Annabelle Rama’s Legal Case against PEP
Annabelle Rama, manager and mother of actor Richard Gutierrez, through her legal counsel filed a “Cease and Desist” order against the Philippine Entertainment Portal (PEP) website. The basis of their complaint was due to the sheer volume of negative comments posted on an article published by PEP about Richard Gutierrez. I don’t know about you guys, but this just screams ignorance of the world of new media and the digital age. Is the camp of Rama suggesting that PEP had their own writers spam negative comments against Richard Gutierrez?
Here are some points that I would like to raise about this particular issue.
1. Richard Gutierrez et. al should be thankful that PEP has steadily featured content about him for most of his career. According to the response published by PEP, they’ve actually done more than 300 articles on Richard, and only 2-3 of those had content that could be deemed “negative”. PEP, as a community-based website and forum, has been instrumental in keeping Richard afloat with online media presence. The C&D order is actually asking PEP not to talk about Richard Gutierrez at all in the future which I find really strange given that the actor’s career still has a long way to go.
2. Not all Lawyers are Marketers, much less New Media practitioners. The law office representing Rama clearly does not know how search engines work and how fast a mob can mobilize if given an issue they can rally on. Case in point is JC Candare’s case wherein it spread like wildfire across various platforms and channels in a matter of hours.
3. Richard and party will only be demonized by the online community. Bloggers and online communities are very particular with their right to free speech. The moment someone attempts to attack that, they will retaliate – and they will do so without mercy. People who comment in posts and bloggers are not covered by ethical codes of conduct and they will do whatever they want to do – which maybe a good and bad thing. My point here is that Rama and her son are both asking for more pain. Yes, you can stop PEP from publishing articles about you (though I doubt they actually can), but you cannot stop every single blogger, forum, commenter, and online Filipino from talking about it in their own respective websites.
By the way, here’s a link to the copy of the Cease and Desist order published by PEP.
I strongly urge the camp of Ms. Annabelle Rama to withdraw the case filed against PEP. This will only cause more damage for your son’s career and it won’t actually help him in the long run. The sooner you do the better before this snowballs into a PR-media avalanche disaster.
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9 Responses to “Annabelle Rama’s Legal Case against PEP”
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PEP should just comply. If this jerk doesn’t want any more coverage, why give him any?
Yep, I was thinking of writing that, Mike. It’s actually the loss of Richard more than the loss of PEP. PEP can easily focus and give more attention to other upcoming stars if they wanted to.
In fact, I think everyone should comply. I’m calling for a blogospheric boycott of Richard Gutierrez.
Let’s see how much he likes attention starvation.
I was able to watch the news on this one. PEP has to remove the story an hour later, after publishing, and they admitted that there was no truth (wrong lead) in the story and even issued an apology to that effect.
So basically the mother and son were suing for the damages (generated by the negative comments) for publishing an untruthful story.
Hi Janette,
If you also check the latest communication from Annabelle Rama and her counsel (links above), they’re now going after another thing altogether. The wrong story was the first issue, and this is the second one. The basis for their latest complaint can be found in the letter which was re-published on PEP.
By the way, good luck to iBlog5 and the Social Networking Conference! I’ll be attending both activities. Hope to see you there!
Best,
Carlo
Yup, go crying to your mommy when someone says something mean about you.
His monster mom is indeed a monster.
Your blog is a very good blog. Thanx for all your posts. I hope you ll post more soon. Regards.
Goodness, sa halip na sayangin nila ang pera para sa pagpa-file ng kung anu-anong kaso laban sa kung kani-kanino, gastusin na lang nila iyon sa pagpapacheck-up sa isang psychologist o isang mental specialist. They’re too “maarte”.