The Monster You Know
“The person I knew was gone. I mean, he’d never really existed.”
Hi,
I don’t think any Webworm readers will be surprised to know that I’m drawn to stories of narcissistic men getting away with terrible things for decades.
Tickled was about a New Yorker pulling the strings from behind a computer. Mister Organ saw an over zealous parking attendant who liked to break people’s sanity. This Flightless Bird episode was about an ex-Sheriff governor who loved executing innocent black men. The Arise church series was about a preacher who built Aotearoa’s biggest church by abusing and manipulating his flock.
In telling these stories, it’s my hope that these types of people will get easier to spot.
In most of these cases, these people operated in plain sight. And if not in plain sight, they’d been publicly convicted in the past and gone back to doing exactly the same thing.
And so last week, when New Zealand filmmaker Rajneel Singh was jailed for possessing horrific images of abuse, I became curious. This was a social, popular guy. He had friends. I have friends who have made stuff with him. I think he used to tweet at me years ago. Back in 2003, I sat transfixed watching his $800 budget Matrix fan film The Fanimatrix.
He probably read fucking Webworm.
My colleague Dylan Reeve was also curious about all of this. About how he got away with this for so long — and what it was like to be around someone gaslighting and manipulating their way through accusations, investigations and court cases.
He did this for years. But how?
And so Dylan decided to talk to some of those closest to Rajneel Singh, to see what signs — if any — were given off along the way. He uncovered a really compelling account of how someone like Rajneel operates. And, perhaps, what to look out for ourselves.
David.
Note: Obviously, read with caution. But I’d also note this piece is more about how this man operated and manipulated others, rather than the details of his offending.
Names indicated with an asterisk have been changed to protect their privacy.
The Monster You Know
by Dylan Reeve.
Rajneel Singh was sentenced last week for the possession and distribution of objectionable material including the very worst child sexual abuse imagery.
You now have a better picture of Rajneel than his closest friends of decades did.
You certainly know him much better than I did, as a professional acquaintance and one-time collaborator (Rajneel edited the ‘sizzle reel’ for a documentary project I was working on a few years ago).
Raj, as his friends knew him, was a monster — but he didn’t look like one.
The Police Raid
In the early hours of March 13, 2023 Rajneel’s flatmate Mark was working in his downstairs office around 6am when there was a loud knock at the front door.
When he went to the door, Mark was met by nine police officers.
“There were police officers standing there saying that they have a warrant to search this house. And I just went ‘are you guys lost?’,” Mark recalled as we sat in his home office, two metres from the front door. “Apparently that was not the correct thing to say. He told me to back away from the computer and said ‘is anyone else here at the moment?’”
In the confusion of the moment Mark never even asked to see a copy of the warrant. Instead, upon confirmation that his flatmates were home, he was instructed to wake them and bring them all downstairs to the lounge.
To hear the others in the house describe it, the entire event was confusing and seemingly without cause — and with police interested in their computers, there was some concern that maybe someone in the house had been caught torrenting movies.
But one of the people standing in the lounge that morning was almost certainly aware of exactly what was going on.
After speaking to everyone in the house, and taking cursory looks at various devices and computers, it was just Rajneel that accompanied officers to the station for what he later explained was just some routine procedural stuff because, unlike the others, he’d insisted on speaking to a lawyer before allowing police to look at any of his devices.
But Raj was back at the house less than two hours later, and the police all left. His flatmates looked to him for answers, and he would have plenty to offer, but they wouldn’t be the truth.
Rajneel Singh — Director and Friend
As a director, Raj first gained attention in 2003 with the Matrix fan-film The Fanimatrix — just a couple of years ago he was still leveraging the early “viral” project to promote his work as he claimed it was the oldest torrent still in active distribution.
In the two decades since, he had worked consistently, but in fairly low-profile parts of the industry. He was relatively well known to many who took part in the 48HOURS film making competition, and contributed to many short films and independent projects.
For a significant period, until the eventual disclosure of his offences, he worked closely with Annamarie Connors, as a collaborative duo collectively credited as The Unkindness.
“The name feels darkly ironic now,” Annamarie tells me from her office in the house she shared with Raj, Mark and their other flatmate Hamish. “Some friends used to joke that he was the ‘un’ and I was the ‘kindness’,” she laughs.
Annamarie has been trying to laugh more about it all, using dark humour as a coping mechanism to confront the fact that she’d been professionally and creatively tied to Singh for almost the entirety of her professional career.
The pair had been friends since meeting at Auckland University around 2001. By the time police turned up on their doorstep, Annamarie would have described Raj as probably her closest friend.
Together they had been the recipients of the New Zealand Writers Guild’s Seed funding, and had been selected by Script To Screen for the Fresh Shorts program — the collaboration was hugely significant for both of them. They had co-written and co-directed music videos and short films, and worked together on countless pitches, scripts and concepts.
Explanation, Denial and Gaslighting
After the initial police raid in 2023, Rajneel constructed a detailed explanation that cast him as a victim, of both an unknown internet user, and of his own issues with alcohol and his mental health.
The story he told to Annamarie, Mark and Hamish on that March morning was that he’d been heavily drinking one recent evening, and was chatting to someone online that he’d met through the fetish message board FetLife.
In Raj’s telling, what happened was that he’d essentially passed out mid-chat and woken up later to find that the person he was chatting to had sent him a bunch of obscene images — he didn’t offer specifics about the images.
In his version of events he was a victim — the unwitting recipient of illegal imagery. But, he explained, he’d simply deleted them and blocked the sender, without making any effort to report the event.
It was, crucially, this failure to report that had caused the whole situation, he claimed.
It was a jarring story for his flatmates but, they thought, police had brought him back with little fanfare after what felt like a very short time, so it seemed to make sense. Surely if he’d done anything worse he’d be sitting in a cell?
Their friend Raj, in their mind, had done something very stupid and was going to have to deal with it.
Annamarie, as one of Raj’s closest friends and his professional collaborator, was insistent that if he wanted to keep her support he needed to get help. His enrolling in alcohol counselling and therapy became conditions of his continued place in the flat.
What Really Happened
In retrospect, with sentencing complete and a summary of facts presented, we now know the truth of what took place.
The basic facts of Rajneel’s story were true, but the participants reversed. He had been chatting on Wickr — one of many encrypted messaging apps that includes features such as disappearing messages — to a person he’d connected with on FetLife.
That person, it turns out, was a young transgender person, Nic* who was also known personally to Raj.
Their conversations had involved some consensual “age play” fantasy discussions and the exchange of personal imagery. But one day in February 2023, that discussion took a sudden and unwanted turn when Rajneel sent a number of graphic CSAM images to Nic.
Nic was not expecting the images and was not a willing recipient. The sudden bombardment caused significant emotional distress. They immediately ended their chat session, and blocked Rajneel.
Nic’s close friend Chris* became aware of what happened and encouraged Nic to file a police report, but that was a step they didn’t feel comfortable with. Ultimately Chris received Nic’s permission to file a report on their behalf.
Chris reached out to the one person in their life who they felt would be able to help them navigate this situation — Tove.
Tove
Tove Partington is, to put it bluntly, not someone to be fucked with.
She has a fierce reputation as a fighter for the rights of marginalised people. Chris and Nic were among Tove’s “fosterlings” — young people, many gender queer, for whom she’d taken on an informal support role when they’d become isolated from family as a result of their identity.
With Tove’s encouragement Chris filed an online police report about the event. But at that stage the fact that they knew the real identity of the person who sent the image was something they felt unable to share with Tove — Raj had been very specific in his online conversations with Nic: they couldn’t ever let Tove know they were chatting, he warned, because she would be upset, maybe even jealous, and would disown them.
Tove and Raj had been friends for years. It was, in retrospect, a classic “our little secret” manipulation.
You might assume, as I did when I first heard this part of the story, that Rajneel would have realised at this time he had fucked up. He had sent these images to a real person who knew his identity — and immediately found himself blocked by them.
But it seems that such self-reflection didn’t occur for him, because what happened next is what ultimately brought the police to his door a month later.
The police Child Exploitation Team, upon receiving the tip, opened an investigation into Rajneel, and engaged a “covert online investigator” from the Department of Internal Affairs who used an account on FetLife to establish an online friendship with “DarkandGrizzly” — his FetLife persona — from February 20th until the raid on March 13th.
That online relationship, which began on FetLife, quickly moved to Wickr and once again Rajneel sent many explicit CSAM images — 253 in total — to his new chat partner.
It was these images, captured and catalogued by police, along with more discovered on his devices, that formed the basis of the case against him.
According to a media statement issued after his sentencing, police say they ultimately found a total of 554 files containing child sexual exploitation material on Rajneel’s devices.
Court documents provide more detail, including the distribution of similarly objectionable child sexual abuse imagery with three other Wickr users in the seven days immediately preceding the raid, another on WhatsApp between January and March, and a fifth person via another chat application called Wire for which specific records couldn’t be recovered.
Webworm has viewed the judge’s sentencing notes which go on to describe, for the record, some of the horrifying and explicit detail in just a few of the hundreds of files Rajneel possessed and shared.
The Lies Continue
As the unavoidable consequences of his actions came clearly into view for Rajneel, he concocted another story to help him get on top of the situation.
Dozens of contacts from Singh’s life received an email on the evening of September 9, 2023. The subject line was vague: “Reaching Out To Ask A Favour”.
In the email he explained that he’d been seeing a therapist recently to help address a history of depression and anxiety. That therapist, he explained, had given him a task that would use his professional skills to put together an aid to bolster his mental health in future.
“I want to make a short video of snippets of my friends that I can watch when I'm feeling down or anxious or need a reminder about my value to myself.”
The recipients were asked to send a short video of themselves talking about what they valued in Rajneel as a friend; to remind him of positive things he’d done for them, or they’d seen him do for others; and what difference he might have made in their lives.
It’s unclear if any therapist had suggested anything of the sort. Instead, it has been supposed, in retrospect, that Sigh’s plan was to use the videos he was sent as character references for his eventual sentencing — a video montage of people speaking about what a good guy Raj was, while having no idea of what he’d been doing or how he was really planning to use their videos.
Whether the videos testimonials were intended for such a use is uncertain, all we know for sure is that they didn’t become part of his sentencing in late May. However suspicions by some of those who’d received the email and were aware of Raj’s situation were reported to police officers handling the case.
Discovering the Truth
The nature of Rajneel’s offences meant that there simply wasn’t much information available to those around him. They had only his explanation of events to rely on. But his grip on the narrative wasn’t going to hold out forever.
Tove was vaguely aware of the police raid on Raj’s house, and had known that one of her fosterlings had been on the receiving end of CSAM messages about a month before that. But she hadn’t connected the events. Why would she? The Raj she knew was a good person. A feminist. An ally.
It wasn’t until December 2023, after a change of personal circumstances, that Chris finally felt able to let Tove in on the truth: she actually knew the person who’d sent those images months earlier.
It was a huge betrayal for Tove. “Raj was one of the few men I trusted, and so many people did.”
But the next steps still weren’t clear for Tove. She was aware that doing the wrong things with the information could endanger the prosecution. Tove did one thing immediately that many of us probably have in moments of personal distress — she ‘vaguebooked’ about it, posting a cryptic update on Facebook: “My day went from mediocre to coldest circle of hell in an instant… I guess you really don’t ever know the secrets of one’s heart, huh.”
Eight minutes later a Facebook Messenger notification popped up, “you okay, darlin?” from Rajneel Singh.
Tove deleted her post and ignored the message.
After pondering the situation for a few weeks she felt she had to make sure that at least those closest to Raj were aware of who he really was, so she reached out to Mark.
When Mark heard from Tove that she needed to talk to him, in person, and that it was “about Raj” and the police, he started to have a sinking feeling. He went into the living room where Raj and Annamarie were working.
“I said, ‘guys, Tove called, she seems to know what’s going on with your case. Did you tell her, Raj?’,” Mark recalls. “He said, ‘yeah, no no, I have no idea.’”
The flatmates had been asking Raj regularly about the case.
According to him everything was going slowly and it was all tied to “this other guy’s case” so he didn’t really know what the timing would be. He’d told them that he’d been told he would likely receive diversion or a fine for his failure to report, and be required to attend alcohol treatment, which he’d already started.
“He treated it like an annoyance. Almost like he was frustrated that it had taken so long, and not been resolved,” Annamarie recalled.
Leaving Annamarie and Raj to their work, Mark drove the 30 minutes to Tove’s house where she laid out what she now knew. Mark knew immediately that he needed Annamarie to know, and that he didn’t want to be the one to tell her. So he texted her: “I said ‘I’m coming to get you, you need to hear this,’ and drove straight back to pick her up.”
Knowing now that Mark knew something, and that he was on his way to collect Annamarie, Raj still acted ambivalent to whatever was taking place.
“I didn’t even go inside when I got back,” Mark remembers. “I couldn’t look at him.”
Annamarie was soon sitting in Tove’s living room hearing the details of what had really happened almost a year earlier. “It was like I was in mourning,” she recalls. “The person I knew was gone. I mean, he’d never really existed.”
Before leaving Tove’s Mark texted Rajneel, “Please don’t be home when we get back.”
“And he just messaged back ‘understood’,” Annamarie remembers. “That was it. No ‘why?’ No ‘what’s going on?’ Just ‘understood’”
History Repeats
With the nature of Rajneel’s crime now known to his flatmates, the ordeal wasn’t over. A suppression order by the courts, as well as a general concern about damaging the prosecution, meant that, for almost a year and a half, they felt unable to tell others what they’d come to know about their former friend, collaborator and flatmate.
But some quiet and, at times, vague conversations were had with those most closely connected with Raj, so that they might distance themselves from rather than be blindsided when the truth came out. Annamarie also started the process of unpicking their years-long creative collaboration, including unlisting their YouTube channel, and abruptly cancelling their participation in the Fresh Shorts competition they’d been selected for.
As whispers quietly spread among some of those close to Raj about his crimes, a new piece of information came out.
Natalie, one of the people who’d known him the longest — since they met at high school in the mid-90s — dropped a bombshell: he’d been caught up in something like this before.
He’d minimised the situation at the time, playing it off as a mistake, where he’d been unwittingly sent gross images by an anonymous chat partner.
It is a story that has a very familiar echo now.
“When we’d asked him he said, ‘oh well it’s basically I’ve been caught with something I shouldn’t have had, but when you’re in these chat rooms basically anyone can send anything to anyone’,” Natalie recalled of the event more than 20 years earlier. “It was just word salad to us. He was very avoidant and at 22 I was so fricking naive. You haven’t seen the worst of life yet.”
The case made it to trial, but details were scarce and the case seemed ridiculous to the few friends who knew about it.
Once again, the investigators who knew the details weren’t able to share them with those close to him, and there were no specifics in the parts of the trial that Natalie witnessed.
The details are vague — Natalie believes that some key evidence was lost — but ultimately there was no conviction. The Department of Internal Affairs, when approached for comment after this latest conviction, would only provide a general statement to Webworm: “We can confirm that the Department of Internal Affairs’ Digital Safety team led an investigation and prosecution into Mr Singh [in 2002]. Mr Singh was subsequently found not guilty at a judge alone trial.”
Learning details now, after 30 years of friendship, that retrospectively felt so familiar was shocking for Natalie. It immediately made her reconsider everything. “I felt so sick. Like, he and a girlfriend of mine, they were the ‘mates of honour’ at my wedding. He looked after my cat when I was away. It’s just pure disgust, just real visceral sickness.”
Natalie assumed, of course, that the police would be aware of his past, but she spoke to a detective to make sure.
They were not. It was, apparently, totally new information to them. A short time later investigators confirmed they’d been able to retrieve details of the previous case.
Inquiries to police seeking confirmation of the details, and clarification about why it had been overlooked, were rebuffed by the media team, and referred to the Department of Internal Affairs.
Ultimately with no conviction and decades having passed, none of those in Raj’s life now had any reason to suspect what lay beneath his carefully cultivated ‘good guy’ persona.
Small Mercies
When the nature of Raj’s offenses became apparent there was immediate concern that maybe he’d done more than just share images he’d collected in the dark corners of the internet. Raj was a filmmaker and he’d worked with kids in some of his television, short film and music video projects.
However, both direct communication with some of those involved in productions, and discussion with the police, seemed to at least suggest that he’d never been involved in creating material himself, or otherwise done anything physically with the young people he’d worked with.
But police are still keen to hear from anyone with further information about Rajneel’s actions during the time covered by this case, or any time in the past.
Uncovering the Monster
By the time Raj eventually stepped into the court room for sentencing more than a year had passed since he was evicted from the flat, and removed from his creative partnership with Annamarie.
He had been largely disconnected from his closer social groups. But many people who were a little further outside his former inner circle were still in the dark, and Raj had continued living his life as if nothing had changed.
People who knew about what he was accused of were often shocked to see him in public, at events and film screenings, but felt unable to tell those he was socialising with.
As Tove, Annamarie, Natalie and others arrived at the Auckland District Court to see Raj finally sentenced, they found him outside the court with two women they didn’t know. “He was out there yucking it up with them — it was gross,” Annamarie recalls of the moment they encountered him.
His seemingly new friends entered the court with everyone else to witness what was about to unfold. “Those people… I can’t imagine they knew,” Tove offered, of the pair. As the details of the case were stated for the record by the judge the two appeared to become more and more uncomfortable. “Their faces just got more and more distressed, especially when the descriptions came. One of them was crying by the end,” Tove observed.
The true horror of what had been taking place so close to them still wasn’t fully laid bare for Raj’s former friends and flatmates until the judge outlined the police case against him — by then uncontested fact, following his guilty plea — including the number of images, details of his conversations with chat partners, and the categorisation of the materials he’d collected and shared.
In delivering the sentence the judge had to be specific at times, including about the general tenor of the materials involved — “the children were predominantly female, aged between six months and 12 years of age” — and specific details of a number of the images.
The descriptions of what was uncovered, Annamarie says, were some of the worst things she’d ever heard.
According to Raj’s own affidavit he had begun his offending in late 2022, not long before the first occurrence recorded in the police case. The fact that he’d been charged with similar offenses 20 years earlier obviously cast doubt on that for those in the public gallery.
In his substantial filing in his defense Raj cited his own mental health struggles and self-reported prior suicidal ideation, as well as many issues in his personal background. However, the judge noted, “You did not appear to express any acknowledgement of or recognise the harm that was caused to the child victims depicted in the child sexual exploitation material.”
The judge went further, summarising the overall tone of Raj’s submission on his own behalf: “I have to say that my overall impression of it is that, while you spent a lot of time and used a lot of paper telling me about your own troubles, you did not appear to give more than peremptory recognition to the nature of your offending and the harm that such offending causes innocent children.”
In his request for permanent name suppression, Rajneel had expressed concern over his ability to continue his work in the film industry if his name were to be published — part of the reason that I, a member of that same industry, was so determined to ensure it would be.
He also suggested that publication of his name would cause distress to his family.
Rajneel has no immediate family aside from his elderly parents, suggesting that perhaps they weren’t even aware of the charges he was facing — they weren’t in court to support him.
Police had warned those close to the case that the sentence could range from community service through to imprisonment, with a non-custodial sentence being a very real possibility.
The judge ruled that option out swiftly, telling Rajneel, “I can tell you straight away that I am of the clear view that no sentence other than imprisonment could possibly address the relevant principles and purposes of sentencing in this case.”
Starting from a sentence of six and a half years, Rajneel was eligible for a number of statutory discounts including for his guilty plea, his mental health, his engagement with rehabilitative programmes and, perhaps ironically, for “good character” — specifically the lack of previous convictions.
The judge pointedly refused to apply a requested discount for remorse.
Ultimately he was sentenced to three years and three months in prison.
Those in the gallery described a guttural wail from Rajneel as he was taken from the court by staff to begin his sentence.
A few hours after he was placed in custody, a new creative collaborator (who had been unaware of the case) received an email from Raj relinquishing his interest in their shared intellectual property. It seemed, perhaps, that he’d set up some sort of “deadman’s switch” to settle some final matters if he was unsuccessful in his bid to remain free.
Given everything that transpired in the more than two years since police raided his house, it seems highly unlikely that Rajneel Singh would have ever told anyone what had happened if he’d been able to avoid it.
If he’d been granted the name suppression and home detention he’d sought none of us would have been able to identify the monster we thought we knew.
Primed To Believe
In speaking to those who were close to Rajneel I heard very understandable regret and guilt. Should they have known?
Why did they remain friends after the raid?
Still others who were a little more removed from Raj expressed, in retrospect at least, that they’d previously felt vaguely bad vibes from him, or ‘got the ick’ after encounters. Immediately after hearing about the conviction I would have put myself in that category.
But neither I, nor anyone I spoke to, had any sense of this. Even now I’m not sure I could describe what it was that felt off to me, and I question whether I really felt it — or have just convinced myself after the fact.
There are many more people who say they had no sense of anything off with Raj, and who describe him as thoughtful, supportive and generally a good person. I haven’t heard from anyone who felt he seemed like the monster he apparently was.
It’s a situation I hope never to confront, but I think I would have to be a pretty terrible person to cut a friend out of my life based on a vague and confusing police raid. Those close to him had only his explanation for what was taking place. The events didn’t fit their expectation of what would happen in the case of something like what Raj was truly accused of.
As I’ve written about before (in far less horrifying circumstances) we are primed to believe the things we’re told. When the person telling us lies is a friend of many years we will, of course, extend the benefit of any doubt.
Reflecting now on their decades of friendship, those close to Rajneel can see the signs of manipulation and narcissism in other parts of his life, but at the time they overlooked, minimised or excused them, as we’ve all done with people in our lives.
Ultimately we don’t really know the people we surround ourselves with. We try our best to form solid opinions about people but at times we will inevitably be fooled.
But what we do once we have real knowledge is important.
I’ve not spoken to or heard from anyone who is willing to excuse Raj or justify a continuing relationship in any way. Every single person I spoke to withdrew from him as they became aware of the nature of the accusations against him. Since news of his conviction became public, online profiles from within the film industry have been deleted by those organisations.
Perhaps what matters isn’t how we respond to the monster hiding from us, but what we do when they finally reveal themselves.
-Dylan Reeve.
Thank you so much Dave, and Dylan especially.
To the victims, the forgotten victims, the ones Raj didn't see as humans, the descriptions of abuse that had me nearly yakking in a courtroom, the ones that survived, the many who likely didn't;
I wish you freedom, I wish you hope.
You are more than images on a screen.
Arohanui and Kia Kaha.
I am a counsellor who has previously worked with sex offenders in a rehabilitative capacity. While it's comforting to frame these men as deviant monsters, this is becoming disturbingly common.
As seen in this article here https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/05/i-didnt-start-out-wanting-to-see-kids-are-porn-algorithms-feeding-a-generation-of-paedophiles-or-creating-one
Please do not doubt that I think this man's offending is horrific, it is, and he is responsible for it. However it also points to a deep problem in our society and our relationship to pornography which is not neutral.
I now primarily work with victims of sexual harm and hear every day the outcome of young men being socialised into a violent and dehumanizing culture regarding sex. This problem is epidemic in New Zealand.