M J Akbar after landing at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi on October 14. He was in Nigeria when allegations of sexual harassment against him first emerged. (Express Photo/Prem Nath Pandey) M J Akbar after landing at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi on October 14. He was in Nigeria when allegations of sexual harassment against him first emerged. (Express Photo/Prem Nath Pandey)

Pallavi Gogoi, the Chief Business Correspondent of National Public Radio (NPR), Thursday accused former minister M J Akbar of raping her while she was working as the Op-Ed page editor of The Asian Age around two decades ago. In a column in The Washington Post, Gogoi has recounted the alleged sexual assault she faced at the hands of Akbar after she joined the newspaper as a 22-year-old.

The minister later denied the allegations and told news agency ANI that the two were in a consensual relationship which didn’t end on a “best note”. Akbar’s lawyer Sandeep Kapur said that “these [incidents and allegations] are false and expressly denied.” The denial has been added as an editor’s note in The Washington Post column.

Gogoi writes she became the editor of the op-ed page at The Asian Age at 23. “It was a big responsibility at a young age. But I would soon pay a very big price for doing a job I loved,” she writes in The Washington Post column.

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She says “there was never a day when he (Akbar) didn’t shout at one of us at the top of his voice”, adding, “I was mesmerized by his use of language, his turns of phrase, wishing that I could write like he did. So I took all the verbal abuse.”

Gogoi recalls the first time Akbar allegedly assaulted her. “It must have been late spring or summer of 1994, and I had gone into his office — his door was often closed. I went to show him the op-ed page I had created with what I thought were clever headlines. He applauded my effort and suddenly lunged to kiss me. I reeled. I emerged from the office, red-faced, confused, ashamed, destroyed,” she says.

The second incident, she says, happened a few months later in Bombay (now Mumbai). “He called me to his room at the fancy Taj hotel, again to see the layouts. When he again came close to me to kiss me, I fought him and pushed him away. He scratched my face as I ran away, tears streaming down,” she writes in The Washington Post column.

Gogoi says the alleged incident of rape took place one year into her job in Jaipur while she was on an assignment. “In his hotel room, even though I fought him, he was physically more powerful. He ripped off my clothes and raped me.”

She says that “instead of reporting him to the police” she was filled with shame. “I didn’t tell anyone about this then. Would anyone have believed me? I blamed myself. Why did I go to the hotel room?” she writes in The Washington Post column.

The sexual abuse continued with Gogoi further recounting: “What was worse was that after that first time, his grip over me got tighter. I stopped fighting his advances because I felt so helpless. He continued to coerce me. For a few months, he continued to defile me sexually, verbally, emotionally.”

Gogoi further writes that Akbar would “burst into loud rages in the newsroom” if he saw her talking to male colleagues her age. “It was frightening”. She says she was “preyed” on despite finding outstation assignments as far as the US and UK to take her “far away” from him.

When she was a foreign correspondent in the newspaper’s London office, she recalls how Akbar, during a visit, “hit me and went on a rampage, throwing things from the desk at me — a pair of scissors, a paperweight, whatever he could get his hands on”. This was the last incident Gogoi recalls before she quit The Asian Age.

Gogoi’s allegations come two days after Akbar appeared in court to record evidence in his defamation suit against journalist Priya Ramani, the first woman to level sexual harassment allegations against him. Akbar stated that Ramani’s alleged “defamatory articles” on him were a “figment of imagination” and intended to “malign” his reputation.

Also read | Seeking justice in personal capacity, charges false: M J Akbar in court

Ramani’s allegations were reported while Akbar, who was junior minister in the Ministry of External Affairs, was abroad on an assignment. He resigned from his post in the ministry on October 17.

After Ramani, 10 other women levelled similar allegations against him.

Gogoi confided in her friend Tushita (Patel) about the first instance when Akbar tried to kiss her. Patel, incidentally, is among the women who have made sexual harassment allegations against Akbar. She has said that Akbar invited her to his hotel room in 1992 and opened the door dressed “only” in his “underwear”. She has also alleged that Akbar kissed her without her consent on at least two occasions.

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