OPINION/COMMENTARY
/ News That Fears None, Views That
Favor Nobody /
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Our latest as of Monday,
April 28, 2025
~ The purported "crusade" by Balita publisher/editor Teresita
"Tess" Cusipag to rid the Filipino community of scammers had turned into a
personal campaign vilifying her archenemy, the businesswoman Liwayway Miranda.
The latter filed filed a defamation suit and after 26 months of wrangling at the
Ontario Superior Court, the former lost the legal battle. Justice R. Lee Akazaki
found her and the tabloid liable for defamation and awarded Ms. Miranda $250,000
in damages.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
BALITA'S LEGACY OF DEFEAT
Cusipag's Animus Leads to Downfall
Reviving Old Comment v. Ms. Miranda Proved
Fatal
By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ
Editor, The Filipino Web Channel
"Envy has been, is,
and shall be, the destruction of many. What is there, that Envy hath not
defamed, or Malice left undefiled? Truly, no good thing." - Pythagoras
TORONTO -
Had she been circumspect and kept her animus in control, Teresita "Tess"
Cusipag, publisher/editor of Balita, could have avoided the humiliating rebuke
and the accompanying quarter-of-a-million dollar penalty imposed by Ontario
Superior Court.
Her impulse got in the way again to cloud her better judgment.
And it wasn't the first time either that emotions took over reason, thus, one
loss followed another and another until her vindictiveness carved a legacy of
defeat.
It's bizarre for a non-journalist to be penalized three times and jailed
once for criminal contempt after losing defamation cases by three separate
individuals, the latest by businesswoman Liwayway Miranda.
Related video: Contempt of Court Leads to 21-Day Jail Time
Well, she had a bad call when
she salvaged the original 2020 article slamming Ms. Miranda and republished it
in December 2022 to make it current, giving Ms. Miranda a new opportunity that
she had lost earlier because of libel law limitation to file defamation charges
against Ms. Cusipag.
In fact, I had warned in an article that Ms. Cusipag was
exposing herself to a potential lawsuit by republishing her unfounded
accusations. Well, that hunch has been proven true, now!
Related story: Scavenging Dumpsters Is Not A Way to Look for Stories
If Ms. Cusipag had just
stayed quiet after her 2020 attack, she probably would not be worrying forking
$250,000 to Ms. Miranda to satisfy the judgment against her.
The incident showed
how little she understood her role as publisher/editor of Balita. Ontario
Superior Court Justice R. Lee Akazaki said: "Apart from her evidence that she
took over Balita from her husband, Ms. Cusipag did not provide any evidence of
any training or background in journalism."
That's the judge bursting her bubble.
It's like saying why are you in the newspaper business when you don't know
anything about journalism, much less its perils, and risk being hailed to court
for publishing what basically amounted to gossip as what had happened lately.
Writing has limitations just as much as the exercise of the right of free
expression. And those limitations are embodied in the laws governing defamation.
In Ontario, the Libel and Slander Act covers those issues.
Not to add to her
pain of losing, but her understanding - if there's one at all - seemed to rest
on what's told by some of her ignorant and incompetent friends who are out there
to butter her up. I knew that from experience while writing for the paper.
The
lawyers who handled her (our, because I was also a defendant) defense in the
first two cases were recommended by friends. On what basis, I still don't know. After our loss, Ms. Cusipag admitted without naming names, thus: "I made a
mistake of fighting by hiring the wrong person to defend us . . . "
True, that
fact proved fatal to our defense, and as a result, she had to recompense the
plaintiffs for defaming them in the amount nearly $500,000 each, for an
aggregate of almost a million dollars.
Related story: https://filwebchannelmagazine.blogspot.com/2022/01/good-lawyering-won-libel-cases.html
I initially thought she had learned her lesson when she vowed in late January
2023 to fight Ms. Miranda's lawsuit, promising to sign up, to quote her own
words, "not just lawyers anymore" but "good ones instead."
But the trial came
and went during the last two years and no lawyers (plural) who are "good ones"
ever surfaced to defend Ms. Cusipag in court.
Related story: https://filwebchannelmagazine.blogspot.com/2024/05/balita-libel-scorecard-5-cases-3-losses.html
Who showed up was the person she was promoting in Balita who, she said, was "a
well-known paralegal . . . and "soon to be a practicing lawyer Jun Saludares."
So, it appeared that Ms. Cusipag was just being hyperbolic at that time. Justice
Akazaki had this to say: "I gleaned from Ms. Cusipag’s evidence and from her
words in the 2020 article that Mr. Saludares was one of the 'Elite Crusaders'
and that she ascribed faith or credibility in his professional judgment as a
paralegal and candidate for the bar."
Related video:
Obviously, Ms. Cusipag relied heavily on the say-so of Saludares even if she
knew she was unequipped with the knowledge and skill to continue portraying Ms.
Miranda in a bad light. Indeed, she was courting disaster.
As faulty as her
"factual" assertions were, the court found what Justice Akazaki stated, that:
"It turned out that the only source of her information was the paralegal, Mr.
Saludares – the same Mr. Saludares who, now a lawyer, represented her and Balita
at trial."
Saludares had remarked that Ms. Miranda was “summa cum laude of
scammers” - the very same defamatory words picked by Ms. Cusipag in her renewed
effort in 2022 to destroy Ms. Miranda.
In an overview of his "reasons for
judgment," Justice Akazaki wrote: "Balita published false exposés about Liwayway
'Lily' Miranda, intentionally damaging her reputation to prevent her from
restarting her employment recruitment agency."
He continued: "Balita’s campaign
against Ms. Miranda began with a February 2020 report of a community meeting
penned by Ms. Cusipag with the headline, “IWAS SCAM, Elite Crusaders to help.”
"It cited one of the speakers, 'a well-known paralegal ... aiming for the bar'
who described: one immigration exploiters [sic] that he rates as the summa cum
laude of all the scammers here in the community. ... The scammer lady (later
identified as Ms. Miranda by Ms. Cusipag) according to the speaker started a
cleaning business, contracting different lawyers to obviously start her racket
again."
To this, Justice Akazaki said: "In addition to reporting Mr. Saludares’
remarks without any attempt to verify them, Ms. Cusipag considered his words as
licence to invent her own story."
To sum it all up, the judge said:
- Ms.
Cusipag's "defence that she had verified the report of Ms. Miranda as a
fraudster 'from several court decisions' turned out wholly unfounded."
- "The
defendants (Ms. Cusipag and Balita) tendered no evidence of the source of this
portrayal of Ms. Miranda as the central figure in a global fraud network" and as
such "The defence of responsible communication has no basis in the evidence."
-
"The defence of fair comment is also groundless and must fail."
- " . . . the
limitations defence does not insulate the defendants from liability arising from
the 2022 article and Ms. Cusipag’s personal posts."
- "Whatever the consequence
of the prosecution to her (Ms. Miranda's) life, she deserves to be compensated
for an amount that signifies her status as a person wronged by the defendants’
publication." (Copyright 2025. All Rights Reserved).
