Nasha to pay dad RM10,000

What say you on the issue below?

KUALA LUMPUR: The High Court has ordered actress-cum-model Nasha Aziz to pay her biological father Abdul Aziz Mohd Ali RM10,000 in general damages for defaming him.

Abdul Aziz Mohd Ali, 61, succeeded in his bid to get the court to enter judgement on Friday (yesterday) in a defamation suit against his daughter after the actress and her counsel, Rashid Mokhtar, were absent for the hearing of the suit on Wednesday.

In handing down his ruling, Justice Abdul Wahab Patail said the court accepted a father’s right to say that someone is his child, if it was true.

“Our society does not accept a person’s denial of the status of another person in the family if they are indeed family,” he said.

Abdul Aziz therefore had the right to call Nasha his daughter, he said, and if by doing so had caused others to look down on him and call him a liar, then it can be said that the plaintiff had been defamed.

Family dispute: Nasha and Abdul Aziz gesturing to press members outside the High Court in Kuala Lumpur Friday.

“The court accepts that the plaintiff has proved that he had been defamed when the defendant said ‘I only have one father’,” he ruled.

He then ordered Nasha, whose real name is Noraishah Abdul Aziz, to pay Abdul Aziz RM10,000 in general damages with an 8% interest from March 31, 2005, when the suit was filed, until the matter has been disposed of.

Abdul Aziz, a silat (Malay martial arts) teacher and businessman, is Nasha’s biological father while her uncle, the late Abdul Aziz Hathim, was her “adoptive father.”

He filed the suit on March 31, 2005, claiming that the defamatory words published in Mingguan Malaysia on Oct 24, 2004, quoting Nasha as saying that she only had one father had embarrassed and tortured him.

He also named publisher Utusan Melayu (M) Bhd and its reporter Tengku Khalidah Tengku Bidin as defendants in the case.

In his statement of claim, Abdul Aziz said that the article Jangan Tanya Hal Peribadi (Don’t ask personal questions) contained defamatory words.

Previously, his lawyer M. Visva-nathan had submitted that the article implied his client was dead, but Nasha had contended that the plaintiff had given her to his sister, Habibah Mohd Ali, when she was three months old and that her husband, the late Abdul Aziz Hathim, was ayah (father) to her.