By now, the Tarun Tejpal (Tehelka) case has probably crossed your feed one too many times. But read it again, because this judgment is a masterclass in how a country still finds new ways to name, shame, and blame a woman for surviving sexual assault.
You know the script by heart.
Don’t wear something that revealing if you don’t want the attention.
Why bother with make-up if you didn’t want to be noticed?
Why were you out that late if you knew it wasn’t safe?
Why did you reply to his messages if you were so uncomfortable?
Why didn’t you say no sooner, sounds like you led him on.
It’s the same five questions, recycled endlessly, dressed up as “concern” and “safety advice”, while the men who do the harming walk free, protected by parents living in a fantasy where “my son could never.” That delusion is the problem. No child is born a predator. It’s silence, upbringing, unexamined trauma, and the conversations we never have that build one. Without early intervention and attention, that is a path almost anyone could be pushed down.
This case is simply the most visible version of a pattern that plays out everywhere: a woman fighting for twelve years, ostracised, interrogated about every choice she’s ever made. Forced to defend her morality before anyone will even admit she was raped. Layer in the power dynamics at play here, and the case gets exponentially harder to unpack. As a POSH consultant, I have seen this constantly. Majority of the cases are quid pro quo, where the survivor isn’t just carrying the trauma of the incident itself. She’s also fighting the second battle: being blamed for somehow having made him “comfortable enough” to do it.
To understand just how invasive, pervasive, and traumatic this cycle really is, it’s worth sitting with the arguments raised in this case, and the observations made by the Hon’ble Goa High Court.
| Accused | Tarun Tejpal, journalist, Founder-Editor of Tehelka magazine |
| Complainant | A Tehelka employee, she’d joined as an intern and was, by this point, Principal Correspondent |
| Venue | ThinkFest, a festival held at the Grand Hyatt |
| Dates | November 7 and 8, 2013 |
What Happened
On November 7, the Complainant and the Respondent escorted a guest, Robert De Niro (yes, the American actor and producer) up to his room, then headed back down. Minutes later, the Respondent suggested they go back up to wake him. Alone with her in the lift, he allegedly forced himself on her, kissing her against her will, and subjecting her to further non-consensual contact, including penetration with his tongue and fingers, despite her attempts to resist. All while making sure the doors stayed shut. When the lift finally opened, she straightened her clothes and they left by the stairs. She reminded him she was his employee, and his daughter’s friend. His alleged response: that this was “the easiest way to keep the job.”
The next day, he told her they needed to retrieve something from the same room, and turned down her offer to go alone. In the lift again, he began kissing her; she pushed him away. He touched her face in response. When she turned toward the door to get away from him, he allegedly violated her physically again adding a remark about her body. After a brief detour out of and back into the lift, he groped her just as the doors opened on the ground floor.
The Aftermath
After the first incident, she told four of her colleagues. She called her partner, then in Ethiopia. Her colleagues were shaken, some offered to resign in solidarity.
After the second, she called her partner again, and told the Respondent’s daughter, who wasn’t surprised, and said that she’d seen her father do this to someone else when she was just 13. Word spread to friends, family, colleagues.
When confronted, the Respondent reportedly dismissed it as “drunken banter”, and criticized her for telling his daughter.
She then wrote formally to Suparna Chaudhary, Tehelka’s Managing Editor, naming what had happened: sexual assault, wrongful confinement, restraint.
He responded with two apologies – one formal, one informal. In the formal apology, he admitted to a “shameful lapse of judgement” that led him to attempt a sexual liaison with her despite her reluctance. The informal one echoed the same acknowledgment and regret.
In the light of the above events, lets look at some of the arguments made by the defense, the prosecution and the court’s observation regarding the same –
| Defense Argument | Prosecution Argument | Court Observation | |
| Could the lift doors be kept shut? | The prosecution never explained how he supposedly kept the doors shut. The Complainant said in her email that he kept pressing buttons to keep the lift “in circuit” but could not clarify which button and how many times. Further, the IT manager and lift technician both said the doors simply can’t be held shut like that. | The lift technician explained that after 3-4 minutes of no use, the lift goes into “sleep mode” but only if nobody presses the call button outside. He also confirmed the doors normally stay open for 4 seconds, but pressing the close button shuts them faster. | The court found it was, in fact, possible to keep the doors shut, and that it was unreasonable to expect the Complainant to remember exactly which buttons were pressed, or how many times. |
| Did the incident even happen in the lift? | The two entered the lift, got off by mistake on the 1st floor, walked the corridor, came back, rode to the 2nd floor, then took the stairs down, all in under two minutes. That leaves no time for an assault. The investigating officer never collected 1st-floor corridor CCTV, which the defense says would have backed this version up. | This is essentially an alibi defense (plea of alibi is a legal defense where an accused person claims they were at another place at the time of a crime), which shifts the burden onto the defense to prove it. Missing footage isn’t proof of anything. And even if their version is true, there’s no explanation for why they’d go straight to the stairs on the 2nd floor without ever trying to reach Mr. De Niro’s room, the reason they supposedly went up there in the first place. | CCTV showed the Respondent and Mr. De Niro going up together in one lift, then the Respondent and Complainant coming back down to the lobby. Minutes later, he pulled her by the hand into a different lift, (one for which hotel had no CCTV) that went from the ground floor to the 2nd floor. On the landing, she was seen adjusting her dress and underwear as she followed him. They both took the stairs down, and she was seen tying her hair back as she left the lobby. |
| Character assassination | The defence brought up her past relationships, WhatsApp messages, emails, and photos into the open court, in an attempt to paint her as an “immoral woman.” | Her then partner, now husband, was questioned about her relationship with a man named Danny, whether they’d used drugs, whether their relationship was sexually exclusive, whether she’d stayed with him at Ashvem. He was shown private, intimate messages between him and the Complainant from before their marriage. He was even shown CCTV footage of her at the event and asked if she “looked normal.” Yet through all of it, his account of what she’d told him about the assault never wavered. | The court didn’t hold back here. It noted that nearly half of the 1,000-page cross-examination wasn’t about the assault at all, it was about her. Her past relationships. Her old social media posts. How she’d reacted to trauma, publicly and privately. She was asked, over and over, to describe her exact position during each act, when he kissed her, when he lifted her dress, when he assaulted her. Not to clarify anything, but to catch her in a slip. The incident happened in 2013. She gave this testimony between 2018 and 2021. Five years later, still being asked to relive it, not to establish truth, but to unravel it. And then the court said the quiet part plainly: even if a woman is accused of “immoral character,” that gives no one the right to rape her. Citing State of Maharashtra v. Madhukar Narayan Mardikar, it held that even a woman of so called “easy virtue” is entitled to her privacy, and no one has the right to violate her. |
| Not a “perfect victim” | She said she stayed back in Goa to process the trauma, but a photographer’s pictures show her with friends, wine glass in hand, looking calm and composed. The day after the assault, she asked the Respondent to pose for a photo with Robert De Niro, and was seen having light, easy exchanges in the WhatsApp group. | How a survivor copes afterward says nothing about whether the assault happened. | The Trial Court proceeded on the notion that a victim of sexual assault must behave in a stereotypical manner. The “perfect victim,” or “ideal victim”: an unspoken cultural archetype where a person is believed and granted legitimacy only if they show absolute vulnerability, complete innocence, and total passivity. By expecting the survivor to be constantly miserable or visibly broken, the Trial Court ignored the reality of human coping mechanisms. The “perfect victim” is a myth. Credibility must be evaluated on facts, not on whether a survivor fits a narrow cultural mould. |
| Respondent’s apologies | The apologies were obtained through inducement and coercion, and should be excluded as extra-judicial confessions. | The apology itself is an admission of guilt. Had the Complainant been lying, the Respondent would have simply denied the accusation, not apologised. | As Editor-in-Chief of Tehelka, the Respondent was a powerful figure. He claims he barely knew the Complainant before she joined. Yet he sent two emails admitting guilt and apologising, which is inconsistent with a claim of denial. His personal apology describes her negatively as flirtatious, sexually provocative and describes their interactions as secretive. If he truly sent the email only under pressure, why did he also send a formal apology, and then step down as Editor-in-Chief for six months? The apology was also circulated widely among Tehelka staff. If his claim of complete denial is true, it isn’t believable that he would be pressured by his own sister and managing editor into apologising for something he says never happened. |
| Inconsistencies | There was a delay in filing the FIR. The complaint email was sent with her friends marked on it, suggesting she’d actively deliberated with witnesses over her account. Her November 16 email named Nikhil Agarwal as the first person she told, but his name was later omitted, without explanation. She initially described it as attempted rape, though the Respondent was ultimately charged with rape. | The victim was consistent throughout her deposition, and her evidence is of sterling quality. Even if some portion of the evidence has gaps, established precedent holds that a conviction can stand if the remaining evidence sufficiently proves guilt. | A woman subjected to sexual violence is often slow and hesitant to disclose her plight. In the present case, the victim has stood firm in her testimony despite invasive cross-examination. As many as seven witnesses have corroborated her account. We have no hesitation in believing her testimony. |
The uphill journey to justice isn’t over for this “imperfect victim.” The decision will certainly be challenged in the Supreme Court. But for now, she gets to hold onto something she was denied for twelve years: – being believed. The Hon’ble Goa High Court’s observations are a hard-won silver lining after over a decade of reliving the assault, and having to prove herself in court, and outside it.
Why didn’t you seem more traumatized? Why did you go on with your life? Why weren’t you the perfect victim?
I often find myself in awe that she had the strength to withstand all this – the shaming, the blaming, the five years of being asked to relive her own rape in granular detail. But that strength is rare, and it shouldn’t have to be the price of justice. Most survivors don’t have it in them to bear this kind of scrutiny. So, they settle. They withdraw their complaints. Some don’t survive it at all.
And in every single one of those outcomes, the victim loses while everyone else’s life, including the perpetrator’s, simply continues.
