1. ) SITI FARHANA BINTI MOHD PAKEH 2. ) AHMAD FIRDAUS BIN MUHAMAD NGADI v SITI NUR AINIEN SOFIEYA BINTI MOHD ZUKI

Case Significance

Illustrates the requirement that a defamatory publication be shown to refer to the plaintiff, the importance of precise pleading in a libel action, and the limits of the defences of justification and fair comment.

This High Court decision at Shah Alam concerns a defamation claim brought by two plaintiffs against a defendant over a series of social media publications, and it illustrates the requirements of reference and pleading in a libel action. The parties were all involved in the same multi-level-marketing business, and the plaintiffs sued over four publications attributed to the defendant, comprising a social media post, a set of short social media stories, another post, and a longer article on a website. A threshold difficulty for the plaintiffs was that in none of the four publications were they identified by name, so the court had to consider whether the publications referred to the plaintiffs, and in particular whether they would lead reasonable people who knew the plaintiffs to conclude that the publications were about them. The court also examined significant defects in the pleading: the statement of claim annexed the publications in full without a summarised account of the offending words in the body of the pleading, and, save for the short exchanges, did not identify which specific parts were said to be defamatory, while pleading a series of eighteen imputations without matching each to a particular publication. On the substantive issues the court considered whether the publications were capable of bearing the pleaded imputations and whether the defendant, who did not dispute authorship, had made out her pleaded defences of justification and fair comment. The court concluded that only one of the four publications identified the first plaintiff and was capable of being understood in a defamatory sense based on the pleaded imputations, and that the defences of justification and fair comment did not pass muster in respect of it. It allowed the claim in part, awarding the first plaintiff general damages of RM30,000.00 and costs of RM25,000.00, while the balance of the claim failed. The judgment is a useful illustration of the requirement that a defamatory publication be shown to refer to the plaintiff, of the importance of precise pleading in a libel action, and of the limits of the defences of justification and fair comment.