Chapter 1357: Menacing
Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Cai Shengnan had told the court early on that she would plead not guilty in Luo Jialan’s case, so she certainly wouldn’t agree to Gu Nianzhi’s charges.
She stood up from the bench, bowed to the judge, and nodded slightly to the people in the courtroom.
The judge looked at the doc.u.ments they had presented and asked, “May I call your witnesses?”
The witnesses that Cai Shengnan and the others brought were Auntie Xing and Auntie You. They were still waiting to be called in the room next door.
According to the procedure, Huo Guanchen was the prosecution witness, so he should leave so now. The defense lawyer would call their witnesses in to testify.
However, Cai Shengnan changed her mind at the last minute.
She shook her head and smiled. “No need. I want to interrogate the prosecution’s first witness, Mr. General Huo Guanchen.”
The judge thought about it for a moment, then nodded. He raised his hand and said, “You may begin.”
Cai Shengnan lowered her head and organized her doc.u.ments and folders. She took out a yellow, translucent folder and held it in her hands. She walked to Huo Guanchen’s witness stand.
“h.e.l.lo, Mr. General Huo.” Cai Shengnan addressed him politely by using Huo Guanchen’s military rank. Her movements were very restrained, and she was trembling in fear in front of Huo Guanchen, as if she was afraid of him.
Gu Nianzhi was slightly taken aback.
She had come with ill intentions.
She was trying to emphasize Huo Guanchen’s ident.i.ty and status. She was trying to give the people in the court a preconceived impression of Huo Guanchen’s superiority, and affect their perception of him and their judgment of his testimony.
Gu Nianzhi put the back of her hand to her lips and coughed lightly.
The cough was very jarring in the quiet courtroom.
Cai Shengnan turned around abruptly and looked in the direction of Gu Nianzhi.
Her expression was sharp and her gaze was piercing. Her cowardly and timid demeanor from before had disappeared, and her entire aura had changed.
Gu Nianzhi raised her eyebrows at her. “I’m sorry, but my throat was itchy. Please don’t mind, lawyer Cai”
Her interruption had completely destroyed the respectfulness and fearfulness towards Huo Guanchen that Cai Shengnan had feigned earlier.
Cai Shengnan felt a little uneasy when she turned around to face Huo Guanchen. She couldn’t act as timidly as she had before.
She decided to stop acting. She flipped through the folder in her hand and asked nonchalantly, “Mr. Huo Guanchen, may I ask how you met Ms. Song Jinning?”
Huo Guanchen: ” … ”
Gu Nianzhi quickly stood up. “Objection. The defense attorney’s questions concerns the privacy of my client and the witness, and have nothing to do with this case.”
The judge tapped the gavel. “Objection sustained. Defendant’s lawyer, please be mindful of your questions and wording.”
Cai Shengnan smiled and said, “As far as I know, you met Ms. Song Jinning after your brother, didn’t you?”
Huo Guanchen’s face darkened, and he didn’t speak.
Gu Nianzhi continued, “Objection. If the defendant’s lawyer continues with this paparazzi-like interrogation, I’m going to file a complaint with the defendant’s lawyer’s licensing agency.”
Cai Shengnan didn’t wait for the judge to speak and quickly said, “Your honor, this matter is also closely related to this case. I can prove it.”
The judge looked down at the information and evidence that she had submitted in advance and nodded. “Defense lawyer, please quickly get to the point.”
Cai Shengnan looked at Gu Nianzhi with a smile and looked away. She looked at Huo Guanchen and said, “If you don’t answer, I’ll take it as your acquiescence.”
Huo Guanchen nodded lightly. “Yes, my brother knew Song Jinning first. It’s no secret.”
Cai Shengnan nodded. “After that, you got to know Ms. Song Jinning and started pursuing her. At one point, Ms. Song Jinning swayed between you and your brother… ”
“Objection.” Her expression serious, Gu Nianzhi stood up again. “The defendant’s lawyer’s question was already defaming my client’s reputation just now. I reserve the right to sue the defendant’s lawyer.”
“Lawyer Gu, I have evidence for every word I say. Are you obstructing justice by doing this?” Cai Shengnan raised her eyebrows and looked extremely seriously.
“Evidence? May I ask where you got the evidence to prove that my client swayed between them 30 years ago? Did you open your heavenly eyes, or did you use a time machine to go back in time and see it with your own eyes? Maybe you even made a little video? Can you share it with us?”
Gu Nianzhi retorted eloquently to Cai Shengnan without letting her guard down at all.
Cai Shengnan said calmly, “I heard about it from someone who knew them. It’s up to you whether you believe it or not. But Huo Guanyuan’s belongings contain a love letter he wrote to Song Jinning. You can’t deny that, can you?”
After she beated around the bush, she focused on the love letters Huo Guanyuan had written to Song Jinning.
The love letters had been exposed during the Bai Jinyi case.
It was obvious that Cai Shengnan was still using the “love letters” to argue.
Gu Nianzhi smiled. “I’m sorry, but I do have to deny it. “Lawyer Cai didn’t personally witness the trial, so she probably doesn’t know that I had already refuted the love letters. Because the letters didn’t say so, it was impossible to tell who they were addressed to, but you blamed everything on my client out of the blue. It looks like you’ve been too deeply influenced by Bai Jinyi and Luo Jialan, because that’s what they think.”
“Is that so? You can continue lying to yourself, lawyer Gu, but you can’t expect us to lie to ourselves like you. Those love letters were actually written by Huo Guanyuan to Song Jinning. Otherwise, why would your witness have been so furious when he saw the love letters? Why would he divorce Song Jinning even though Song Jinning was seriously ill at the time?”
Cai Shengnan closed her semi-transparent yellow folder and turned to look at the judge. “Your honor, the truth is that Mr. Huo Guanchen couldn’t stand the ambiguous relations.h.i.+p between his ex-wife and his brother, so he filed for divorce.”
That was indeed the truth.
Even Gu Nianzhi couldn’t deny it.
Her lips opening and closing silently as she spoke, she glared at Cai Shengnan angrily. “Despicable!”
Cai Shengnan smiled and gestured for her to “calm down”.
Gu Nianzhi appeared so angry that she couldn’t speak. She sat down forcefully, but when she looked down, a glimmer of light flashed in her eyes.
Cai Shengnan didn’t notice the change in Gu Nianzhi’s expression. For the first time, she was happy to suppress Gu Nianzhi. Cai Shengnan turned around and said, “After Mr. Huo Guanchen divorced Ms. Song Jinning, he didn’t ask her to move out of the Huo family’s home. Instead, she continued to live in the Huo family’s home. Mr. Huo Guanchen was still responsible for the manpower and expenses needed to take care of her.”
“At the time, many people praised him for being affectionate and not forgetting to take care of his seriously ill wife. However, in private, he had already been hooking up with Song Jinning’s best friend, Bai Jinyi. He had betrayed his wife. So, can the words of such a person really be trusted?”
“I didn’t,” Huo Guanchen objected in a deep voice. “When I was with Bai Jinyi, I had already divorced Song Jinning.”
“Really?” Cai Shengnan shook her head with a smile. “But according to what I know, Bai Jinyi said that when you had s.e.x with her for the first time, you weren’t officially divorced.”
Huo Guanchen almost spat out a mouthful of blood.
The first time he had s.e.x with Bai Jinyi, to put it bluntly, was because he was deceived by Bai Jinyi…
But he was a man. Even if he was deceived by a woman, it was his own fault.
It wasn’t as if she pointed a gun at him and asked him to have s.e.x with her.
Drunken s.e.x was also messy.
Song Jinning was sitting in the plaintiff’s seat. Cai Shengnan had unraveled the incident that happened when she was out of her mind in front of her.
Not only was Huo Guanchen extremely embarra.s.sed, but Song Jinning’s cheeks were also flushed. It was unclear whether she was angry or enraged.
Gu Nianzhi was dumbfounded.
She had really underestimated Cai Shengnan’s “professionalism”. She had actually managed to get such a thing out of Bai Jinyi.
Gu Nianzhi had only managed to get one sentence out of Bai Jinyi about Luo Jialan’s background.
But Cai Shengnan had managed to get Bai Jinyi to reveal everything about her and Huo Guanchen in bed!
Gu Nianzhi didn’t know whether to laugh or cry out loud…
Cai Shengnan continued to goad him, “So, Mr. Huo Guanchen, after betraying your seriously ill wife, you continued to raise your divorced wife at home and even let my client, Miss Luo Jialan, who was only 18 at the time, take over the responsibility of taking care of your ex-wife. What exactly were your intentions?!”
Not daring to look at Song Jinning’s expression, Huo Guanchen raised his head. He took a deep breath and said, “Although I divorced Song Jinning, she was seriously ill at the time, and there were no immediate family members in her family. I couldn’t possibly let her leave the Huo family.”
“Then, should I compliment you on being loyal? Or should I compliment you on being a pervert?!”
Cai Shengnan changed the topic, and her expression became more fierce.
“During the years when Song Jinning was seriously ill, you peered at her whenever you had the chance, and you didn’t let her know. If my client really tortured Ms. Song Jinning to the point of death, why didn’t you say anything? Or were you the one who wanted Song Jinning to die?!”
Cai Shengnan’s wave of attacks were really aggressive.
Not only did she question Huo Guanchen’s character and integrity through invading his personal privacy, which made the credibility of his testimony questionable, but she also threw out a huge trap.
She raised her head and looked at the judge with a serious expression on her face.
“Your honor, Mr. Huo Guanchen was jealous of his ex-wife and brother, and he placed his ex-wife, who was incapacitated, in front of him. Can I also prove that Mr. Huo Guanchen also had a motive and the conditions to commit the crime? Therefore, it is possible that he tried to killed her on purpose!”
“Don’t forget, the motive that lawyer Gu described earlier — the s.e.xual desires between a man and a woman — is also one of the most important motives!”
Gu Nianzhi’s heart skipped a beat.
Cai Shengnan had taken a huge leap.
She had gone from questioning the witness to blaming him as a suspect.
And she had pinned the two procedures on the same person.
It was too big of a leap to take, so Cai Shengnan taking a huge risk that could potentially backfire.
Gu Nianzhi stood up calmly, then said, “Objection. Even according to the defendant’s lawyer, it only proves that Mr. Huo Guanchen was deeply in love with Ms. Song Jinning. If he really wanted her dead, he could have just kicked her out of the Huo family after the divorce and do nothing about it.”
“I guarantee that the Song Jinning of that time wouldn’t have survived the winter.”
“If he could take Song Jinning’s life so easily and without any legal responsibility, why spend the money, effort, and effort to visit her so often?!” Gu Nianzhi retorted without hesitation, “Even though in the defendant’s lawyer’s eyes, Mr. Huo Guanchen wasn’t visiting his seriously ill ex-wife, he was ‘peeping’.”
“Tsk Tsk, as expected of the kind of person you are, the world you see is the same.”
Gu Nianzhi chuckled. “Lawyer Cai, your reasoning is too farfetched.”
Cai Shengnan blushed slightly; she had been too impatient.
She quickly retracted her words. “Okay, even if Huo Guanchen didn’t have the intention to kill her, everyone heard him lying in court. Your honor, if the witness lied in court, what would be the result if something important was concealed?”