“I only said it once, to one coworker. How is that defamation?”
A senior colleague filed a complaint. We responded from the complaint review to a written defense opinion, and it ended with a police non-referral (no suspicion)

Hello, this is Kwon & Partners Law Office.
Many people are shocked when something said once to a coworker comes back as a criminal complaint. They only described what they saw, yet it turned into a criminal case.
Today we share the case of A, an executive who was accused of defamation by a senior colleague. The police decided not to refer the case (no suspicion) about 2 months after the complaint was filed, and A was spared the burden of a criminal process at the investigation stage.

A is an executive at a small company. One evening during a business trip abroad in September 2025, A saw a senior executive, B, getting a massage next to a woman A did not know, at a massage shop near the hotel. B spoke first, and the two only exchanged a short greeting before parting.

Surprised by the scene, A told C, a staff member who shared the taxi home the next day, “I saw B with a woman at the massage shop yesterday.” A said it only once.

The story appears to have reached B through C. In December 2025, B himself brought it up in the company group chat. In June 2026, the CEO stepped in and arranged a meeting between the two. A month later, in July, B filed a defamation complaint against A.

The complaint had three claims. First, A told C a false statement on the way home. Second, A spread the same story two or three more times afterward. Third, A repeated it loudly during the meeting. A then came to Kwon & Partners Law Office.

There were three key issues in this case.

① Was what A said “false”?
Stating a false fact is punished more heavily. But the Supreme Court holds that both the falsity of the statement and the speaker’s awareness of it must be proven by the investigators (Supreme Court Decision 2012Do13718, September 4, 2014).

② Is telling one person “publicly” saying it?
Defamation can apply even to a true statement if it is said “publicly,” meaning in a way that can spread widely. This was the most important issue. The Supreme Court en banc decision (2020Do5813, November 19, 2020) held that for statements to a small, specific group, the possibility of spreading must be strictly proven.

③ Was what A said during the meeting also defamation?
A’s words in the meeting came after B himself said, “Go ahead and tell me.”

After reviewing the complaint, Kwon & Partners sorted out what to admit and what to contest and put it into a written defense opinion.

First, we got the complaint first. We coordinated with the investigator to reschedule the questioning and obtained the complaint through an information disclosure request, so we knew exactly what B was claiming. Then, with A, we sorted each of the three claims into admit or deny.

Second, we made clear it was one statement to one person. A spoke privately, once, to C alone on the way home. For about 3 months afterward, A told no one else, and the story reached only B himself. The first person to raise the matter in the company group chat was B. As for the claim of “spreading it 2 or 3 more times,” we explained that A had only asked C once whether C had told anyone else.

Third, we answered the “false” claim head on. A was a party who actually greeted B on the spot, and consistently gave the same account in the meeting. After the complaint, A also phoned the shop overseas to obtain CCTV footage, but the footage (kept about 2 weeks) had already been deleted. We presented this effort as further support that A’s account was sincere.

Fourth, we set the facts straight with the meeting recording. Only the two of them were in the room. When A asked, “Is this about that?”, B answered, “Go ahead and tell me.” We also submitted a Supreme Court decision (2008Do6515, October 23, 2008) holding that a simple confirming answer to a question is hard to treat as defamation.