the judgement of the Goa trial court which acquitted former Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal on May 21, 2021.
On page 509 of its judgement the Goa district court, while acquitting Tehelka founder Tarun Tejpal, has said, “the IO didn’t supply a copy of unedited CCTV footage of Block 7 to the accused (Tarun Tejpal) due to which the accused had to move to the honourable Supreme Court. The honourable court had directed the prosecution to provide clone copies of the unedited CCTV footage to the accused, which was not done for two years and a clone copy of the CCTV footage was finally handed over to the accused in 2016’.

Two important points emerge from this observation of the court. One, it would not have been easy for Tarun Tejpal to defend himself in the court. Second, what actually was in the CCTV footage, that the accused went all the way to the SC to get a copy? Add to this the fact that despite the SC’s directive the accused didn’t get a clone copy of the footage for two full years and the matter becomes even more intriguing.

It tries to go beyond the headlines, selective information, misinformation and various agendas to examine the judgement of the Goa trial court which acquitted former Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal on May 21, 2021.
It's no secret that in our country the prosecutrix of a rape case often undergoes extreme hardships. This has little to do with the laws but the attitude of law enforcement agencies and the overall attitude of society in such cases. The Tarun Tejpal case however is different in this regard: in this case, the establishment stood firmly with the lady in question. The fact that the Goa police acted on its own and registered a suo motu FIR against Tarun J Tejpal might give us a little idea of that.

Then there was former Goa CM Manohar Parrikar who also exhibited keen interest in the case and held several press conferences with the media.

In her testimony before the district court, noted in the verdict, the Investigating Officer in charge of this case, Sunita Sawant ‘admitted that deputy SP, Sammy Tavares, SP OR Kudtarkar and DIGP O P Mishra were directing and supervising the investigation’ (Page 395).

Sawant has the reputation of a tough police officer and that is probably why Goa police handed over the investigation to her despite her being the formal complainant in this case. Even when there was another female officer, Sudiksha Nayak, in the Goa police’ crime branch department who could have been entrusted with the investigation. This created the rather singular situation in which the person filing the complaint was also the one investigating it (Page 506-507).

The Goa political establishment did not lose any interest in the case seven and a half years later and despite the change of guard Chief Minister PB Sawant himself announced that the State will appeal the verdict in the High Court barely hours after the lower court acquitted Tejpal.

And barely a day after a copy of the judgement was released, not only did the Goa government filed a plea in the High Court, they were represented by no less than the country's second-highest law officer, solicitor general Tushar Mehta.

A side note, but one that illuminates the unlikely nature of events in this case: in 2014, while Tarun J Tejpal was in judicial custody another case was suddenly registered against him, alleging he was forging a plan to escape from the jail. Tarun Tejpal’s family alleges that this case was registered purely in an attempt to deny him bail. The accusation gains some ground given that 7 years down the line no one seems to have the faintest idea about what happened to that case.

But now, to the all-important CCTV footage. A cursory reading of the verdict makes it clear that whatever the CCTV footage contained, played a crucial role in Tarun J Tejpal’s acquittal.

The prosecutrix had alleged that Tarun J Tejpal had tried to outrage her modesty at Goa’s Grand Hyatt on two consecutive nights, November 7 and 8, 2013, during Tehelka’s annual Think festival.

The prosecutrix’s assigned duties were to chaperone Hollywood megastar Robert De Niro and his daughter Drena during their time at the event. The prosecutrix alleged that on the night of November 7, a day prior to the start of the festival, Tarun J Tejpal accompanied her to see the De Niros off to their rooms after the dinner. De Niro’s room was on the second floor of the two-storied Block 7 of Grand Hyatt hotel.

The prosecutrix, in her statement, stated that they (Tejpal and her) were on their way back (after seeing de Niro off at his suite) but as she tried to exit the lift on the ground floor, Tarun Tejpal grabbed her and pulled her back into the lift. “Let us go wake up Bob (Robert De Niro),” the prosecutrix quotes Tarun J Tejpal as saying.

Once inside the lift, she says, Tarun Tejpal kept pushing random buttons on the lift panel to “keep the lift in circuit without stopping anywhere and without letting the doors open on any of the floors.

In her allegations, the prosecutrix went on to state that when the lift finally came to a halt on the ground floor after two minutes and the doors opened, she immediately dashed out of the lift blinking back tears, deeply distressed, and thereafter left immediately for Goa International Centre (GIC) where the Tehelka staff were staying.

Upon reaching GIC she confided in three of her colleagues and told them everything that had happened with her at Grand Hyatt, her statement said.

It is important to know here that the Grand Hyatt did not have CCTV cameras inside their lifts. However, there were cameras in the lobbies outside the lifts on each floor and this footage therefore would have answers to some of the vital questions related to the case: were they inside the lift for two minutes? Did the lift doors actually remain closed for the full two minutes? Did Tarun J Tejpal actually grab the prosecutrix and pull her back into the lift? And when the two of them finally exited the lift, what was the nature of their interaction?

Another important question the footage would have naturally had answers to was whether Tarun Tejpal and the prosecutrix left the lift on any of the floors. This question was rendered all the more important because, in his defence, Tarun J Tejpal had maintained that the two of them had accidentally exited the lift on the first floor instead of the second floor since all floors looked the same. This would mean that they were not inside the lift for the two minutes in question and were there for less than half a minute, in two separate parts.

In other words, the utmost importance of the footage of Block 7 of the Grand Hyatt stands established beyond question. If Tarun J Tejpal had committed the crime the footage would have nailed him and if he was innocent, as he claimed, the footage was equally necessary for him to prove his claim.

Yet, Goa police — the complainant in the case — seized the footage only from the ground and second floors, not the first floor. The court observes that despite being of such crucial importance, the footage from the first floor was either destroyed or not submitted to the court. (page 421, 507).

The court has also observed that Tarun Tejpal in his defence had mentioned exiting the lift on the first floor, and even to prove his narrative false, the first-floor footage would have been all-important.

What makes things interesting is that the investigating officer Sunita Sawant along with multiple other police officials have in their testimony actually confessed to having watched the first-floor footage in November 2013 (page 419). Curiously every one of the officials who acknowledged viewing first-floor footage claimed that they could not remember what was on it.

When it became clear that first-floor footage had existed and been viewed by the police, the lawyer for the prosecution argued that it was possible the footage had been destroyed in the property room of the court, for it might not have been stored properly.

The court, while not accepting this argument of the prosecution, said in his judgement that if that was the case then all the footage would have been destroyed and not only of the first floor, that too the footage of only a few days (20 August 2013 onwards). (Pages 433, 435).

The court observed that while the IO directed her officers to seize the DVR for the ground and second floors, she did not ask them to seize the first-floor footage. The court further observes that the police failed to seal the DVR room of Block 7 at Grand Hyatt; they did not seize the footage in time; and they failed to generate the crucial hash value for the footage, which ensures that it can not be tampered with. (pages 423, 507, 509).

Moreover, the information regarding the confiscation of the DVR was skipped from the charge sheet as well as the case diary. The investigating officer told the court that she had no idea how that happened.

On the other hand, Tejpal issued a press release on November 22, 2013 itself, demanding that the related CCTV footage be made public. This, of course, was never done and only selective footage was made available to him and the court.

Moreover, the court has, in its judgment, observed that the prosecution objected to the request of the defendant to cross-examine the Investigating Officer while playing the DVR containing the footage by saying that ‘the DVR is not functional’. When a further request was made by the accused to get either the DVR repaired or obtain a DVR from the Grand Hyatt the public prosecution opposed this suggestion as well. Why did prosecution do that is anybody’s guess (Page 433).
. . . . .

Let us now talk about the footage that was actually produced before the court.

The first revelation: the footage from November 7 shows that Tejpal did not pull the prosecutrix back into the lift on the ground floor, after seeing off Robert De Niro as alleged by the prosecutrix.

A quick but important digression: the prosecutrix told the court that Tejpal had insisted on accompanying her to see De Niro to his suite, given it was the first day of the event. This detail was not part of her initial statement.

This claim of the prosecution was to show that Tejpal was using De Niro as an excuse and the real motive was to accompany the prosecutrix. However, Prosecution Witness 43 (PW43) Prawal Srivastava has testified that he was standing with the accused when the prosecutrix came up to them and asked Tejpal to accompany her. (Page 249, 251).

Baseline logic here says that if Tejpal had in fact intended to molest the prosecutrix and was using De Niro as an excuse to accompany her, wouldn’t he do so the moment they entered the lift together on the second floor after leaving De Niro in his suite rather than waiting for the lift to come down and open on the ground floor and then pull her back inside?

As it turns out, footage from November 7 proves that Tejpal did not in fact pull the prosecutrix back into the lift as they exited the lift. Instead, they both exited the building entirely and spent almost 6 minutes in conversation outside the block before they went back inside block 7 and re-entered the lift. While prosecutrix concealed this segment entirely in her complaint and several statements, she finally accepted in the court that they had been in conversation outside before re-entering the block. This indicates that the return to the block and the act of getting into the lift again might have triggered by what they were discussing during those six minutes (page 249, 263).

To return to the allegations and the CCTV footage: in multiple statements to the police as well as before the court, the prosecutrix repeatedly emphasised that ‘Tarun was simply pressing buttons on the lift’s panel to make the elevator stay in circuit, preventing it from stopping anywhere, and for the doors to open.'

However, two prosecution witnesses - representative of the elevator company, Ameen Jabbar and Grand Hyatt security officer Priyan K S - testified in the court that keeping the lift moving up and down like that (without the doors opening) is not possible (Page 385). The court also made an observation in its judgement that the investigating officer did not even bother to check whether the lift could be made to go up and down without its doors opening, neither before registering the FIR nor after the case was lodged (page 520).

This claim was the foundation of the prosecutrix’s allegation of assault; that the lift was prevented from opening, that she was trapped by Tejpal inside it; that she had no way of getting out.

As it was established that this was not possible, the police once again paid visits to the Grand Hyatt Hotel in November 2020, seven years after the incident.

Almost immediately following this, the prosecutrix (in December 2020) changed her statement in the court.(Page 512, 518). Now, she suddenly claimed that Tejpal pressed only one button to keep the lift moving and doors closed and not multiple buttons. She also changed her claim that the lift had been in constant motion to say she didn’t know whether the lift was moving or stationary. But she remained firm on one thing - the doors did not open anywhere for two minutes.

However, during cross-examination of the technical witnesses, it was also established that the doors of the lift couldn’t be kept closed even by pressing the emergency button inside the lift. (Page 396).

Close observation of the footage of the ground floor and second floor during the two minutes of the alleged incident also shows that the lift doors opened at least twice on the ground floor only. Because the footage of the first floor was not available, it was not possible to say how many times the lift doors opened on the first floor, the court noted in its judgement. (page 389).

This can have only two interpretations: either the prosecutrix and accused were inside the lift when the doors of the lift opened during those two minutes, or they were not inside the lift at all.

This is where the court took note and examined Tejpal’s version of what had occurred. It was his account that the prosecutrix and he had exited the lift on the first floor instead of the second by mistake and walked to the corner room they thought was the de Niro suite, only to realise on getting there that they were on the wrong floor.

Tejpal’s version of events to play out roughly matched the two minutes in question. If they did exit the lift on the first floor, walk to the corner and recognise their error, walk back to the lift and go up to the second floor, they would have taken around two minutes to reach from the ground to the second floor. (page 443).

But there was still more, in terms of what the CCTV footage went on to show.

The prosecutrix had said that when the lift did finally open on the ground floor, she had dashed out of the lift (changing the floor from ground to second in her subsequent statements) while Tejpal followed her and kept asking, “What happened?” She also said that she was visibly upset and blinking back tears at that point.

The CCTV footage, however, shows a stark counter-narrative. The footage of the second floor shows Tejpal was the first one to leave the lift and not the prosecutrix. She calmly follows Tejpal out and they take the stairs to the ground floor. While first-floor footage of this time is unavailable, the ground floor footage half a minute later also shows Tejpal walking a little ahead while the two of them come down the stairs and walk out, talking, as they exit Block 7's lobby.

The footage becomes even starker when viewed against the allegations on November 8, the day the prosecutrix said Tejpal tried to molest her again.

Before that, though, there was one more extremely significant omission from the prosecutrix’s narrative of November 7.

The prosecutrix, in her statement, had maintained that her friends and co-workers at Tehelka, Ishaan Tankha, Shougat Dasgupta and G Vishnu, were the first ones she confided in soon after she reached Goa International Centre, where the Tehelka staff was staying. Following this, on November 15, she also wrote an email to these friends and attached a document with a detailed chronological account of the alleged incident. Because Ishaan was unable to open the attachment, she sent him a fresh mail the next day, November 16. This email was sent to the prosecutrix’ stepmother also and it was also the draft of the letter that was emailed to Tehelka managing editor Shoma Chaudhry on November 18 as her official complaint. There were multiple issues related to these email but police selectively seized only a few of them only. (pages 282, 286).

It is the email, which she wrote to his co-workers on Nov 5, 2013, that holds evidence of a very crucial omission. In her email, the prosecutrix mentioned spotting a friend Nikhil Agrawal (DW4 or Defense Witness 4) standing at the entrance to the lawn near Block 7 when she exited the block with Tejpal. According to her email, she immediately asked her friend DW4 to keep standing there and talk to her until Tarun Tejpal left from there. She stated in her email that she didn’t inform him about what happened to her moments ago. (page 258).

This would mean that by her own account, DW4 was the first witness since she met him barely a minute or two after the alleged incident. Yet, the prosecutrix deleted all mention to him after that one email - from her subsequent complaints and every statement she made in the court.

In cross-examination, confronted with this draft and reference to the first witness, the prosecutrix finally admitted that she had deleted DW4 from her account, and said she did so for some reasons. She refused, however, to clarify those reasons. (pages 258-260).

In the law, the first person a prosecutrix meets after rape or molestation is extremely important to the case, particularly if this person is met soon after the alleged incident. Such a person is called a “contemporaneous witness”. Yet, as the verdict notes, this fact was willingly not disclosed to the court and the victim removed all references pertaining to Nikhil.
The court also noted that the IO, despite seizing documents that referenced this witness by name, and knowing fully well that he was the only contemporaneous witness in the whole case, neither tried to contact or question him nor did she ask the prosecutrix why she had deleted all references to this witness in her official complaint.

This crucial omission didn’t end there. The friend in question himself reached out to the police via a letter and asserted that there were some facts he wanted to add to the case; yet, despite receiving this letter from him, the Investigating Officer failed to question him. Confronted with this, she maintained that she did not question the witness on the directions of her superiors in the police department (page 271). Later, he was made a witness by the defence side.

The court has observed that the testimony of this friend of the prosecutrix, DW4, was exactly the opposite of the prosecutrix’s claims. DW4 in his testimony recalled meeting the prosecutrix on November 7 while standing in the garden with his fiancee.

“I saw them coming from the poolside towards the garden. Tejpal moved towards the bar while she came towards me,” DW4 told the court, “She was excited and had a smile on her face.”

DW4 told the court that the prosecutrix motioned him to come near her and told him that she had been flirting with Tejpal. She was smiling and did not look perturbed at all, DW4 testified (pages 260, 262).

Interestingly, the next day, the prosecutrix exchanged multiple messages with DW4. Two of the messages from her to him read: “But thank God I met you,” and “Obviously, you won’t tell anyone about this.”

The court also notes that the prosecutrix lied about her exact relationship with DW4. She claimed he was only an acquaintance and not a good friend; however, verdict says that there were a total of 53,176 messages exchanged between them on Whatsapp on the phone seized by the police. When DW4 was asked about their friendship, he ratified their extreme closeness. But it is strange that despite meeting him within seconds and being extremely close to him, the prosecutrix did not tell him anything about the incident. On the other hand, she had never communicated with Shougat Dasgupta on Whatsapp and had barely 10 messages exchanged with Ishaan Tankha and under 500 with G Vishnu, yet she chose to return to her hotel and then talk to these three “witnesses” two hours later inter room. (page 134, 253)
. . . . .

Back to November 8, the second of the two alleged incidents. In her complaint to Tehelka and statement to the police, the prosecutrix recalls Tejpal asking her to accompany him to Robert De Niro’s room. “We need to get something from there,” she quotes Tejpal as saying, as she walked into the lobby of Block 7.

Scared that she was being asked to accompany him to De Niro’s empty room, she insisted she would go and get whatever Tejpal needed from the room by herself, she stated. At this point, as per the prosecutrix, Tejpal held her hand and dragged her into the lift where he molested her again (page 191).

She further alleged that when they reached the second floor, he said to her, “the universe was telling us something,” to which she replied that she was going down by the stairs and not the lift. Tejpal however did not let her and “sensing her hysteria”, pulled her back into the lift. “He was comfortable manhandling me by now,” she wrote in her complaint.
Here is what the CCTV footage for this sequence of events shows.

On the ground floor, at 08:10 pm, Tejpal is walking toward the lift while the prosecutrix is walking behind him. Near the lift, Tejpal bumps into well-known photographer Rohit Chawla. Tejpal and Chawla talk a bit, and Tejpal gestures to Chawla that he would “call him” and walks into the now-waiting lift, followed by the prosecutrix who waited for him to finish his conversation. Contrary to the claim of being grabbed by the wrist and pulled in, Tejpal here doesn’t touch her at all. (page 444).

Twenty seconds later, the footage from the second-floor camera shows that the lift opens and the prosecutrix comes out followed by Tejpal, but barely two steps out, Tejpal turns around and enters the lift again. At this point, the prosecutrix who has gone a few steps realises he has gone back into the lift - and she dashes to run into the lift after him. This is the moment which in her narrative she describes as him manhandling her and preventing her from leaving the lift. But the footage shows no physical contact between them (page 445).

So stark is the contradiction between what’s happening on screen and what the prosecutrix’s account says on both days that the verdict noted, “What the prosecutrix has claimed and what the screens show are completely opposite of each other and still the Investigating Officer didn’t even question the prosecutrix on the same”. (page 520).

The stark contradictions, the concealing of facts, the omission of crucial witnesses and episodes, and the multiple changes of narrative, led the court to conclude that the prosecutrix could not be considered a witness of “sterling quality” on whose sole deposition Tejpal could have been pronounced guilty. (page 229).

The court also noted the absence of medical evidence in the case. When the prosecutrix was asked about this in court, she maintained that the police never asked her to get medically examined or she would have done so. The documentary record however shows that she refused the medical examination on paper (page 47).
. . . . .

This is a case that throws up almost countless dimensions for greater examination. Let us limit ourselves to two.

One, the role of the police in this case. While lacunae in the investigation have been referred to above, it is barely the tip of the iceberg. The verdict lists over 40 counts of police failure in this investigation.

The second and much-touted aspect relates to the apparent censure of the prosecutrix by the judge for her behaviour, something that has triggered extreme outrage on social media.
A close look at the judgement alongside the complaint and the multiple statements of the prosecutrix place this in their proper context. Various social media posts seem to suggest the judge has called out the prosecutrix for not behaving like a victim. Whereas the judge’s observations seem to be in response to the victim’s own statements about how she was feeling, acting, responding, in her testimony in court. The verdict notes the contrast between the prosecutrix’s claimed actions versus actual actions recorded on camera, in photographs and as described by various witnesses.

The prosecutrix’s narrative speaks of being terrified, of avoiding Mr Tarun J Tejpal, of being scared to be anywhere in the hotel for fear of being accosted by him again (Page 468). Multiple photographs over the course of the three days of the event show her smilingly posing for pictures with the accused, Mr Robert De Niro and other persons, of laughing moments immediately after the alleged second incident in conversation with Tehelka managing editor Shoma Chaudhury, of being visibly at ease. Witnesses recalled hearing her call out to Mr Tejpal to come to join a photograph she was taking with Robert de Niro on November 10, 2013. One of the prosecution witnesses even noted that she looked happier than both Mr De Niro and Mr Tejpal in that photograph. After the alleged incidents she also sent a few messages to the accused telling him about where she was without him asking her to do so. (page 489).

The court also examined WhatsApp and CCTV evidence that show the prosecutrix on two nights returned to Robert de Niro’s room late at night and detailed playfully her encounters with him to her friends on WhatsApp, which included Tarun Tejpal’s daughter, in words and tones that don’t match the narrative of being fearful and traumatised after being sexually assaulted just a few hours before. In fact, on the night of November 9, she chose not to return to her own hotel at all but instead took a key to a production room from someone on staff and stayed back at Grand Hyatt itself. (Page 469)

Prosecutrix told the court that as she was about to leave for the airport after the Think Festival was over, she realised that her mother was staying in her flat in Mumbai and three of her (mother’s) associates were also coming to stay with her. Moreover, she also wanted to deal with the trauma caused by the sexual assault on her. So she decided to stay back in Goa for a few days.

But the court observed, citing the evidence, that the prosecutrix planned to stay in Goa with her friends pre and post Think Festival much in advance and the alleged incidents of November 7 and 8 in no way changed her or her mother’s plans. She reached Mumbai a day after her mother left the city (Page 491, 500).

It is the sheer stark contradiction of her claims and her actions, as well as so many crucial omissions, that the court noted while not finding the prosecutrix a consistent or reliable witness on whose solo verdict it could base a conviction.

There were multiple other contradictions the court took into account but it was not on these factors that Tejpal was acquitted. It was the CCTV footage, the implausibility of the lift operation as per the prosecutrix’s allegations that were the main reasons behind his acquittal.
. . . . .

About the role of the police in this case, the court has commented at such length that more than one write-ups can be compiled on it. The court’s disappointment with the police can be gauged by the fact that the IO did not even match the claims made by the complainant with the CCTV footage of the hotel on November 26, at the time of recording her statement, even when she already watched the footage herself. The IO didn’t ask the prosecutrix about how she got to know that she was in the lift for 2 minutes, on November 7. The police did not ask her about the buttons pressed by Tejpal to stop the doors of the lift from opening and they did not bother to confiscate the mails she had sent to her co-workers on November 15. It was her first statement regarding the incident and of utmost importance to the case. None of the mails the police produced in the court was downloaded from Tehelka’s server. The police did not record Nikhil Agrawal’s statement, nor Tia Tejpal’s or Kartikeya from the production team who helped the prosecutrix stay in Grand Hyatt on the intervening night of November 8-9. Police didn’t ask the complainant about the Nikhil and did not even produce a production manual of the Mitsubishi lift in the court.
. . . . .

And finally, about the two emails, Tejpal had written to Tehelka staff and the prosecutrix on November 20, 2013?

The first of these was an “official” apology (written to Tehelka staff) that documentary evidence shows was written by Tehelka managing editor Shoma Chaudhury after the prosecutrix demanded this apology for ‘closure’ of the complaint. The judge notes that multiple Supreme Court judgements make clear that ‘confessions’ demanded under threat or under the inducement of closure of a complaint, or demands for confessions that require an accused to ‘self-incriminate’ are inadmissible in a court of law.

The judge also notes that the second of the two emails, titled ‘Personal’ by Tarun Tejpal does not make any admittance of what the prosecutrix is alleging. The judge also notes that multiple Supreme Court judgements make clear no ‘confession’ can be read selectively to omit other parts of the document that contradict or deny the allegation. “If the mail titled “personal” is looked at in the light of the Supreme court decision, there is absolutely no admission of confession of any incriminating fact even remotely suggesting sexual assault by the accused,” the court maintains. (Page 300)
. . . . .

And at the end a small, seemingly insignificant detail but one that was responsible for a lot of public rage against Tejpal: the repeated claim by the prosecutrix that Tejpal was a father figure to her, someone she knew and trusted since childhood, which is why her anguish and devastation was bigger, and why Tejpal’s crime was even more heinous.But an email by the prosecutrix on Tarun Tejpal’s 50th birthday (in March 2013, the same year when the alleged incident took place) shows that this was not true. In this mail, she clearly wrote that when she met Tarun Tejpal for the first time, she was already working for Tehelka (page 110).