In its detailed order granting relief to actor Shilpa Shetty from charges including obscenity following an event in 2007 where Hollywood actor Richard Gere had hugged and kissed her, a sessions court in Mumbai has said that there was no evidence of obscenity against her and that she had not kissed but was kissed.
On April 3, the court had dismissed the revision application filed by Rajasthan and Mumbai police against a magistrate court’s order passed in January 2022, which had granted relief to Shetty and cleared her from all charges. The detailed order was made available on Tuesday. The sessions court said that to prosecute a person under section 294 (obscenity) of the Indian Penal Code, an obscene act and annoyance to the person complaining must be proved. “It is an unsaid fact that the present respondent (Shetty) had not kissed but was kissed. Obscenity on her part is not evident. There is nothing on record to elaborate on the prima facie evidence of annoyance by the complainant,” the court said.
Case Brief
Back in 2007, Gere and Shetty were part of an AIDS awareness event and during the event, Gere kissed Shetty on her cheeks in order to spread awareness that kissing was a safe act that could not lead to the transmission of HIV.
A private complaint was filed by a person in Rajasthan, alleging that Shetty had committed an obscene act by not objecting to the kiss. The response filed by Shetty said that the complaint was filed to ‘gain cheap publicity’ and there is no material to charge her with any of the sections she was booked under.
On orders of the Supreme Court, the case was transferred to Mumbai and clubbed with a case filed here in the city. In January 2022, the magistrate court allowed Shetty’s discharge application stating that the charge against her was groundless.
The revision application filed by the police said that kissing in public is an offence and kissing is a ‘bilateral act’. That Shetty did not protest Gere’s kiss, amounted to ‘illegal omission’ on her part, the application said. This was opposed by Shetty through her lawyer Prashant Patil stating that she was being made a ‘victim of malicious proceedings and harassment’ and that the magistrate court’s order was correct and did not require interference.
Additional sessions judge S C Jadhav considered various judgments on what constitutes obscenity. Shetty was also charged with Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act and Information Technology Act on charges of publication and transmission of obscene material.
The prosecution had claimed that Shetty was aware that there were broadcast channels at the event and knew that the act would be telecast, claiming that it showed her ‘mental culpability’.
The court said that no evidence of Shetty having shared or published the said act was produced by the police.
“A woman being groped on the street or touched on a public way or in public transport cannot be termed as accused or participative to an extent of mental culpability and she cannot be held for illegal omission to make her liable for prosecution,” the court said.
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