A former Miss Hong Kong runner-up has accused her businessman husband of threatening her with a knife and choking her at their home earlier this year, while insisting her allegations are irrelevant to their ongoing legal dispute over his family’s assets.
Vivian Lee Ming-wai, 49, appeared at Eastern Court on Wednesday to testify against her husband, Johnson Chan, 58, who is on trial for criminal intimidation and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
Lee came second in the 1997 Miss Hong Kong competition, ahead of Charmaine Sheh Sze-man, now a popular actress with the city’s largest broadcaster, TVB.
Lee married Chan, the younger son of the late entrepreneur Chan Shu-kui, in 2003.
The court heard that the couple had an altercation over parenting matters at their luxurious house on Stanley Village Road in southern Hong Kong Island on January 21.
Lee, who now lives separately at the Regalia Bay residential complex in Stanley, said Chan launched into a tirade in his private room that morning, violently smashing objects and swinging furniture.
She said she took photos of the room, intending to send them to her mother to ask her to call police, but provoked Chan’s anger after taking a photo inside a bathroom that showed his “drugs and paraphernalia”.
The witness said Chan pointed a 20cm (7.9-inch) knife at her and grabbed her by the neck while trying to snatch her mobile phone, before one of their domestic helpers came to Lee’s aid.
Police later investigated, but Lee decided not to pursue the matter at that time as she wanted to de-escalate the situation. She filed a formal complaint the next day.
In cross-examination, defence lawyer David Leung Cheuk-yin SC highlighted that the couple had been embroiled in a legal dispute with Anson Chan Yiu-cheung, the defendant’s elder brother and chairman of the Bonds Group of Companies, a local developer, over control of the family’s trust.
Lee acknowledged her attitude towards her brother-in-law had changed completely since the incident with her husband, having borrowed a car from him for daily use and taken out several loans from him.
But she rejected the counsel’s suggestion that she and Anson Chan now had “the same enemy”, adding that she did not genuinely believe the current case would affect civil proceedings.
Leung also argued that it was Lee smashing Chan’s laptop onto a table that caused his client to lose his temper before committing the alleged criminal acts, but Lee stressed the force applied was “not enough to break it”.
“I was trying to stop his tirade and that was the instinctive way to do ... I was trying to survive the moment,” the witness added.
The trial before Magistrate Kestrel Lam Tsz-hong is scheduled to last three days. - SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
