The Court of Appeal for Ontario has dismissed an appeal in a family defamation lawsuit, upholding a lower court’s decision to grant summary judgment and throw out the case before it could reach a full trial1. The lawsuit, one of two related actions filed by the same man, centered on an alleged text message that the court ultimately found no admissible evidence of. The decision, Alli v. Shakur, confirms the dismissal of the claims made by Ejjaz Alli against his two nephews, Yasir Shakur and Saiyaf Alli.
Click here to read our previous reporting about the case which gave rise to this appeal.
The case, referred to as “the first action,” was initiated by Ejjaz Alli, who alleged two specific instances of defamation. First, he claimed that in May or June of 2019, his nephew Yasir Shakur sent a text message to his other nephew, Saiyaf Alli, falsely stating that Ejjaz had sexually assaulted a member of his own family. Second, Ejjaz alleged that in August 2021, Saiyaf repeated the content of this alleged text message during a telephone call to Ejjaz’s sister, Bibi Nazeeman Mohamed. Both Yasir and Saiyaf denied the existence of the text message from the outset. Court documents noted that neither Ejjaz nor Bibi Mohamed, the two central figures in the allegations, had ever seen the text message in question.
This lawsuit exists alongside a “second action,” which was not the subject of the appeal but provides a complex family context. In that separate case, Ejjaz sued his sister-in-law, Bibi Nesha Rahamatun Alli (who is also Saiyaf’s mother), as well as Saiyaf again. The allegations in the second action relate to events on August 1, 2021. Ejjaz claims that on that day, Bibi Alli made false and defamatory statements that he had sexually assaulted her on two occasions. He alleges these statements were made to several people, including her son Saiyaf and her husband Ashraf Alli (Ejjaz’s brother). That lawsuit, which also alleges a defamatory email was sent from Ashraf Alli’s account, is still proceeding separately and was not impacted by this appeal.
The appeal decided on October 17, 2025, stemmed from a summary judgment motion in the first action heard by Justice Jasmine T. Akbarali of the Superior Court of Justice. The nephews, Yasir and Saiyaf, had asked the court to dismiss Ejjaz’s case against them, arguing there was no genuine issue that required a trial. During the motion process, Justice Akbarali ordered cross-examinations of Saiyaf and Ejjaz’s sister, Bibi Mohamed.
In his evidence, Saiyaf denied ever possessing the alleged text message. Bibi Mohamed testified that while she had never seen the text, Saiyaf had told her about it and its contents, which she described as an accusation of rape, during a phone call on August 3, 2021. This created a direct conflict of evidence. The motion judge was then tasked with determining if the case could be decided without a full trial. Justice Akbarali ultimately accepted Saiyaf’s evidence and rejected Bibi Mohamed’s. The judge found that Bibi Mohamed’s testimony about what Saiyaf allegedly told her was inadmissible hearsay in the action against Yasir, the supposed author of the text.
In her decision, released in December 2024, Justice Akbarali dismissed the action against Yasir, stating, “There is no admissible evidence before me to prove the existence of a text message in which the plaintiff is called a rapist. However, there is evidence, from [Saiyaf], [Yasir] and the search of their telephones, that no such text was ever sent or received. I find that no text was sent by [Yasir] to [Saiyaf] in which [Yasir] called the plaintiff a rapist.”
The motion judge also dismissed the action against Saiyaf, finding that he never made the alleged defamatory statement to Bibi Mohamed. The judge found that Bibi Mohamed was “mistaken in her belief that a text message accusing the plaintiff of sexual assault was discussed during the conversation she had with [Saiyaf] on August 3.” Justice Akbarali noted that Saiyaf’s evidence did not give rise to the same credibility concerns she had about Bibi Mohamed’s evidence.
Ejjaz Alli appealed this dismissal, advancing several arguments. He argued that the motion judge should not have made significant credibility findings on a summary judgment motion and that the case was inappropriate for such a resolution. He also contended that Bibi Mohamed’s evidence about the phone call with Saiyaf should have been admitted under the principled exception to the hearsay rule. The appeal court panel, consisting of Justices P. Lauwers, J. Dawe, and M. Rahman, disagreed. They found that even if the evidence were technically admissible, the motion judge had found it to be unreliable and not credible. The appeal court deferred to the motion judge’s credibility findings, noting that she was within her rights under the Rules of Civil Procedure to make limited findings of fact and credibility to decide the motion. The court found Ejjaz had not shown why it was in the interest of justice to require a full trial for these limited issues.
Ejjaz also argued that the motion judge had misstated the evidence regarding the telephones, pointing out that the phones in question no longer exist. The appeal court quickly dismissed this point, stating that the non-existence of the phones “does not defeat the motion judge’s finding that no admissible evidence of the text message exists.”
A central part of the appeal focused on conversations that happened on August 1, 2021, two days before the alleged phone call about the text. Ejjaz argued that the motion judge erred by dismissing the action against Saiyaf, even though Saiyaf had admitted in his evidence that he spoke with family members on August 1 and mentioned “someone else might come forward with accusations against Ejjaz.” Ejjaz’s lawyer argued this was “in substance” the same as the allegation in his lawsuit: Saiyaf repeating a sexual assault accusation.
The Court of Appeal rejected this argument, finding that it confused the allegations in the first action with the separate events of the second action. The court reviewed the motion judge’s findings about the August 1 events. On that day, Ashraf Alli (Ejjaz’s brother and Saiyaf’s father) was severely ill with brain cancer and had trouble speaking. His wife, Bibi Alli, told him that Ejjaz had sexually assaulted her in the past. Ashraf then asked his son, Saiyaf, to help him communicate this new information to his siblings, including Bibi Mohamed, over the phone. The motion judge found that during this August 1 conversation, it was Ashraf, not Saiyaf, who “made reference to a text message,” but that it was unrelated to Yasir or Saiyaf.
The appeal court found that Ejjaz had made a clear “strategic choice” during the summary judgment motion to narrow his claim in the first action to only the 2019 text from Yasir and the alleged August 3 repetition by Saiyaf. The August 1 conversation, which involved Bibi Alli’s direct allegations, is the specific subject of the second lawsuit. The court ruled that these allegations “should not be conflated” with the first action. For the same reason, the court denied Ejjaz’s alternative request to amend his pleadings in the first action to incorporate the August 1 admissions, stating this was “inconsistent with Ejjaz’s decision at the summary judgment motion to abandon his claim… and to pursue only his claims based on the 2019 text message.”
Finally, Ejjaz argued that granting summary judgment in the first action was improper because it was “partial summary judgment” that created a risk of inconsistent findings with the second action, which is still proceeding. The appeal court rejected this as well. The judges agreed with the motion judge’s assessment that Ejjaz chose to start two separate actions instead of a single one, and he also chose not to join them together later. The court stated it saw “no reason to relieve Ejjaz of the consequences of his strategic choice.” The panel added that by narrowing the first action to just the text message, Ejjaz had made the two actions distinct, which “minimizes, if not eliminates, any overlap.”
The Court of Appeal concluded that the motion judge made no error in her findings. The appeal was dismissed, and Ejjaz Alli was ordered to pay $20,000 in costs to Yasir Shakur and Saiyaf Alli.
