A Delhi district court on February 17 acquitted senior journalist and editor Priya Ramani of criminal charges of defamation brought by MJ Akbar, also a former senior editor, in a verdict that has been hailed as a significant victory for the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace, and for women’s rights.
Akbar, then a Union minister and presently a Rajya Sabha member from the Bharatiya Janata Party that leads the central government, had averred that Ramani, in accusing him of sexually harassing her during a job interview in December 1993 through tweets linked to an article she had written a year earlier in 2017 had defamed him.
Ramani’s tweets had come near the start of the #MeToo movement in India in October 2018 The court, however, said that women “cannot be punished for raising” their “voice against sex abuse through the pretext of criminal complaint of defamation”, and that the right of reputation cannot be protected…
