Gordon Moseley to pay $1M in costs after losing defamation claim against Guyana Times

Veteran journalist Gordon Moseley has lost a defamation lawsuit he filed against Guyana Times. In the action, he had claimed that one of the newspaper’s columnists had defamed him by linking him to the controversies surrounding the 2020 General and Regional Elections.
Moseley owns News Source Guyana. In addition, he serves as Chief Editor of the online news website.
Justice Navindra Singh dismissed Moseley’s lawsuit on Friday, stating that the columnist, Dr Leslie Ramsammy’s writings were opinions he honestly held at the time of publication, March 18, 2021.
Ramsammy, a former Health Minister, now serves as Advisor to the Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony.
In that particular column, Ramsammy had contended that Moseley’s reports and comments were biased in favour of the APNU/AFC coalition, particularly, in advance that the fraudulent results that the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) was attempting to declare, were, in fact, accurate and that the APNU/AFC coalition had won the elections.
He claimed that Moseley, who has a sizable social media following, was thus involved in the scheme to rig the elections.

Acknowledgment of rigging
Although the Judge found that the publication was capable of being defamatory in nature, they were not, since they were based on unspecified conduct—conduct which would have been known and could have been analysed by the general readership.
According to the Judge, Ramsammy’s comments can be interpreted as Moseley casting doubt on the legitimate concerns voiced by some of the political parties contesting the elections based on a fallacy. “In addition, despite the Claimant [Moseley] testifying that he posted articles and/or comments that would have addressed the actions of GECOM and calling on the APNU/AFC coalition to publicly produce Statements of Polls in their possession, such postings were not produced or tendered in evidence or proven to this Court,” Justice Singh added.
An important point made by Justice Singh was that Moseley acknowledged in his evidence that an attempt to rig the polls had occurred, adding that the journalist testified, “Based on all that we have seen, I accept that there was an attempt to rig the elections.”

Bias reporting
Based on the evidence, particularly the documents dated prior to March 1, 2020, that contain reports and posts by Moseley and his news outlet, the court found “as a matter of fact” that a “reasonable person” would find his coverage of the 2020 elections to be biased.
Additionally, the Judge held that any reasonable person would conclude that Moseley’s coverage of the election was intended to convince the public that the results being released by GECOM were accurate with little or no parallel coverage of the concerns being raised by the public and the international observers over those very results.
He went on to say that Ramsammy, who testified that he was a member of the team from the PPP/C verifying the results being read, could reasonably and honestly have concluded from these postings that Moseley was biased in his reporting and therefore giving support to the rigging.

Fair comment
The Judge determined that the newspaper’s defence of fair comment was established in the given circumstances because there was no evidence to suggest that the comment was made maliciously and therefore deemed Ramsammy’s comments as a “fair comment”.
“It is an opinion expressed by [Ramsammy] that he honestly held at the time of the publication of the commentary… In the circumstances, the claim is dismissed in its entirety,” he said.
Moseley was ordered to pay $1M in court costs, which included $500,000 Guyana Times and another $500,000 to Ramsammy. The payment must be made by November 30 at the latest.
Attorney Eusi Anderson represented Moseley, and Guyana Times was represented by Attorneys-at-Law Devindra Kissoon and Abhimanyu Dev. Ron Motilall and C V Satram represented Ramsammy. In that lawsuit, Moseley was seeking almost $100M in damages.