The Online Citizen A Community of Singaporeans
By Josh
Jason Chua has gone overboard with his antics this time. On the Fabrications About the PAP page, Jason Chua suggests that law firm Peter Low LLC is run by Worker's Party, and called it "One Big Family".
Can Jason Chua be sued for defaming Peter Low LLC? He insinuated that a reputable law firm is the tool of a political party and called it “One Big Family”. He claimed that because some of the law firm’s members are WP members, the firm is “One Big Family” with the Workers Party.
Where is his evidence that the law firm is a WP outfit?
Defending a client doesn't mean the lawyer supports what the client does. Nor does it mean the law firm is guilty if the client is guilty. Jason Chua has knowingly hurt the reputation of a law firm with his accusations.
He also commented on the post, saying that the lawyer Remy Choo has volunteered with WP before. He is obviously trying to say that helping WP equals being part of WP.
He tried to draw links between WP and TRS. He alleged that lawyer Remy Choo and MP Sylvia Lim were associated with TRS because their law firm was defending the TRS duo in court. The faces of several lawyers from the law firm, including Peter Low were also featured on the post.
The comments on the post showed that the readers of Jason Chua’s page were misled to think that lawyers from Peter Low LLC were guilty by association with their clients Yang Kai Heng and Ai Takagi. Despite a netizen pointing out that the post could be defamatory, Jason Chua did not remove the post.
The Cornell University Law School's definition: “Libel is a method of defamation expressed by print, writing, pictures, signs, effigies, or any communication embodied in physical form that is injurious to a person’s reputation, exposes a person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule, or injures a person in his/her business or profession.”
The post was shared multiple times on Facebook.
There was a second post on the same day which made it clear that Jason Chua was targeting Peter Low LLC. His page has more than 40,000 likes, so that’s 40,000 times the damage if he were to say it by word of mouth.
Don’t you think that the firm’s reputation has been hurt by the libellous post? Should Jason Chua apologize and offer damages?
Editor's note: This is a letter submitted by a reader to TOC for publishing, and in no way advocates TOC's editorial position. TOC does not necessarily believe that defamation should be used on any of the parties described, not should it be a first action of recourse for any published material. We believe that clarifications should be made directly with content creators, rather than for affected parties to resolve matters through legal means.