About a month after blogger Grace Tan announced that she was filing a protection order against another popular blogger Xiaxue, the latter has finally written a blogpost explaining her side of the story.
In the lengthy blogpost, Xiaxue wrote about how she first met Grace, shared her interactions with Grace from that time until Grace spoke out about cyberbullying, and also commented on the verdict of the protection order that Grace filed — which didn’t quite hold its weight in court.
If her blogpost is a bit TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), here is a quick summary of what went down.
Grace was a legitimate Xiaxue fangirl
Xiaxue says that she met Grace when the latter won a filming opportunity on a Lee Kum Kee video alongside Dr Leslie Tay (from ieatishootipost) and herself. Taking excerpts from Grace’s social media channels and blog, she found out that Grace was once a fan of hers, though at the time, she took little notice of her.
Grace made the first move against Xiaxue
After a series of positive messages written about Xiaxue, Grace had a change of tone and took a more critical stance of their meeting at the Lee Kum Kee video shoot. In a blogpost, she criticised Xiaxue and Dr Leslie Tay as liars, because the ’30 minute’ recipe had taken more than that amount of time to prepare.
The blogpost has since been removed.
Xiaxue’s hardly interacted with Grace at all
Xiaxue’s interaction with Grace has been minimal, according to her blogpost. The first was a reply to a fan who had asked about Grace’s insinuations, to which Xiaxue wrote a long Facebook comment defending herself. In the comment, she refers to Grace as a “bitch”, which she redacts in a screenshot she retrieves from Grace’s blogpost.
The second time was in the comments section of an article shared by Walter Lim, in which Grace makes additional attacks at Xiaxue, and even jokes about “starting a committee” to go against her.
Grace has made frequent jibes at Xiaxue, including calling her the #PineappleBlogger
In total, Xiaxue cites 22 posts from Grace’s blog and social media channels that mention Xiaxue, all of which were posted in a span of 2 months. #Pineappleblogger, in particular, can be taken to constitute name-calling.
At this point, the blogpost seems to shine a very negative light on Grace, who appears to have made frequent jabs at Xiaxue.
Grace’s Protection Order
After the Walter Lim post saga where the two went head-to-head, Grace filed for a Protection order, citing medical problems such as loss of sleep, headaches, and loose stools — the last of which was made fun of in the blogpost with liberal amounts of toilet paper images.
Grace even wrote an email to several ministers, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. This was on March 24, the day after the passing of former PM Lee Kuan Yew.
The police report was also posted on Xiaxue’s website, and in it, Grace cited the incident that took place on Walter Lim’s Facebook post, where Xiaxue had called her “bipolar” and “attention seeking”. She also alleged that these comments were out of proportion, since she never mentioned Xiaxue by name.
She then filed a secondary report, stating the various things that Xiaxue had said about her, such as accusing her of plagiarising material for her book, attacking her looks and mental stability.
After filing for a Protection Order, she went on to write about it in a blogpost, which we previously covered, and erroneously said that she was “suing” Xiaxue in a Facebook post. Xiaxue retaliated by saying that she had made “3 comments over the span of 2 days”, which doesn’t constitute cyberbullying over a long period of time.
Withdrawal of The PO
On the day of the trial, Grace didn’t show up, though she was represented by solicitors. The judge then recommended a settlement out of court in the pre-trial conference. The present parties then reached an agreement:
- Grace will withdraw her PO application.
- Grace will remove all the offensive articles she posted about me in their entirety, and I will in turn not sue her for defamation.
- We both agree not to post any insulting, abusive or threatening communication about each other.
Since then, blogposts and Facebook posts about Xiaxue have been removed — except this blogpost. While Xiaxue has clarified that the blogpost was not meant to insult or demean Grace, but to justify her actions in this saga, its not clear whether Grace considers this blogpost “insulting” or “abusive”. Instead, she has been responding to comments left by netizens on her Facebook page:
It does raise a question here: with the new evidence, was there a single party who was actually doing the bullying, or was it just a spat between two bloggers that had been aired for the public to see?
