For years, the Thai public knew Siranudh Scott as a scion of Thailand’s largest beer dynasty and a high-profile marine conservationist who publicly criticized government officials for ignoring environmental violations.
But Mr. Siranudh, 30, was also fighting a personal battle. Earlier this year, he decided he could no longer stay silent, and made a bombshell accusation.
Mr. Siranudh, who is also known as Psi, said his older brother, Sunit Scott, and his nanny had sexually assaulted him as a child — and that his mother attempted to cover up the abuse and buy his silence. The fallout was swift. He said that as punishment for speaking out, he was cut off from the $1.3 billion Singha family fortune and thrown out of the family beach house.
His accusation — which his brother denied — unleashed a rare public reckoning over sexual assault in Thailand, where the #MeToo movement had failed to make an impact. Many Thais have responded with accounts of sexual assault within families and by powerful people.
It has catapulted Mr. Siranudh further into the spotlight. Now a household name and considered a symbol of standing up to power, he is mobbed in the streets by supporters. When he stopped his pink pickup truck at an intersection in Bangkok recently, a man rolled down his window and shouted: “Keep fighting!”
His mother has disputed his account of what she knew and how she acted, in a written response to The New York Times, her first public comment on the allegations. Mr. Sunit, 36, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a social media video posted after his brother made his accusations public, he denied the abuse and described what happened as roughhousing. The nanny did not respond.
The New York Times interviewed Mr. Siranudh on multiple occasions and spoke with seven of his friends and supporters. We also reviewed a contract signed between Mr. Siranudh and his family, as well as an audio clip of what Mr. Siranudh said was a conversation between the brothers that he secretly recorded.
The support from the Thai public has given Mr. Siranudh something he says he long wanted from his family: acknowledgment. Having the accusations out in the open was like a weight lifting from him, he said.
“Some form of justice has come in its exposure,” he added.
To Be a Bhirombhakdi
Mr. Siranudh described a childhood in which his parents, who were divorced, were distant. The household staff took care of him, and even though he was not close to his brother, they would play together sometimes.
That made the abuse so hard to understand, he said, because it came from those he trusted.
He said he barely saw his mother and met his father for dinner once a week. His grandfather, Chamnong Bhirombhakdi, was the longtime chairman of Boon Rawd Brewery, which owns Singha beer and holds the largest share of Thailand’s lucrative beer market. The country’s wealthy elite regularly visited his grandfather’s house.
“The housekeepers and cooks filled the void,” he wrote in 2023.
Closest to him was his nanny, who had cared for him since he was a baby.
But once, when he was 8, Mr. Siranudh said, his nanny took her pants off and sat on top of him. He was confused about what happened. (The nanny did not respond to requests for comment.)
The bigger betrayal, he said, came when he was 9. His older brother had returned from boarding school in England for summer vacation. Mr. Siranudh wanted to spend time with him. Instead, he said, his brother forced him to give him oral sex.
“The first time he grabbed my head, I remember being really repulsed,” Mr. Siranudh said.
The abuse continued until Mr. Siranudh was 13, he said.
Mr. Siranudh said he told no one because he felt responsible for protecting his family.
“I just felt early on that I had to undermine my reality to let other people live,” he said. “I didn’t speak up also because I didn’t think I was worthy or that I was loved.”
Carissa Wong, Mr. Siranudh’s best friend, said that in 2024 he first hinted at what his brother, who is known as Pi, had done.
“He said that Pi did something to him,” said Ms. Wong, who has known Mr. Siranudh since he was 7. “He didn’t tell me everything at first. I think he was still processing how to tell people.”
As a teenager, Mr. Siranudh struggled with depression. He found refuge in drawing, and left home in 2014 to study animation in California. He moved to London in 2020 and started seeing a therapist, whom he confided in.
He said the therapist helped him see the gravity of his situation. He said before that, he thought an older brother abusing a younger brother was normal.
“The minute that I was able to start saying that yes, it was rape, I was able to start planning like how I was going to go forward,” he said.
Breaking the Silence
Mr. Siranudh said he did not set out to make his allegations public. He first tried to address them with his family. What followed, he said, convinced him that he would need proof, and public pressure.
In 2020, Mr. Siranudh told his mother, Chiranuj Bhirombhakdi, that he had been sexually abused by his nanny.
When Ms. Chiranuj confronted the nanny, Mr. Siranudh said, the nanny told her that he had been abused by his older brother. His mother asked Mr. Siranudh about it then told him not to tell anyone, he said. She fired the nanny.
Mr. Siranudh saw what happened next as punishment for speaking out. Within months, he said, Ms. Chiranuj threw him out of the family’s beach house in Hua Hin. She said he had damaged the property. This was the start of his estrangement from his mother and brother.
In the years that followed, he began building a life outside the family. He became a park ranger, was appointed an adviser to the director general of Thailand’s Department of National Parks, and started to draw attention to plastic pollution. His environmentalism brought him fame.
But he was on shaky ground financially. He said his mother had not given him a share of a family trust even though his brother and cousins were beneficiaries.
Mr. Siranudh’s estrangement from his mother deepened when he learned that she had rehired his nanny and continued taking vacations with his older brother.
In August 2023, he said he found the courage to do what he had thought was impossible. In a series of Facebook posts, he wrote that he was “raped by someone in the family,” that his nanny had sexually abused him when he was a child, and that his mother had thrown him out.
The posts drew widespread attention. Three months later, Mr. Siranudh’s aunt invited him to her house for a meeting with his relatives. His brother, Mr. Sunit, was there.
Mr. Siranudh asked to speak alone with his brother. Mr. Siranudh told The Times he recorded the conversation without his brother’s knowledge because he wanted evidence if he ever made his allegations public.
The Times reviewed the 20-minute recording, the full version of which has not been made public. In it, Mr. Siranudh is heard confronting the other speaker, whom Mr. Siranudh identifies as Mr. Sunit.
“It’s nothing that a brother should ever feel. It’s not just sexual assault, Pi,” he said. “It’s like incest, and I had no responsibility in it at all ‘cause I was a kid.”
The other speaker says he did not know what he was doing at the time. He does not appear to deny Mr. Siranudh’s accusations. He says: “What I’ve done I can never take back.”
Mr. Sunit did not respond to requests for comment sent through his mother’s lawyer as well as a crisis communications consultant hired by the lawyer of the Bhirombhakdi family. A Times reporter who went to his home and asked to speak with him was turned away.
At the family meeting, Mr. Siranudh challenged his mother to tell their relatives about what he said his brother had done, but the relatives refused to listen, he said. His mother and aunt offered to give him financial support if he signed an agreement to “uphold the reputation, honor, and dignity as a member of a ‘Bhirombhakdi,’” according to a copy of the contract viewed by The Times.
Specifically, he was told not to post “extra content” about his mother on social media. In return, he would receive an annual allowance of 5 million baht, and a one-time payment of 10 million baht ($300,000). He signed.
But he refused to be silenced. He reiterated his complaints about his family on television. In January, his mother sued him under a Thai law that allows parents to take legal action against “ungrateful” children who defame or insult them.
Then, in May, Mr. Siranudh made his accusations against his brother public. After his brother denied them, he released excerpts from the recording on social media, saying he felt his family would otherwise never acknowledge what happened.
Ms. Chiranuj disputed much of his account in written answers to questions from The Times.
She said she had not heard the accusations against Mr. Sunit until Mr. Siranudh made them public; Mr. Siranudh says he told her in 2020.
She rejected his description of the agreement as hush money, saying it was meant to support her son financially, on one condition. “He has to behave and uphold our names and reputations of ‘Bhirombhakdi’,” she wrote. Ms. Chiranuj said the lawsuit was necessary because he had damaged the beach house and was “causing trouble.”
“I’m really sad that Psi has dragged the brewery and the big ‘Bhirombhakdi’ family into this mess to keep his social media ‘hot,’” she wrote.
A National Reckoning
By releasing the recordings, Mr. Siranudh generated public pressure that his family, and the brewery tied to its fortune, could not ignore.
In Thailand, the #MeToo movement had not gained traction because confrontation is often avoided and criminal defamation laws can make people reluctant to name those they accuse of assault. The topic of sexual abuse within families was especially sensitive, but that is changing.
Jaray Singhakowinta, an assistant professor at the National Institute of Development Administration in Bangkok, said Mr. Siranudh’s story challenged the expectation that family comes before the individual, and the silence surrounding male victims.
“A young man crying on camera about childhood abuse gave other men permission to speak, and many did,” he said.
As the response to Mr. Siranudh’s account grew, the family and the business sought to distance themselves from the dispute.
Boon Rawd Brewery, the maker of Singha beer, announced that Mr. Sunit, who worked for the company, had resigned. It published his resignation letter, in which he apologized for “the incident and the impact it has caused,” and said that he was stepping down until the matter was clarified. The company also expressed its sympathy to Mr. Siranudh.
In a statement, the Bhirombhakdi family acknowledged the “significant public concern” around Mr. Siranudh’s allegations and said its members were committed to addressing the issue responsibly. The broader family said it did not know about the contract.
In July, Ms. Chiranuj announced that she was dropping the lawsuit against Mr. Siranudh, saying she hoped that ending the litigation would allow the family to heal.
Mr. Siranudh said reconciliation was no longer his goal. He is now preparing to file criminal complaints against his brother. He has no plans to speak to his mother.
He is not alone in his fight.
In June, dozens of supporters yelled his name as he arrived at the office of a legal nonprofit that had offered to help him.
Some had waited for hours. They hung a flower garland around his neck.
“When he’s sad, we need to be here,” said Kannapa Chim, 58, a retiree, her eyes filling with tears. “We are his family.”
Kittiphum Sringammuang contributed reporting.
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