Appeals Court Backs Westminster Councilman Lam

Citing the right to free speech, an appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit against Westminster Councilman Tony Lam stemming from statements he made to a newspaper reporter.

In a ruling issued Thursday, the state 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana ruled that Lam was exercising his constitutional rights in telling a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1996 that he believed a fire at his Little Saigon restaurant was set by “opponents of Westminster’s Tet Festival.”

The fire occurred amid disputes among organizers of festivals to celebrate the Lunar New Year. At the time, Lam was a chief organizer of Westminster’s Tet Festival while another group, the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, sponsored another celebration in Garden Grove.

On February 13, 1996, the night the Westminster City Council voted to go forward with Lam’s festival, a fire broke out at his restaurant, Vien Dong. The fire was considered arson, but investigators have made no arrests.

Lam, in an interview for a Times article, also said that organizers of the Garden Grove Tet Festival were responsible for inciting threats and violence in the local Vietnamese community.

The organizers filed suit in March 1996, arguing that the councilman had made the statements “knowing they were false, did so with malice and had caused damage to [the group’s] reputation,” according to the appellate decision. The Times was not named in the suit.

A three-judge panel, led by Presiding Justice David Sills, noted that the community group failed to show any error made by Superior Court Judge James J. Alfano in dismissing the suit.

Regarding the statements themselves, the panel decided they were clearly expressions of opinion rather than fact.

“Under the 1st Amendment, an opinion, no matter how pernicious, is not actionable,” the panel ruled. “The statements in no way suggested that [the community group] directly started the fire; rather, they carried with them Lam’s opinion that the hostile political climate created by his opponents in the controversy . . . had led to this kind of violent result.”

The community group also was ordered to pay for Lam’s attorney fees and costs. Neither representatives of the group or Lam could be reached Tuesday to comment on the appellate ruling.