The Taipei District Court (台北地方法院) yesterday said that the former commander of the Combined Services Force General Headquarters Wen Ha-hsiung (溫哈熊) and Ting Shou-chung (
Chiang Hsiao-chang (
Wen was interviewed by the Academia Sinica (
During the interview, Wen also said that Chiang was pregnant before she married Yu. He also said that Yu Tai-wei has once bowed to Yu Yang-ho's second wife and asked her to divorce his son so Yu junior could marry Chiang legally.
Judge Wu Ding-ya's (
The aim of an "oral history" is to propose questions or issues for researchers to investigate to amend official history books. As such, this medium should be protected as a kind of freedom of speech.
The court did not find any evidence to prove that Wen was libeling.
"It was the Academia Sinica's decision to interview Wen," said Wu. "In other words, Wen was just doing his job as an interviewee and told the interviewer what he knew. He had the right to say whatever he believed to be true. Whether to believe it or not was a decision up to the interviewer. This kind of oral history should be protected and it's more important than [ordinary] freedom of speech [issues]."
Wu said that the court believed that Wen did not intend to damage Chiang's and Yu's reputations so the libel charge against him was dropped.
As for Ting, Wu explained that as a son-in-law of Wen, Ting could not avoid being chased by the press for quotes and sound bites for news coverage. What he did was interpret what he knew or what Wen told him. As a result, the court also believed that he did not have any intention to libel the plaintiffs, either.
Wang Ching-feng (
"The book was published with Wen's authorization and he said that he would be responsible for every word he said," said Wang. "How can he make up something to ruin people's reputations like this and not to be responsible for it?"
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