A British Columbia man has been ordered to pay a total of $4,000 in compensation to a Coquitlam company and its two proprietors for posting a disparaging Google review.
The order from B.C. Supreme Court Justice Andrew Mayer comes three years after a hit-and-run crash that precipitated the negative online review written by Hyungdong Lee about Pacific Granite Manufacturing Ltd. and the subsequent $105,000 lawsuit by the company and its owners.
Lee was employed in an office located near the Coquitlam headquarters of the custom stone fabrication firm, according to the court decision published online this week. His vehicle was damaged in a hit-and-run crash in September of 2021 by a white Chevrolet Impala that belonged to a Pacific Granite employee, according to the court filing.
Lee discovered the vehicle in question was owned by an employee of Pacific Granite. He went to the business where he had a conversation with one of the proprietors, Nader Tabrizi, the court documents said.
Tabrizi told the court that he informed Lee the Impala was owned by an employee of Pacific Granite, but was not used for work-related activities. He said he suggested Lee return at the end of the day if he wished to speak with the vehicle’s owner.
Lee’s account of the conversation, written in response to the plaintiffs’ claim, was very different.
He said he met with a Pacific Granite representative who denied any employee of the company had been involved in the crash. He acknowledged writing and posting the Google review in question which began with the phrase: “Please never do business with this place.”
“I got a lot of CCTV with the help of people working at Automind Collision and NRG Electric,“ he continued, listing the details of the hit-and-run and his proof of an employee’s involvement. ”Thanks to you, we have successfully completed the report to RCMP and ICBC,” he added.
He ended by saying “the boss and the staff here lied to the end” and accompanied the review with three pictures. One showed an RCMP vehicle parked on the street outside his work premises, another was of the rear of the white Chevrolet which Mr. Lee claimed collided with his vehicle and the third photo was of the premises of Pacific Granite.
Although Mr. Lee filed a response to the plaintiffs’ claim he did not otherwise participate in the litigation and did not appear at trial to defend the claims made against him.
Review Revisions
Pacific Granite told the court it became aware of the review in March 2022. The company’s lawyer subsequently contacted Lee to request he remove the review and post an apology.Lee deleted the review with the exception of the three photos and one line: “it’s a shame that people and employees like you work close to our company,” the court documents said. He also did not include an apology.
The company’s attorney wrote to Lee again, asking for an apology and the removal of the photos, prompting Lee to revise the review a second time. He did not remove the photos or apologize.
The revised review began with “I will be sued by this company,” and then reiterated his account of the events, but omitted the claim that the company and its employees had lied.
Pacific Granite, Tabrizi, and co-owner Alireza Beittoei, subsequently initiated a defamation lawsuit against Lee, contending the review’s content, as well as the subsequent modifications made by him, were damaging. They said it “implied that Pacific Granite and its management and employees could not be trusted and conducted their business in a shameful, dishonourable, dishonest, unlawful and criminal manner.”
The plaintiffs requested a total of $105,000 in general, aggravated, and punitive damages along with an injunction that would prohibit Lee from posting any additional content related to the hit-and-run or the legal action Pacific Granite took against him.
The judge found only one line in Lee’s original review to be defamatory.
“It is generally defamatory to suggest that someone has lied because this word tends to bring the person named into hatred, contempt or ridicule,” Mayer wrote in his decision. “I find the publication of the words “[b]ut the boss and the staff here lied to the end” to be literally defamatory. They accuse the management and staff of Pacific Granite, on whose Google.com page the review was posted, of being liars.”
The judge declined to award full damages, however, saying there was “no evidence establishing that the Google Review resulted in any significant or ongoing distress” to the business owners.
