Court on Tarun Tejpal case: Survivor was happy, not traumatised

PANAJI: The additional sessions court, Mapusa, which acquitted Tehelka founder-editor Tarun Tejpal on Friday, noted that on the night of the alleged rape, there was “only drunken banter” between the survivor and the accused.
The court also noted that the prosecutrix (survivor) could not be called reliable and trustworthy after she declined to show an email to the court and added that the “prosecutrix wants to hide something”.
The email, the judge said, was relevant to the case.
“The messaging record shows that it was entirely the norm for the prosecutrix (survivor) to have such flirtatious and sexual conversations with friends and acquaintances,” judge Kshama Joshi said.
“Therefore, the WhatsApp chats of the prosecutrix and her propensity to indulge in sexual conversations with friends and acquaintances, as well as her admission that the accused was talking about sex or desire because that is what the accused usually chose to speak to her about unfortunately, never her work, proves that the accused and the prosecutrix had a flirtatious conversation on the night of November 7, 2013,” she said.
Considering the evidence regarding these messages, the court said, “the chat clearly shows that there was only drunken banter between them”, and that there was “absolutely no denial of the same by the survivor”.
The court also said that “CCTV footage does not support the statement that she was in shock or trauma and blinking in tears”.
“Evidence of witnesses and printouts of photographs clearly prove that the prosecutrix was absolutely in a good mood, happy, normal, smiling, and did not look distressed or traumatised in any manner whatsoever, though this was immediately a few minutes after she claims to have been sexually assaulted again by the accused,” the judge said.
“It is extremely revealing that the prosecutrix’s account neither demonstrates any kind of normative behaviour on her own part — that a prosecutrix of sexual assault on two consecutive nights might plausibly show, nor does it demonstrate any such behaviour on the part of the accused.”
The court also questioned as to why the survivor did not reveal the alleged rape incident to her colleagues after the incident.
The court also said that the survivor refused to go for a medical examination. “There is no medical evidence on record on account of delay in lodging the FIR and as the prosecutrix refused to go for medical examination,” the court said.
Regarding the prosecution claim of an apology sent by the accused, the court observed, “A bare reading of the alleged personal apology categorically shows that his email neither implicitly or explicitly makes any of the admissions or confessions which the survivor demanded in the apology, or with relation to any other offence with which the accused was charged, and is clearly therefore not an apology but an attempt to assuage any discomfort the prosecutrix might have post-facto felt.”
The defence lawyer argued that there is ample evidence on record to show that the alleged personal apology was the result of inducement, promise and implicit threat due to the charge made against the accused.