict, Justice Pang Khang Chau said that the victim had been an “unusually convincing” witness, although he noted that her testimony was “not without difficulty”.
He raised several points that the defence had highlighted in its bid to show the victim had been inconsistent.
One of them had been how the victim had given Panfilov her home address so that he could call a private-hire vehicle to send her home after the incident.
She had also continued to respond to his text messages after that, and took three days to see a doctor after experiencing pain from being raped.
One alleged inconsistency was how the victim told the doctor that she had screamed during the incident, but told others that she wanted to scream but did not, or could not.
Another detail was how the victim made a “seemingly strange” request to a doctor for a memo of her injuries to show to Panfilov’s family. In court, the victim testified that she could not recall making such a request.
Justice Pang said that having examined the evidence, he found that there were reasonable explanations for most of these difficulties.
The rest were minor inconsistencies which were immaterial and did not affect the victim’s overall credibility, he said.
On the other hand, Justice Pang felt that Panfilov was not a credible witness, with the irregularities in his evidence “symptomatic of his attempt to distance himself from events”, albeit unsuccessfully.
Panfilov, who appeared in the dock dressed in a purple prison jumpsuit, had his head bowed as the verdict was read and constantly glanced at his relatives in the gallery.
