It’s amazing what a good scandal will do to bring out the crowds, says Yeoh Siew Hoon.
I am referring, of course, to the Mongolian model murder trial which opened in Malaysia this Monday, June 18. Smelling blood, the media hounds were out in full sniff while the public, tasting sex, money and dirty secrets, also thronged the courtroom that day.
Headlines were splashed all over the Malaysian papers and will continue to hog the limelight for the month the trial is expected to be on.
It has all the ingredients of a juicy scandal. Young high profile, high flyer, the cover boy of the country’s political world, married with two children, allegedly has affair with Mongolian model, who is later found dead, blown to pieces.
Sex, money, murder – the stuff of television drama – played out in real life in front of the world’s cameras.
Behind the headlines, lives in ruin, families torn asunder, a grieving father, young children traumatised …
In our little travel world meanwhile, the Patrick Imbardelli scandal also brought out the crowds.
While certainly nothing in scale compared to the Malaysian trial and neither as sordid nor sinister by comparison, it does have the ingredients to make a juicy corporate scandal.
A young, high profile high flyer, the cover boy of the Asian hotel world, married with two children, is accused of lying about his CV and resigns abruptly from a big corporate job from a publicly-listed global company.
Smelling a good story, the media hounds, including us, were all over the story. This week, if you Google the words “Patrick Imbardelli quits”, you get 739 results.
The responses to his resignation for his misdeed have been nothing short of amazing. Opinions have been traded freely in cyberspace. And here’s the thing about the Internet – because it is anonymous, everyone is much freer with their opinions.
The Café has had responses which ranged from sympathetic to emphathetic to rational to nasty. There have been job offers and kindly advice along with dirt-raking.
There have been those we have chosen not to publish while some, we have edited.
I don’t know if this is right or not. Most social networking sites allow comments to be posted without editing – although this might change now that TripAdvisor is being threatened with a law suit and just this week, the Australian High Court delivered a verdict that a damning review of a restaurant which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald four years ago was defamatory, a development which will certainly have repercussions on all reviews of everything, online or offline.
But we did what we did because it just didn’t feel right to have someone we don’t know express highly personal opinions about someone else on our site.
Above everything else though, there is nothing like a crisis to unite.
During the opening day of the trial in KL, the family members of the accused political analyst, Abdul Razak Baginda wore T-shirts that proclaimed their relationship to him, and the words “Proud of It” at the back.
In the same way, hotelier colleagues have rallied round Imbardelli in his moment of crisis.
