The right to privacy and the press’ freedom of expression had to be carefully balanced, said the Bombay high court yesterday (July 29) while hearing Shilpa Shetty’s Rs. 25 crore defamation suit filed against 29 parties. Justice Gautam Patel, hearing the case, noted that just because someone was a public figure, that person was not deemed to have sacrificed his right to privacy. He also refused to put a blanket restraint on the reportage as, he added, reporting something which the crime branch or police sources had said could never be defamatory. The court asked some media platforms to take down what they had reported about Shilpa Shetty regarding husband Raj Kundra’s pornography case.
Shilpa Shetty, whose husband, Raj Kundra, has been arrested in the pornography film case, on 28th July filed a defamation suit in the Bombay high court against 29 parties including web portals, media outlets and unknown people to restrain them from posting, reposting, circulating any derogatory and false content in print or audio visual formats and to prevent any further invasion of her privacy. Her plea said that private details of her and Kundra’s life were being unnecessarily dragged by defendants, in the public domain by distorting facts and twisting them and reporting incorrectly and falsely, and defaming her through such articles and videos.
The actress alleged that she had lost business opportunities because of this, and many companies had terminated their contracts/deals with her, resulting in huge monetary losses and humiliation as well as severely impacting her emotionally. The application sought orders to also remove the list of articles and posts from their respective websites and from social media platforms too.