Nicole Seah, 36, was a member of the Workers' Party (WP) and served as the president of the party's youth wing before her affair with fellow WP leader Leon Perera was exposed, leading to their resignations.
Seah is married with two daughters.
2011 General Elections:
Seah's rise to fame started in the 2011 general election, when the National Solidarity Party (NSP) fielded her along with Ivan Yeo Tiong Boon, Cheo Chai Chen, Spencer Ng Chung Hon, and Abdul Salim Harun to contest Marine Parade GRC.
At 24 years old, Seah was the youngest female political candidate in the election.
The battle for Marine Parade GRC was hotly watched, especially since it featured two young female candidates pitted against each other: Seah herself and the PAP's Tin Pei Ling, who was 27 then.
Both were contesting in a political election for the first time.
Seah famously lodged a police report against Tin for making a Facebook post on Cooling-off Day, during which political candidates are not allowed to campaign.
However, it was revealed that Seah had also made a Facebook post on Cooling-off Day.
Police action was not taken for both of them in the end.
Even though the PAP won with slightly over 56 per cent of the vote, then Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong, who led the PAP's Marine Parade team, found the results disappointing, and acknowledged Seah as a formidable political opponent, saying:
"She communicated very well. She spoke quite persuasively to the younger people as well as some older people."
In fact, Seah was so popular that people starting calling the NSP the "Nicole Seah Party". Her social media following was one of the highest for a politician.
Interest in politics began in school:
According to an interview, Seah said her passion for politics ignited when she was 17 years old, while she was delivering food to the needy.
"When I visited a house, I was surprised to see that there was an old lady, she had a roof over her head but she didn't even have enough money to buy a meal. And that angered me, because yes, we have provided food for her for that one day, but what is going to happen to her the rest of the days? And that was when I realised that you need policies to go down to the root of the matter, and you cannot rely on the organisations to do the job for you."
Afterward, at the National University of Singapore (NUS), she was the managing editor for an online publication called The Campus Observer, which is where she said she started developing an interest in policies as a whole.
In 2009, she joined the Reform Party (RP), kickstarting her political career.
Three political parties: RP, NSP, WP
Seah has been affiliated with three different parties in her political career.
Her stint in the RP was short-lived, with her resigning in February 2011 and joining the NSP under the invitation of its then secretary-general, Goh Meng Seng.
This led to her political debut in GE2011 under the NSP's flag.
In the then senior minister's words:
"I look at NSP and they appear to have only one person in charge and the four men are leaving it to the young lady to campaign and say all the things."
Following that election, Nicole remained in the NSP until 2013, but moved to Bangkok, Thailand to further her advertising career at IPG Mediabrands.
She resigned from the NSP in 2014, calling it an "extremely painful and difficult decision to make".
Saying that there had been no specific incident that triggered her resignation, Seah said:
"It's reached a point where I feel that my job is done (for now) and I have to move on and grow in other areas, before I can continue to give back to the communities I choose to place myself in."
Her last role at NSP was second assistant secretary-general.
In GE2015, Seah started volunteering with the WP's media team and also wrote parts of the WP 60th anniversary book launched in November 2017.
The WP also confirmed her status as a volunteer but did not elaborate at that time.
During GE2020, Seah was unveiled as one of the WP's candidates for East Coast GRC.
She described the unexpected fielding of Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat to East Coast GRC on Nomination Day as a "curveball thrown our way 15 minutes before closing".
The battle was close, with the PAP edging out a victory with 53.39 per cent of the votes, and Seah's team coming in at 46.61 per cent.
Following the election, she was also elected to the WP central executive committee in December 2020, and was re-elected to it once again in November 2022. She was president of WP's youth wing.
Life outside of politics
Seah's interests outside of politics stretch far and deep.
She said that, as a child, she was passionate about journalism, history, reading, and played the violin.
After graduation, she worked at numerous private companies, including IPG mediabrands, where she was account manager.
She even dabbled in the film industry, appearing as Mei in the Singaporean film, "1965".
False allegations and death threats
Ever since becoming a political figure in 2011, Seah's life, even outside of her political activities, has come under public scrutiny.
In 2013, Seah uploaded a photo of herself and Steven Goh, the man she was dating at the time.
However, AsiaOne and Lianhe Wanbao wrongly reported that Goh, who was divorced at the time, was actually married, leading to a public outcry.
The two news outlets revised their stories and issued public apologies to Seah who said her reputation had been "irreversibly damaged".
In November that year, Seah uploaded a lengthy Facebook post, saying that 2013 had been the "worst year of [her] life thus far".
In it, she confessed that her life had been "derailed" as she was constantly worried about her political image, saying that she had become "myopic" from thinking of life in "5 year blocks".
During the year, illnesses, family circumstances, and career problems severely affected her mental and physical health.
She suffered a panic attack at her workplace, overwhelmed by the stress of underperforming at work and the shock of finding out her grandmother had stomach cancer.
She left the company after two months of medical leave, only to catch dengue fever, where she had to sit on a chair for 10 hours on a drip because there was no bed for her.
While she got another job offer to work in India, she was fired within a month without compensation.
Her health deteriorated, and she was hospitalised for 18 days and spent the next one-and-a-half months with no income. She said she "subsisted on crackers and water because [she] was too weak to eat anything else".
If that wasn't enough, Seah also reported receiving death and rape threats, with "people knowing [her] exact address", causing her to fear for her family's safety.
But Seah concluded her message by listing all the life lessons she had learned from her setbacks, and imparting her wisdom to her followers, ending things on an optimistic note: "The only way now is to go up."
As the president of WP's youth wing, Seah was one of its youngest presidents in recent years.
She resigned from the WP on Jul. 18, 2023.
All photos from Nicole Seah's Facebook