Delhi court starts hearing MJ Akbar's defamation case again…

John refers to case documents: The whole of Priya Ramani's case was put up before the witness.

#MeToo #metooindia @mjakbar

John: I was under an obligation to tell the witness what my defence was, have fulfilled that obligation.

Continues showing case documents.

John refers to an article by Ramani in 2017 where noone was named, however, in 2018 when she tweeted, this article was referred to/attached in the tweet.

John: Only the first four paras of the article referred to Akbar, rest of the article was about male bosses in general.

John refers to the article in @voguemagazine

John admits that even though Akbar wasn't named in the article, the first 4 paras referred to him.

#MeToo @mjakbar

John refutes Akbar's submission that the whole article was about him.

John: This is self-evident. The portions of the article in inverted commas are from articles written in America by American authors, which is why they are in inverted commas. They've nothing to do with Akbar.

John: This was an unwanted controversy. When we read Ramani's statement, this will become clearer.

John refers to experiences shared by Saba Naqvi, Harinder Baweja, Anju Bharti, Suparna Sharma, in response to Ramani's tweet.

John: In one of the experiences shared, the lady in question had talked about how she was called to a hotel room by Akbar for an interview.

Judge: Has he made complaints against others also?

John: No, he has only picked out Ramani, and he admits he was aware of others also.

John presses that the FirstPost article was infact put forth by Akbar and not Ramani before the court. She argues that it's an established principle of law that if the prosecution places a document on record, the defence can very well rely on it.

John reads out a judgment from the Delhi High Court to establish the above argument.

Akbar has stated that he shared a consensual relationship with Pallavi Gogoi 23 years back which ended on a bitter note.

His wife, on the other hand stated that, Pallavi's flaunting the relationship publicly threatened to destroy their family- which he admitted.

John: My purpose of reading these out, is showing that this is opposed to his claim of having a 'sterling reputation'. Is this the record of a man with a "sterling reputation"?

#MeToo #MJAkbar #PriyaRamani

John: Irrespective of the nature of his relationship, and I am noone to comment on it, Mr. Akbar has admitted that he was in a relationship with a woman who was 20 years his junior and his subordinate at the workplace, at the time he was married.

#MJAkbar #MeToo

John: This is not the conduct of a man with a sterling reputation. Through my cross examination, I tried to establish my truth, my story. I have established, through his own documents, that reputation which is an ingredient of S.499 IPC - he didn't enjoy a sterling reputation.

John: He didn't even remember that the Delhi High Court convicted him for contempt, it seems there is no onus on him to be truthful. He is a politician now, but was a journalist earlier. Where is the onus of truth?

Court takes a 5-minute break.

Hearing resumes.