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RAPPLER CEO Maria Ressa filed a motion to overturn her second defamation case against businessman Wilfredo Keng, this time via tweet.
December 4, 2020 for his second cyberlibel case. PHOTO BY RENE H. DILAN
In a 10-page motion, the CEO of the embattled news website cited a 2014 Supreme Court ruling, which stated that simply “liking, commenting, or sharing on social media cannot be considered cyberlibel.”
Her camp questioned Makati City prosecutors for accusing her of violating Section 4 (c) 4 of Republic Law 10175 or the “Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012” in connection with Article 353 of the Revised Penal Code. about defamation about a tweet he posted on February 2. January 16, 2019.
Keng brought the case to the Makati court in February 2020 over a Ressa tweet posted in 2019.
“Sharing or RT (retweeting) a defamatory content on social media written by another person cannot be punished as a cyberlibel,” the motion prepared by Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) attorneys Theodore Te and Maria Carmela Maranan said in the petition dated Wednesday.
The Ressa camp further emphasized that sharing or retweeting defamatory content only becomes actionable “if independent statements are made in the actions or statements on RTed (retweeted) that are themselves defamatory.”
Ressa tweeted a screenshot of a philstar.com story that tagged Keng in the murder of a former Manila councilor, Chika Go, and in various alleged illegal activities.
His tweet read: “Here is the 2002 article on the ‘private businessman’ who brought the cyberlibel case, which was rejected by the NBI and later revived by the Justice Department #HoldTheLine.”
The motion further emphasized that the sentence is not defamatory but is “correct, true and factual.”
“In particular, the Philstar article is 18 years old and the private complaint took no action on the original post.”
In a DZMM radio interview on Friday, Ressa criticized the second defamation case, calling it “nakakatawa” (ridiculous).
In June, the judge of the Manila Regional Court of First Instance, Rainelda Estacio-Montesa, declared Ressa and former Rappler investigator and writer Reynaldo Santos Jr. guilty of violating the cyberlibel.
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