Third chargesheet filed against Prajwal Revanna for ‘repeated rape’ of zilla parishad member

In the chargesheet filed on Friday, Revanna is accused of raping the victim for the first time at a quarters allotted for MPs in Hassan when she had gone to meet him with a request to accommodate students from her constituency in a girls hostel.

Revanna allegedly used a firearm to threaten the victim and warned her of danger to her husband’s life if she refused to agree to the demands for sexual favours. The former MP allegedly recorded a video of the first attack and used it to blackmail the victim. He also allegedly made repeated video calls to sexually harass the victim.

Revanna is alleged to have destroyed the mobile phone on which he recorded the sexual attacks on the woman ZP member.

Among the key evidence in the case, however, is a report of a panel of doctors after comparison and analysis of the parts of the accused person’s body with images seen in the videos recorded by the accused of his sexual attacks on the victim.

The charges against Prajwal Revanna

Revanna, 33, has been charged under Indian Penal Code Section 376(2) (n) for repeated rape, for criminal intimidation under Section 506, for sexual harassment by demanding sexual favours under Section 354(A) (1) (ii), for assault of a woman under Section 354(B), for voyeurism under Section 354 (C), and for destruction of evidence under Section 201, plus for video recording and sharing the incidents under Section 66 (E) of Information Technology Act, 2008.

The chargesheet filed on Friday is the third by the SIT in the span of a month with regards to multiple cases of sexual assault by the former Hassan JDS MP which emerged in April this year after videos of the sexual assaults got leaked in the public domain ahead of the April 26 Lok Sabha polls in Hassan where Revanna was the NDA candidate.

Earlier on September 9, the SIT filed a charge sheet against Rrevanna for multiple sexual assaults on a woman who was employed as a domestic worker at the home of the MP’s family. Prior to that, a chargesheet was filed on August 23 for the sexual assault on a cook who worked for the Revanna family and the alleged sexual harassment of the cook’s daughter.

Revanna, against whom charges of rape emerged at the end of April following the leak of explicit videos and images through pen drives distributed in Hassan, was arrested on May 31 following his return from Germany.

An SIT was constituted by the Karnataka government to probe the sexual assault videos that were allegedly accessed from the MP’s phone by a car driver and leaked to political rivals of the MP. As many as 2,900 files with videos and images from sexual encounters of the MP were found on pen drives that were leaked.

The former MP has been in prison since May 31. Three cases of rape and one case of sexual harassment have been filed by women who were allegedly assaulted by Revanna. The SIT has included the accounts of some women who were victims of the former MP as witness statements in the three chargesheets.