“When People Want To Sabo You, They'll Find Ways To Sabo You”

Entertainment lawyer Samuel Seow opens up to us about the recent case where a former employee filed a police report that he had physically and verbally abused her, why the report was withdrawn and whether he now has an aversion to the words “she beat me”.

- Jonathan Fam

Unlike most of Singapore’s Internet-obsessed population, entertainment lawyer Samuel Seow, who made his name representing Michelle Saram and Tanya Chua in their legal cases, still has not heard the now-viral audio clip of him getting into a dispute with an employee, who turned out to be his niece. “I probably won’t, until the dust has fully settled, because it is too painful,” he tells us over the phone.

The dust he is referring to is the media maelstrom he found himself in when a 19-year-old former employee, who is not his niece, lodged a police report accusing the 45-year-old lawyer of physical and verbal abuse. A day later, the aforementioned audio clip of Samuel getting into an altercation with his niece went viral online.

This is where it gets a tad complicated. What you hear in the clip is not what had transpired between Samuel and the 19-year-old former employee. The 19-year-old former employee who had lodged the police report is not at all part of the audio clip, and contrary to what the Internet says, is neither Samuel’s niece nor the girl you hear in the clip telling Samuel to “stop” [beating his niece].

And so, at least for those few days, the lawyer became Singapore’s most talked-about and, if online comments were to be believed, vilified man.

But what a difference a week makes. Samuel, who tells us he was advised “to lie low” during that period, has since resolved the issues with his niece. In a press conference held shortly after the audio clip first went viral, he apologised for slapping his niece, saying that it’s a family dispute and that he had acted as an uncle and not her boss. During our interview, he also declines to answer questions about his niece because “it’s a family issue”.