Maria Ressa, the founder of award-winning news site Rappler, was charged with her second cyber libel case at the Makati Regional Trial Court, several media reported today.
Read: Despite Maria Ressa’s conviction, Malacañang insists Duterte supports press freedom
The case stems from a tweet that Ressa shared on Feb. 16, 2019, where she shared screenshots of a 2002 Philippine Star article that linked businessman Wilfredo Keng with the killing of Manila councilor Chika Go. The same report, which said that Keng was involved in several illegal activities, was taken down by Philippine Star from its website in 2019 after “the camp of Mr. Wilfredo Keng raised the possibility of legal action.”
Keng is the same complainant behind Ressa’s first cyberlibel case. Along with former Rappler reporter Reynaldo Santos, she was sentenced in June by a Manila court to at least six months in jail. This stemmed from a May 2012 Rappler article written by Santos, which said that Keng loaned vehicles to the late former Chief Justice Renato Corona.
Santos’ Rappler story used the now-deleted 2002 Philippine Star article as one of its sources.
Makati Senior Assistant City Prosecutor Mark Anthony Nuguit filed the second cyber libel case against Ressa on Nov. 23. He said that Ressa’s tweet that included screenshots of the Philippine Star article was done “willfully, unlawfully, feloniously, publicly and maliciously – with the intention of attacking the honesty, virtue, honor, integrity, character, and reputation” of Keng.
Ressa has filed a motion to quash the cyber libel case, saying that she is not the author of the Philippine Star article and should not be charged for tweeting screenshots of it.
“By any reasonable and unbiased reading, the sentence is not defamatory—read singly, none of the words are; read together, the sentence is not,” her petition read.
However, the prosecutor said that Ressa did not bother to get Keng’s side, and she “acted with reckless disregard whether the contents of the Twitter post was false or not.” He also recommended the journalist’s arrest and a bail of PHP48,000 (US$999).
Ressa is facing a string of other charges and has also been indicted for tax evasion and allegedly violating the anti-dummy law. She believes the charges are politically motivated because of Rappler’s critical coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte’s government.
Rappler was once called a “fake news” outlet by Duterte when it published a 2018 article that said his then-assistant and now Senator Christopher “Bong” Go intervened during the billion-peso procurement of Combat Management Systems for the Philippine Navy.
Republic Act 10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which the prosecution used as its basis for convicting Ressa and Santos for cyberlibel, was signed on Sept. 12, 2012 — four months after the Keng article was first published. The government said that Rappler could still be indicted because it was supposedly republished in February 2014 due to typographical errors.
Reader Interactions