MANILA - Rappler CEO Maria Ressa arrived in court Monday for the verdict in a cyber libel case that she and watchdogs say is aimed at silencing critics of President Rodrigo Duterte.
Ressa, Rappler, and former writer-researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. were accused of defaming businessman Wilfredo Keng in an article published in May 2012.
— ABS-CBN News June 14, 2020 Monday's verdict in Manila will decide a trial that stems from a businessman's 2017 complaint over a Rappler story five years earlier about his alleged ties to a then-judge on the nation's top court. But state prosecutors later filed charges against her and Reynaldo Santos, the former Rappler journalist who wrote it, under a controversial cyber crime statute aimed at online offenses such as stalking and child pornography.
But prosecutors say Rappler's typographical correction to the story in 2014 to change "evation" to "evasion" was a substantial modification and the article was thus covered by the law.
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