Now You See Us by Balli Kaur Jaswal

Author:Balli Kaur Jaswal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Big Island Weekly

Sponsors Pull Out of Influencer’s Event After “Shockingly Insensitive” Parody of East Coast Murder Case

Versus Productions, a major corporate sponsor for Unique Monique’s Boutique Show, has withdrawn support after influencer Monique Leow (who goes by the moniker UniqueMo) released a video mocking a pending murder case in East Coast Road.

In the video posted on @UniqueMo’s Instagram page and viewed 58,000 times, Leow alternates between two characters. The title of the video is “Should We Trust Maids?” It features Leow as slain employer Carolyn Hong, speaking very kindly to her maid, who is off camera.

“Oh, you want Saturday off too? Of course. I understand. Take the whole week. Here, wear my clothes. Go into my closet, borrow whatever you want. Make sure you clean it—ah, wait, is that prejudiced of me to say? Never mind, just bring it back; dirty, also never mind. We trust you one hundred percent not to bring home any foreign smells,” the character says. The camera then cuts to Leow dressed as a maid bedecked in her employer’s jewellery.

In one scene, the maid—who, with her long hair and the mole on her cheek, bears a close resemblance to the accused foreign domestic worker, Flordeliza Martinez—is saying, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” but in her accent, it sounds like she is saying, “Accuse me! Accuse me!”

The sponsor’s statement slammed the insensitivity of the video. “We do not wish to align ourselves with somebody who would mock a violent death and vilify our foreign domestic workers,” says the vice president of Versus Productions, Barry De Cruz, who is a Singapore permanent resident from the Philippines.

This isn’t the influencer’s first controversy. Last year, she was dropped as a SingaPride spokesperson after joking on Twitter about the term pansexual and posting a photo of herself seductively licking a frying pan. “Kitchen utensils can have genders too these days!” she was quoted as saying. Leow rose to notoriety on social media in 2014 after a heated spat with MediaCorp actress Kavita Pillai, who complained on Facebook that Halloween decorations were encroaching on the annual Deepavali decorations in shopping malls. Leow’s proposed solution, a Facebook event page called “Dress like an Indian for Halloween,” was eventually taken down after complaints were lodged against Pillai for stirring up racial animosity.

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