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Prime Minister John Briceno and RSV Media lose defamation appeal

Posted: Friday, October 14, 2022. 7:54 am CST.

By Aaron Humes: The Court of Appeal has issued an oral judgment upholding the judgment of then-Supreme Court Justice Westmin James that Prime Minister John Briceno and RSV Media Limited (LOVE FM) jointly and severally defamed former CEO of the Belize Tourism Board (BTB), Karen Bevans, during a radio broadcast.

Senior Counsel and former Prime Minister Dean Barrow, representing Bevans, said they won on all the points raised on appeal after a full day of virtual argument before the court’s panel.

Back in November 2020, shortly after Briceno became Prime Minister, he discussed the employment contract of Bevans in a radio interview and made specific characterizations that were untrue. Bevans sued and won in a judgment by Justice James in August of 2021. The Prime Minister was represented at the Court of Appeal level by Senior Counsel E. Andrew Marshalleck, while attorney DeShawn Torres represented RSV.

Barrow told Channel 7 News that the defenses of justification, fair comment, truth, and the complaint on the quantity of damages were easily dismissed: “Justification? Justification can only succeed if you can prove that what you said is true, what was said about her, how she got the contract when she got it – not true. So, they had to fail on that. [Fair] Comment? Your comment has to be fair but has to be based on a factual substratum, as they called it. What the Prime Minister said was basically not a comment. It was all factual. They said, ‘But he was talking about the need for reform.’ Yeah, but he was saying – you can argue that’s a comment. But he was saying, ‘We need to reform so we can stop this abuse that, in fact, has just happened.’ You can’t – no abuse happened. You said the abuse happened, but it didn’t happen.”

The Senior Counsel contended that the heavy quantum – $30,000 for LOVE FM and $60,000 for the Prime Minister – was comparable to a judgment where the claimants were alleged to have committed crimes, noting that Bevans was accused of participating in corruption which is almost as bad.

On RSV’s defenses, Barrow added that the media house failed to check what the Prime Minister said against a copy of the contract that they had obtained and that there was no evidence they tried to obtain a response from Bevans, as then-reporter Renee Trujillo had claimed at trial that she had tried to reach Bevans, failed to do so, but erased her call log and did not say anything about the call in her witness statement. After a subsequent statement by the P.M., efforts to reach Bevans again failed, but the court found that under the standard of qualified privilege, LOVE FM had not practiced responsible journalism.

As for what happens next, the other side may appeal once a written judgment is handed down, but Barrow advises them not to: “It’s over. You win some; you lose some. He’s lost this one, and I think properly so. But give it [a] rest.”

Barrow said that Bevans has already been paid the award of damages, and if the Court of Appeal overturned the case, she would have had to pay it back.

 

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