A person’s right to reputation can’t be protected at the cost of dignity, a Delhi court said, while acquitting journalist Priya Ramani of the charge of defaming former Union minister M J Akbar whom she had accused of sexual harassment. In a verdict emerging out of litigation relating to the MeToo movement, the court made it clear that a “woman cannot be punished for raising (her) voice against sex abuse on the pretext of criminal complaint of defamation as the right of reputation cannot be protected at the cost of the right of life and dignity of woman as guaranteed in Constitution.”
Additional chief metropolitan magistrate Ravindra Kumar Pandey also accepted Ramani’s statement that Akbar is “not a man of stellar reputation” while believing her testimony of being sexually harassed by him in a Mumbai hotel in 1993, a meeting Akbar claimed had never occurred.
The woman has a right to put her grievance on any platform of her choice and even after decades. It is shameful that the incidents of crime and violence against women are happening in the country where megaepics such as ‘Mahabarata’ and ‘Ramayana’ were written around the theme of respect for women,” observed ACMM Pandey, dismissing the criminal defamation complaint filed by Akbar, who had also questioned the delay by Ramani in levelling these allegations.
The court said it cannot be ignored that most of the time, the offence of sexual harassment and sexual abuse is committed behind closed doors or privately.
Ramani had made allegations of sexual misconduct against Akbar in the wake of the global MeToo movement in 2018 following which Akbar filed the complaint on October 15, 2018, accusing her of defaming him by accusing him of sexual misconduct decades ago when he was a journalist. He resigned as Union minister on October 17, 2018, and denied all the allegations of sexual harassment against the women who came forward against him.
