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Journalism of Courage
A senior Air-India executive has sued a British eveninger here for its report claiming the Indian official had sexually harassed a female colleague and was a “serial sex pest”.
In a libel case filed in the High Court here, Captain Ashvini Kumar Sharma said the “grossly defamatory and fundamentally false” front-page article in the Evening Standard, headlined Sex shame of Airline Chief “damaged both my reputation and health”.
Sharma’s lawyer Ian Winter informed the Court that the August 2006 article led to his client being shunned in Britain which he had wanted to make his home with his wife and two grown-up children. “In short, his world fell apart. He was unable to sleep or eat properly and fell into depression. In the following six months, he lost 10 kg in weight and was prescribed Diazepam for anxiety and insomnia,” the lawyer told the court.
A jury heard the article, which appeared shortly before the end of Sharma’s four-year tenure as Air-India’s Regional Director for the UK and Europe.
Police told Sharma that a female ground services employee had made a complaint against him but an investigation saw no charges brought, Winter told the court. Yet the newspaper inferred the airline official was guilty of harassment of such seriousness that it led to his summary dismissal and he only escaped further action because of his political connections, the lawyer said.
