The judge ordered the three men to pay Mr Calvin Cheng $2,500 plus GST in costs.
District Judge Chiah Kok Khun said the three individuals were not identifiable from the reference made by former Nominated MP Calvin Cheng.
In the post on June 21, Mr Cheng, a businessman, had said: “These people who are spreading misinformation are literally killing people if they believe them. Goh Meng Seng, Iris Koh, Brad Bower and their bunch of clowns are not funny. They should be jailed and caned.” “The application to strike out the three claimants’ claims is allowed as I find that their claims disclose no reasonable cause of action, and they constitute an abuse of process of the court; and it is also in the interests of justice to strike them out,” he said. He ordered Mr Ng, Mr Tey and Mr Chan to pay Mr Cheng $2,500 plus GST in costs.
They also contended that the statements implied the five of them were involved in actions intending to cause death or severe harm to individuals, which portrayed them as “malevolent and dangerous individuals”. Noting that a key requirement of defamation action is that the claimant must show that a third party would reasonably understand the defamatory words to refer to him, the judge said the three men had assigned varying nebulous attributes in their suit to the “bunch of clowns” group and the membership of the group was ill-defined.
“The factor of size and indeterminacy of the “bunch of clowns” group therefore militates against the three claimants’ contention that they were referred to in the alleged defamatory statements,” said the judge.
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