Mothers please take note. Whether your ward is the result of a natural procreative act or legally accepted procedure (adoption, in-vitro-fertilisation, sperm donation, surrogate mom, etc), it is the maternity obligation to care for, nurture and protect that matters most. Having to bury your own child is a horrible situation no one likes to envisage, and dragging her to court and sue the pants off her is just as horrific.
After selling her husband's Lornie Road property and evicting step-daughter Wendy Chan, Madam Eleanor, 79, Tan made her sign an agreement not to say or write anything defamatory or scandalous about Tan and her family in the mainstream media or the internet.
What got Wendy in the hot soup was her posting in a ChannelNewsAsia forum discussion about a parliamentary question on public housing prices ("Wow Ms Foo Mee Har wants to know is $1 mil HDb flat a norm in future"):
"I obviously cannot comment on your bimbo statement but it is a fact that she is with stan chart. A simple google search should also bring up her position in the bank."
Thanks to the Streisand effect, we now know The Member of Parliament for West Coast GRC is Tan's daughter-in-law. It's hard to read anything "defamatory scandalous, or untrue" into the question on HDB pricing, or her position in the bank. Nothing is mentioned about the rumor of her husband being declared bankrupt by said bank. But HDB may have been scandalised by the preposterous suggestion that public housing will be henceforth priced $1 million and up. In that case, HDB should be the one to drag the questioner to court.
Tan was well prepped for her day in court, answering difficult questions with "cannot remember" or "did not know". Perry Mason should be so proud. Then she was presented a statement that does not tax her senior citizen memory, "You have conflated a legal basis to come to court and an emotive desire to want the commenting to stop." Stripped of the high falutin legalese, that could be construed in laymen terms as, "Try to fool me, hah?" Tan responded with, "I really don't know, my feelings are all confused." The mother instinct could still well be alive.
Tattler
*The writer blogs at http://singaporedesk.blogspot.com/