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Lee Yuet-fung shows off one of his paintings outside court. Photo: David Wong

Chinese painter ‘threw cup at Cathay flight attendant for not serving him quickly enough’

Flight attendant says painter threw container at her when she failed to fetch him water immediately, while he claims he dropped it

Thomas Chan

A mainland artist hurled a plastic cup at a Cathay Pacific flight attendant on a Hong Kong-bound plane  after she was slow to fetch him some water,  a court heard yesterday.

Lee Yuet-fung,  who has made a name for himself with his tiger and bamboo drawings, pleaded not guilty to one count of common assault on board an aircraft flying from Singapore to Hong Kong on December 10.

Lee claimed instead that his hands were trembling at the time because he suffered from severe diabetes and needed the water to take his medicine.

“My hands were shaking … and I dropped the cup [onto the floor],” the 68-year-old told Tsuen Wan Court yesterday. “I didn’t throw the cup at her.” 

According to the flight stewardess, Lai Wing-man, Lee assaulted her as she was collecting other passengers’ food trays and she was too busy to fetch the water immediately.

Lai, who joined the carrier in June, said the left side of her waist felt tender after the assault.

The court heard that Lee was sitting in a window seat in row 68 when he requested the water. He said Lai took about 20 minutes to bring him the water.

“The job of flight attendants is to serve passengers. And I was a passenger with special needs.”

Lee did not hire a lawyer to represent him, and his self- %defence was punctuated with interruptions from Deputy Magistrate Jim Chun-ki  correcting his errors.

 When Lee was required to swear to tell the truth, instead of reading out the oath, he said: “I, Lee Yuet-fung, did not throw the cup at Miss Lai.”

At that point, Jim cut in and said: “If you disrupt court proceedings, I will remand you in custody. Are you treating this place as a playground and saying whatever you want to say?”

Earlier, during Lee’s cross-examination of Lai, Jim told the defendant to focus on asking questions instead of making speeches asserting his innocence.

At one point, Lee said the plastic cup he dropped that night was brown – contradicting the prosecution case that the cup was red.

Lee then took a grey cup out of his briefcase, which he said he had bought in order to show the court the kind of cup he had dropped.

He also asked the prosecution to provide in-flight CCTV video as evidence. “Every case has CCTV footage,” he said.

When Jim asked Lee why he thought there was CCTV footage in every court case, the artist did not pursue his request further.

The case was adjourned to April 9 for the verdict.

Outside court, Lee displayed photographs of him and Taiwanese politician Sean Lien Sheng-wen,  saying he had presented some of his paintings to him.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: In-flight drink led to plastic cup 'assault'
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