SINGAPORE, March 23 — A man who pushed aside a ticket-holding Taylor Swift concertgoer then held onto a turnstile to let three people without tickets into the venue was sentenced to six weeks' jail yesterday (March 22).
Li Xiaowei, a 45-year-old citizen of China, pleaded guilty to a charge of criminal trespass.
In sentencing, District Judge Hairul Hakkim Kuthibutheen referenced a song by the American singer-songwriter and emphasised that Li had made “unlawful contact with a legitimate concertgoer”.
“Foreshadowing Taylor Swift’s hit song I Knew You Were Trouble, (Li) entered the National Stadium with the intent of committing the offence,” the judge said.
Swift was in Singapore from March 2 to 9 to perform six sold-out shows at the National Stadium within the Singapore Sports Hub as part of The Eras Tour.
What happened
Li arrived in Singapore on February 29 on a social visit pass, his first visit here. He had no air ticket out of Singapore.
On March 1, three travellers Shangguan Linmo, 25, Hu Zhijun, 21 and Yang Junhao, 23, had departed from Wuhan, China to Penang, Malaysia for a holiday.
While on board one of their connecting flights, an unidentified male person on the flight had approached Ms Shangguan and asked if she was interested in buying three Singapore Eras Tour tickets for 4,000 yuan (about S$755) each.
Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Darren Ang said that when Ms Shangguan said that she was interested, the person told her that he knew a contact in Singapore who could secure three VIP tickets that were “free seating in nature”.
He also told the woman that if she was unable to enter the concert using those tickets, he would provide them with spare tickets and shared his contact number on WeChat messaging application and that of a 29-year-old male named Yang Chenguang.
Three days later, on March 4, the three travellers boarded a flight to Singapore, intending to attend the Singapore Eras Tour concert on the same evening.
Sometime that evening, Li entered the security area for checks where Taylor Swift concert-goers were required to pass through for a bag check before scanning their tickets at a turnstile leading into the National Stadium.
Yang Chenguang, whose case is still before the courts, also entered the security area and met up with the trio.
Court documents did not state the nature of the relationship between Li and Yang, or how they knew each other.
Yang instructed one of the trio to pay 12,000 yuan for three tickets to “Xue Mei”, a user of China's e-payment service Alipay. Court documents stated that the amount was refunded the next day.
Li and Yang met outside Gate 3 and conversed, while the three people planning to attend the concert waited for around 10 minutes as they talked.
Yang then walked to the area behind the crowded Gate 3 and looked towards the turnstile gates to identify an opportunity for the trio to tailgate a concert-goer into the stadium.
When he noticed that there were no security officers stationed behind the three left-most turnstiles while there was a commotion near another gate, Yang brought Li’s attention to that turnstile.
Li then walked to that turnstile where two female concert-goers were queuing to scan their tickets.
At the same time, Yang allegedly squeezed through the queues and approached the only security officer stationed at that set of turnstile gates and distracted him.
Li's role was to enable the trio to tailgate one of the concert-goers with legitimate tickets into the stadium. He pushed aside one of the concert-goers during the period that the security officer was distracted.
He then signalled to the trio to come toward him and held onto the turnstile to prevent it from rotating into a locked position, and pushed the trio through the turnstile.
After the group entered the stadium, Yang and Li made to leave. The concert-goer who had been pushed repeatedly called the security guard's attention by shouting, “Excuse me!”.
Noticing this, Li pushed her on her back to try and get her through the turnstile but was unable to do so. He held onto her hands and shook them aggressively, asking her why she was shouting.
The concert-goer who had passed through the turnstile before her noticed that Li was touching her, and asked him to stop, after which he walked away.
She then told the security guard that three people had tailgated her into the stadium, and the security guard left to find the trio unsuccessfully.
The incident was caught on a closed-circuit television at the venue. Following a police report, police officers were dispatched on the scene and Li and Yang were arrested.
During police investigations, two screenshots depicting Eras Tour tickets dated March 2 and March 4 were found on Li’s phone.
The March 4 ticket was a false ticket, which stated that the date was a Saturday instead of a Monday and had an “uncharacteristically large” number “4”, DPP Ang said.
He added that Li had no satisfactory explanation for why the two ticket screenshots were on his phone and Yang had sent Ms Shangguan an almost identical false ticket over WeChat on March 4.
This week, Yang was handed a fresh charge of cheating one of the alleged trespassers into believing he was buying genuine Eras Tours tickets.
The pair were not the first to have been charged with helping people illegally enter the Taylor Swift concert venue, as 54-year-old Wu Zhihong was jailed for two weeks on Monday for a similar offence.
For committing criminal trespass, Li could have been jailed for up to three months, received a fine of up to S$1,500 or face both punishments. ― TODAY
