My Civil Beat column this week is a little different. It’s a close look at a Hawaii lawsuit pitting neighbors and cousins against each other (“Ian Lind: The Dung Sisters’ Family Feud Gets Out Of Control“).
Here’s the intro section:
A Circuit Court jury in Honolulu last week awarded more than $600,000 in damages to a Honolulu woman, culminating a decade-long legal dispute between neighbors over a shared driveway that gave rise to rival allegations of harassment, attempted intimidation, trespassing, invasion of privacy, character assassination and more.
Following a three-week trial, the jury found former Miss Hawaii Denby Dung, her sister, Darah, a former Miss Chinatown USA, along with their brother, mother, and uncle, liable for damages to their neighbor, Donna Lee Ching.
The parties are more than neighbors, they are family. Ching and Dixon Dung, the uncle of the Dung sisters and a defendant in the case, are second cousins, according to documents filed in the case.
The jury found members of the Dung family engaged in a civil conspiracy to harass, threaten and intimidate Ching in order to discourage her from pursuing the driveway dispute. The jury also found the Dungs invaded Ching’s privacy and defamed her, including by posting derogatory comments on their shared Facebook page.
It’s a rather tangled tale, and has gotten a lot of response so far.
If you have access to Civil Beat, or can look over a friend’s shoulder, check it out.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I call blatant bias on that article! How can dog lover Denby (Da Pet Hui) Dung expect to receive any kind of fair and balanced treatment from a cat lover?
This post and your Civil Beat column are, in my opinion, nothing more than salacious rubbish. Why are you wasting bandwidth on what is essentially a family squabble when there are so many more important things going on in the State and the world? I am disappointed.
Material for the time capsule! Life in 21st-century Hawaii!
It’s lazy reporting and the type that if in the SA Ian would slam. Classic he said she said reporting….or actually she said she said….
Nothing to see here folks move along….
Not just he said, she said or she said, she said. More like she said, she said, attorneys filed, court decided, Ian reported. And never mind the sea shells by the seashore. This case wasn’t about sea shells.
good article. If more people understood how easements worked maybe this wouldn’t have happened. That business with closing the gate is over the top.
If this were a general family that keeps under the radar, than yes, this story would have never been out there. However, the Dung family is seen much more in a public light. They are seen as examples to all kinds of people in this town, like the Baraquio’s, So, with the fame also comes the magnifying glass on their lives. If this whole story is true and their behaviour proven, than my view is that the Dung sisters should have known better than to put out that dirty laundry in the public realm in the first place, considering their relative position in society.
I enjoyed this article. This family is truly petty. Having lived right next to them for many years, I’ve had to deal with their many dogs barking for hours at night while I try to study for exams, hearing the speeding of that woman’s car up the ramp, and other ridiculous stuff. Thank you, Ian.
So I have a giant inside to this story! I lived on the property below the Dung house. I lived in the house while attending UH. I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world, I got to see the Dung sisters come in and out of their house everyday. Then years later I worked for Dana-li (not mentioned) at a retail store where she introduced me to Darah. We started talking and seeing more of each other, but I was a secret to the family because I wasn’t good enough for the family. The story I read was the truth! This family comes off as kind and sweet, but on the contrary… they look down on people and think they’re better then everyone because they wear crowns. The Dungs are cruel and reading this story proves that they believe the world owes them everything and more. I’m glad they had to pay!