The Tragedy of Geno Ong

Today is two years since Geno Ong, known on Facebook as Mai Siao Siao, took her own life.

To her family and to the people who loved her: I am sorry for your loss, and nothing in this piece is aimed at you. You lost someone. That is a grief I would not wish on anyone, and I do not write about her lightly.

We never met her. We never spoke to her. Not once, in person or on the phone. She was never my client, my student, my colleague or my friend. I wrote that in my book, The Silent Roar, before any of this reached the High Court: “we had never met her in real life. We had never spoken to her. She was a complete stranger to us.” I said the same on oath in April this year. Everything that follows depends on it.

Why I am writing now, and not before

I know a dead person cannot answer back. I have thought about that for two years, and it is the reason I did not say more.

But her death did not end the harm. It multiplied it. Her final post and the reporting that followed became a story about us that we were never asked about. That story was then picked up by the Attorney-General’s Chambers, which used her writings as part of an application to have Raymond and me declared vexatious litigants and barred from the courts. It was repeated by newspapers who never called us. It has been used, by people who dislike us, as a weapon: a death to hang around our necks.

On 4 August 2026 the High Court decided that application. I now have a fuller picture than I had in September 2024, in the days just after her death. I am not going to pretend I was calm then. I was not.

So I am writing this once, to put on the record what happened, and then to close the chapter. Not to attack a woman who cannot reply. To answer what has been said about me.

How it began

Almost nobody knows this part, and it matters, because the story everyone else has been told begins in the middle.

Long before any of it, Raymond and Geno Ong were friends on Facebook. They never met in person. For years she was warm towards him — warmer than most. She once got him a book by the Buddhist scholar Dzong-ka-ba (Tsongkhapa), the subject of his university thesis. I remember him mentioning it at the time, surprised: even I did not know he had that interest, and she did. In the years that followed she would post that she was waiting for him at a restaurant, and things of that kind. He did not take her up on any of it, and did not respond.

Then, in 2019, it reversed.

The trigger was a Facebook post Raymond wrote about the death of the actor and national serviceman Aloysius Pang, in which he raised the possibility of a systemic fault in the design of the machine involved. That was the first time Geno called him a cheat. It was also the first time she said he had driven people to take their own lives — an accusation she would repeat for the next five years. When we asked her who these people were, she never named anyone.

The posts did not stop. After two years of them, in 2021, Raymond sued her for defamation.

That is where the public story begins, and it is why it makes no sense: by the time anyone was watching, the lawsuit looked like an act of aggression by a man against a woman he had never met. What came before it had already been going on for two years.

Every screenshot in this piece is hers. She published them herself, publicly, and she never took them down. And what you see here is a fraction of it — a handful of posts out of more than two hundred pages I gathered from her own wall.

I did nothing to her. Not before 2019, and not after. We were the ones on the receiving end of this, not the aggressors we were later made out to be.

What she did

It was not only public posts. She messaged people privately — our clients, our staff, our friends, our supporters — sowing discord about us and urging them to cut ties. She encouraged people to make police reports against us, and told them what words to use so the reports would be taken up. Over time some of the people she wrote to came around to her view and began repeating it themselves. What started as one stranger’s hostility became a vicious circle.

Today there is a group on Facebook of close to 600 people who harass and defame us regularly. We have reported it to Facebook. It is still there. That is what accounts for the sheer volume of defamation and misinformation about us, and it is also why we made public videos saying that if people continued to spread malicious rumours about us, we would have to take legal action.

What would you do, if you were us?

On 15 November 2023, Raymond and I were terminated from the company we had been working with. That same day — before any announcement had been made, and before most of the people around us knew anything about it — she posted publicly that no such company in Singapore would ever accept us again. She treated it as a victory. Between that and the rest of it, I was left with nowhere to earn a living.

How she knew, that day, I still do not know.

The Coroner’s Report, which reached me inside the Attorney-General’s own bundle in the Section 74 application, shows some of this. It shows she was in contact with former clients and associates of ours, encouraging them to take action against us. I will not name them. Several are parties to matters now before the courts, those matters will be decided by judges and not by me, and I will not say a word about them here.

The claims she made

She wrote that she was a former police officer. She wrote about her “police students”. She wrote that she had contacts inside government agencies, in the Attorney-General’s Chambers, among people connected to the judiciary. She wrote that “birdies” told her things about us before they happened. She wrote, with complete confidence, that the AGC would strike out all of our defamation lawsuits.

In one post she wrote that she had held a one-hour Zoom meeting with officials from six government agencies, with evidence collated on “the couple”. The couple was us. She said Raymond was the “mastermind” of years of scams, and that a special task force had been set up to deal with us.

You do not have to take my word for any of this. It is still on her own Facebook page. Go there and search it for police, for SPF, for AGC. That is how I found more than two hundred pages of it.

Here is what troubles me, and I put it as a question rather than an accusation. For three years she published these things. She was never charged. Never warned. Never issued with a POFMA correction direction. No agency ever publicly said it was untrue.

Either she invented all of it — in which case those were grave, damaging falsehoods about the police, the AGC and the courts, and nothing was done about them for three years while our lives were pulled apart — or some part of it was true, in which case there are questions the public is entitled to have answered. I would welcome a clarification either way.

I should be honest about my own state of mind. For years I thought she was simply making outlandish claims, and I ignored most of them. What changed was watching the Attorney-General’s Chambers move to stop us from bringing our defamation lawsuits at all, while nothing was ever done about a single thing she had written.

I cannot help but wonder: why does she appear to have received protection at an institutional level? Who is Geno Ong, really?

So I will put it plainly, and I invite the Government to answer. She wrote these things for three years, in public, under her own name. No action was ever taken on her. No action was ever taken on her, while we have spent five years answering for ourselves in court. If what she wrote was false, why was she never called to account for a single word of it? And if any part of it was true, that is a far more serious matter.

I am asking for more information about some of these matters in my ongoing criminal proceedings, so I will say no more about them here. If I learn anything, I will tell you.

Why Raymond went to court

There is a culture in Singapore that anyone who is sued is a “victim”. We see powerful people sue the less powerful, and the sympathy goes to whoever has been sued. Few people stop to ask the other question: is it all right to speak carelessly and maliciously about someone? Let me remind everyone that in terms of social standing we are private citizens, exactly as Geno was. Are we more powerful than her? No. We are people trying to earn a living, the same as she was. The unspoken rule in this country is that when someone defames you, you suck it up.

People ask why Raymond sued her. The honest answer is that there was nowhere else to go. Most Singaporeans will know the feeling: you make a police report, and you are told there is nothing they can do, but that you are free to pursue legal action. That is exactly what Raymond did.

When a person tells the public that six government agencies have met about you, that you are the mastermind of a criminal enterprise, and that a task force is coming — you cannot disprove that on Facebook. He has since written to the agencies and asked for clarification. And he did what the law provides for: he sued her for defamation and asked the court to make her prove what she had said, or name the officers she said she had met.

She never did. The case was still running when she died.

His cases are his to speak about, and he has done so and will again. I speak here only for myself. I never sued her. I never wrote to her. In five years I never answered her in kind. That is a fact the Attorney-General’s own bundle confirms.

“Maximum damage”

In September 2024, shortly before her death, she scheduled a long public post about us.

In an email written at the same time — an email the Attorney-General’s Chambers itself put before the High Court, in its application against us — she wrote that she needed to make sure the announcement would

“pack maximum damage to the evil couple.”

Her final post is still on her page. I am not going to reproduce it here, and I am not going to publish the Coroner’s papers. But that sentence should be known, because it tells you something the newspapers never reported: the post was not only a farewell. By its author’s own account, it was calculated.

What the courts actually found

The Coroner’s inquiry found that she died by suicide and that no foul play was suspected. On the question of why, the State Coroner recorded that she “had stated in her notes and her Facebook post” that she was ending her life because of the legal costs she faced.

That is a finding about what she said and believed. It is not a finding that anybody did anything wrong, and a coroner’s inquiry cannot make one. Nobody is accused in an inquiry. Nobody is defended in one. We were not parties to it, and I was never in any proceeding with her at all.

Then the same material went to a court that does decide such things. In September 2025 the Attorney-General’s Chambers used her posts, her note and the coroner’s file in its application to have Raymond and me declared vexatious litigants. It asked the High Court to find that I had brought my cases for improper purposes.

On 4 August 2026, the High Court refused. It found that the examples relied on were largely not attributable to me, and that it was “not in a position to make a clear finding” against me. It did not grant the vexatious litigant order against me. It made no order as to costs.

No court has ever been asked to decide whether anyone caused her death. None has said so.

The Press

The newspapers had all of this available to them, and printed almost none of it.

Their headlines said a woman had died facing “lawsuits filed by a man linked to an anti-vaccine group”. They did not say what the lawsuit was about. They did not say she had accused a private citizen of running a criminal enterprise with six government agencies watching. They did not say she had been asked to prove it and never had. They put my name and my criminal charges beside her death, although I had never sued her, never written to her, and had nothing to do with the proceedings at all.

One of them also reported that our defamation cases had been dismissed with costs against us. My claim against Mr Calvin Cheng was not dismissed. It is still going.

It did not end with the inquiry. In February 2025 a court enforcement action was carried out at our home over unpaid costs, with members of the press present. I am not aware of any other enforcement against a private citizen in Singapore being reported this way. The coverage that followed put Geno Ong’s death back into the story, and once again we were the ones the accusation attached to. Those reports are the subject of Protection from Harassment proceedings I have brought, so I will say nothing further about them here.

And not one of these outlets contacted Raymond or me before publishing anything about Geno Ong. Not in November 2024, not in December, not in February 2025, not since.

I will publish a full fact-check of that coverage separately in the coming days. Some outlets did correct themselves when I brought Protection from Harassment proceedings over a different story last year: Mothership and The Independent issued errata, and the Singapore Academy of Law took its article down. Others refused, and those claims are still before the courts, so I will say nothing further about them now.

“We cannot afford a second Geno”

Professor Ben Leong wrote, after her death, that society “cannot afford a second Geno”.

I agree with him. I do not want another Geno either.

But we part company on what follows from it. He seems to mean that people like us should not be able to take legal action when we are attacked. I cannot accept that. If the answer to a tragedy is that the person defamed must simply absorb it in silence, then the protection of the law belongs only to those with the money and the standing to be believed without it.

The way to prevent another Geno is not to close the courts to people who are harmed. It is to stop believing one side of a story.

The tragedy of Geno Ong

For the hurt, the damage and the trauma she inflicted on us, I forgive her. It is the only thing left to do, now that she is dead.

Perhaps she was deeply troubled. Perhaps she believed she was righting a wrong, that she was on the side of the victims, that she was doing justice. I think she believed, completely, in a story about us that she had been told by other people and never once tested by asking us. Everything else followed from that.

She gave years of her life to it. In the end she gave her life to it — over people she had never met and never spoken to.

That is the tragedy of Geno Ong. Not that she was wicked, but that she was certain.

Closure comes when the truth and the facts are out. Without them, nobody can grieve properly — not her family, and not us. I believe only the truth can heal the pain, and the divide, between us and the people who loved her.

I grieve that she died. I did not cause it. I could not have. She was never in my life, except as a name on a screen. But she made us central to hers — to her very existence — on allegations she never once put to the only two people who could have answered them.

Closing this chapter

Today I am shredding the Attorney-General’s bundle: the one that arrived at my door on the one-year anniversary of her death, sent by the AGC’s office on a Saturday, with the Coroner’s report inside it and a photograph of her body that I did not expect to see.

The application is over. The AGC did not obtain the Section 74 order it had asked for against me. A Section 73D order was made instead, and the Court held that it had not been established that I habitually instituted vexatious proceedings. Every case I had already started survives, and I am free to continue them.

I will not be commenting on any matter that is before a court.

As I shred the court papers today, I will say a quiet prayer for Geno.

In August 2016, Geno wanted to give Raymond a book about Dzong-ka-ba, a Buddhist scholar. There are profound Buddhist teachings about speech. Among the acts that do the most harm it counts not only lying, but divisive speech — words spoken to turn people against one another. And it holds that this is a fault even when what is said is true, because the harm lies not in the falsehood but in the wish to separate. The act is complete, it says, not when the friendship finally breaks, but at the moment the listener understands.

Dzong-ka-ba himself taught that nothing in this world stands alone, that whatever arises does so out of causes and conditions — and that every being we meet, including the ones who wound us, has at some point been a mother to us. It is deeply ironic that Geno wanted to give Raymond Dzong-ka-ba’s book before everything happened.

Perhaps remembering these timeless principles is the best way to remember Geno.

May she rest in peace. May whatever comes next for her be gentle. And may the anger she carried, and the anger she caused, end here.

May her story stand as a cautionary tale of what prejudice can do to a person.

Always verify the facts for yourself. Listen to both sides like your life depends on it.

It is finished.

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This account draws on my affidavit filed in HC/OA 988/2025, on the High Court’s judgment in Attorney-General v Ng Kai Hoe Raymond and another [2026] SGHC 162, and on material the Attorney-General’s Chambers placed before the Court. It names no private individual, reproduces no court exhibit, and does not comment on the merits of any matter that remains before a court.

If you are struggling, please talk to someone. In Singapore, the Samaritans of Singapore are there around the clock on 1767, or on WhatsApp at 9151 1767.

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