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SINGAPORE \u2013 Former Wah!Banana scriptwriter-actor and TikToker Lev Panfilov was on Sept 2 cleared of raping and sexually assaulting a woman he had met on Tinder,<\/span><\/a> after the Court of Appeal said there were material inconsistencies in her testimony.<\/p>\n The 30-year-old Singapore permanent resident was sentenced to 11\u00bd years\u2019 jail and 12 strokes of the cane in May 2025, after being convicted by the High Court on two counts of rape, one count of sexual assault by penetration, and one count of outrage of modesty.<\/p>\n The incident took place on Jan 12, 2021, in Panfilov\u2019s bedroom after he invited the woman, an aspiring comedic scriptwriter, back to the condominium unit he shared with flatmates to work on her script.<\/p>\n During his appeal hearing on Aug 13, Panfilov\u2019s lawyer Johannes Hadi <\/b>argued that the sexual encounter was consensual and that the woman\u2019s claim of a forced and violent sexual encounter was riddled with numerous material inconsistencies.\u00a0<\/p>\n On Sept 2, the Court of Appeal,<\/span><\/a> comprising Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Justice Sushil Nair and Justice Ang Cheng Hock, allowed his appeal and acquitted him of all four charges.<\/p>\n The court said the inconsistencies in the woman\u2019s testimony, when viewed collectively, gave rise to reasonable doubt in the prosecution\u2019s case.<\/p>\n One of the inconsistencies relates to whether the woman had screamed during the alleged rape.<\/p>\n Six days after the alleged assault, she told a doctor that she had screamed, and that Panfilov tried to choke her and pressed a pillow over her head to silence her.<\/p>\n This contradicted her testimony in court that she wanted to scream but did not end up screaming.<\/p>\n Another inconsistency relates to the blood-stained underwear that was tendered in court as an exhibit to support her account of a violent assault.<\/p>\n Expert witnesses for the prosecution and the defence agreed that the only injury observed on the woman could not account for the amount of blood found on the underwear.<\/p>\n According to the woman, the piece of clothing was in her laundry basket for six days until Jan 18, 2021, when she \u201chad to dig through\u201d the basket to find it.<\/p>\n The judges said doubt has been raised about the source of the blood and whether the exhibit was the underwear that she wore on the night of the alleged assault.<\/p>\n The third issue relates to the woman\u2019s inability to recall that four days after the alleged rape, she had visited a clinic to specifically ask for a doctor\u2019s memo stating her injuries and what the probable cause might have been.<\/p>\n She wanted the memo so that she could potentially approach Panfilov\u2019s family with it and \u201clet them know what happened\u201d.<\/p>\n When the doctor declined to examine her before she made a formal police report, she asked the doctor to erase any record of that consultation.<\/p>\n The judges said they found it difficult to accept her testimony in court that she had no recollection of having made that request.<\/p>\n Her account that the evidence was sitting in her laundry basket all along was also inconsistent with her citing the lack of evidence as one of the reasons she initially hesitated to make a police report.<\/p>\n Panfilov, who has been remanded in custody, smiled broadly after the verdict. His girlfriend was among those present in court.<\/p>\n In comments to The Straits Times through his counsel from law firm Eugene Thuraisingam, he said his faith in Singapore\u2019s judicial system has been restored.<\/p>\n He added: \u201cThis ordeal has made me a lot more educated. Young people should spend their time reading and not spend too much of their time on social media.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n SINGAPORE \u2013 Former Wah!Banana scriptwriter-actor and TikToker Lev Panfilov was on Sept 2 cleared of raping and sexually assaulting a woman he had met on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":81603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/81603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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