She was once one of Singapore’s most influential and popular online personalities but these days Sylvia Chan, the former CEO of once-popular YouTube channel Night Owl Cinematics (NOC), is known more for her messy divorce from ex-husband Ryan Tan.
In 2021, the now 35-year-old was accused of being a toxic and abusive boss by her ex-NOC employees while going through her rancorous split with Ryan, who co-founded the now-defunct NOC with her. Stories about Sylvia’s alleged bad behaviour, which included claims of embezzlement and prostituition, made headlines for weeks.
Shortly after, things seemingly died down when Sylvia joined global creator and entertainment company Gushcloud International as their regional head of media strategy. In May last year, she announced that she was learning to becoming a life coach.
Well, it now appears that there were many things that happened to Sylvia that were not made known to the public.
In a recent episode of her new podcast, Dirty Mess Free, with co-host Master Coach and “cereal entrepreneur” Daniel Lim, Sylvia came clean about what actually happened to her after the NOC saga.
“Most people don’t know, they just thought: ‘Oh she’s cancelled, case closed, we stopped reporting about her’. But what it started for me was actually — I didn’t know then — a 12-month criminal investigation,” she revealed.
“I never imagined I’d go to a police station, trying to defend that I’m not a criminal. It was very, very scary.”
Sylvia said that when she first went down to the police station, she was informed that the investigation was going to “take quite a while” because one “entire floor” of the police station was working on her cases.
She asked if her case was “that big”, to which the police officer replied: “It’s not that you have big cases, we have about over a hundred open cases against you, ma’am.”
The worst accusation Sylvia had to work through was embezzlement.
“I didn’t do the operations and the accounts [for NOC] so it’s very scary for me to fight through a case of embezzlement because I had no prior visuals to the accounts of the company,” she explained.
She then had to dig through 10 years worth of past documents in the two-storey NOC office to find evidence, as well as buy old bank statements, which she said were “bloody expensive” — about $2K to 4K per statement — just to clear her name.
“The police would ask me really crazy questions like: “In this year, at this time, why is there a S$12K sum that went out?” Sylvia recalled, adding that it was “crazy having to explain something [she had] never done” especially since the sum of money “could be for anything”.
When Daniel asked if she had, at any point, started doubting if she really embezzled funds, Sylvia said: “I really should have put in more effort or at least asked for the right to see these accounts and keep myself updated. But I wasn’t and was completely not involved. That was my mistake.”
She continued: “I think there were two parts of me, one that was like: ‘Sylvia you really didn’t do anything wrong, please trust in yourself. There’s this voice that kept saying: ‘The truth will protect you’.” But when you’re there [at the police station], no. You’re like: ‘I’m f**ked’.”
Sylvia also didn’t hire a lawyer, and the only legal help she had was their company’s retainer, “somebody [she] didn’t know very well and was hired by [her] ex-partner.”
“But he was professional in the sense that he was the one who said: ‘Buy as many bank statements as you could’,” she said.
Throughout the investigation, Sylvia became increasingly paranoid that the police would eventually find something against her.
“The longer the investigation dragged, the more questions they asked and more things they dug through, in my mind I was like: ‘They’re just gonna find something’. I got progressively more scared,” she confessed.
The part where Sylvia thought she “probably really did something wrong” was when they investigated the prostitution claims.
“I didn’t know that I prostituted somebody, right? But the case that they presented was, apparently, rather detailed and colourful… Now I’d probably laugh at it, the details, but at that time, [the police officer] was going through line-by-line our Whatsapp conversation,” recounted Sylvia.
She even had to provide explanations for things as simple as asking a friend out and inviting them to a party, which were really “innocent and common” day-to-day activities between friends, until they were, in Daniel’s words, “misinterpreted in another way, in light of that charge”.
Thankfully, Sylvia was able to prove her innocence because a talent had pulled out of the party at that time.
“I asked the police — it’s so incredible ‘cos it’s so small — if it helped that Miss XYZ chose not to go at 7pm and my reply was: ‘Sure babes!’ and she left,” she said.
When the police officer concurred and went on to say: “Well, this proved that they had free-will to come and leave right?”, all Sylvia could respond was: “Yes! Yes, yes, yes!”
“I was really scared and couldn’t think much. I couldn’t even defend myself in any smart way,” she admitted.
According to Sylvia, the embezzlement and prostitution accusations were particularly painful to deal with because they involved people who, in her head, “knew the truth and gave the police a case that was completely fabricated”.
“I guess the resentment towards me was enough. Because if you’re the company accountant, to say that somebody embezzled, it takes a lot of effort to fabricate certain evidence to look a certain way,” explained Sylvia.
“It pained me because that person was um, my ex-husband. It was somebody who was supposed to take care of me for the rest of my life. You know, we took a vow, in sickness and in health. That was the painful part, like: ‘Wow, you really got me here. You really pinned this on me, and you know full well I didn’t do any of this and it’s very hard for me to even fight for this’,” she said with tears in her eyes.
“The prostitution case was [filed by] my group of girlfriends… These were people I spent all my waking hours working for and spending my life with. So these two cases were just heartbreaking and insanely scary,” she said.
It got so daunting that Sylvia, at some point, actually begged the police to “save” her.
“I was like: ‘Please just save me, I really don’t know what to do. I’m in this deep shit where I really don’t know what’s going on, it really wasn’t me,” and he was like: ‘Ma,am, we’ll do our best.’,” she recalled.
It was after a year that the police made a final decision about her case and called her down to the station.
“When I walked into the room, now that I think of it [the police officer] was quite a funny guy. He had this piece of paper and he gave a really long sigh before saying: ‘I’m done with your investigation, I would like to tell you one thing’. I thought he was going to tell me if I was innocent or guilty but he took another long sigh and said: ‘Sylvia, find better friends’,” she laughed.
He then passed her the piece of paper, and said that she was “innocent of all charges”.
Now you must be wondering, what happened to those who fabricated those claims against Sylvia then?
“To close the case, at least from briefly what [the police] shared, he had to go back to those people and ask for their final statement. It also meant that their final statement had to be: ‘It wasn’t true’,” she said.
However, it was up to Sylvia to prove her innocence and there were no consequences for those who claimed otherwise.
“I was very shocked to find out… I actually apologised to the police on the spot, I was like: ‘I’m really sorry that you had to close a hundred over cases for me. I didn’t know about the back and forth you had to do behind that just to prove every single thing that came out of anybody’s mouth”,” she sighed.