Another law student who interned with the Supreme Court has accused a now-retired judge of sexually harassing her, barely a week after similar charges were levelled by another intern.
The latest allegations were made on a Facebook post on November 11 and reported by a law website, Legally India, on Thursday.
The same website had given the link to the first intern’s blog, describing her ordeal. The Supreme Court has appointed a three-judge panel to inquiry into her allegations and the victim has been asked to record her statement on November 18.
But unlike the first instance, the website this time has not given the link to the Facebook post or identified the woman. When contacted Kian Ganz, who reported both the incidents, told HT: “I got to know about the second intern’s experience with the judge through the Facebook post. However, I wasn’t able to confirm if she wanted to go public.”
The second victim, too, was an intern with the same judge, the website said. HT, however, could not confirm the claims or the allegations independently. The two women can’t be identified for legal reasons.
The excerpts uploaded on Legally India on Thursday quote the second intern as saying she was “at the receiving end of unsolicited sexual advance more than once”. Both the interns knew each other, the report claimed.
“…. we kept attributing all the signs of leeriness to our hypersensitivity... We discussed innocuously said off-colour remarks and dismissed their creepiness because we really respected him [the judge], and the possibility seemed at odds with everything we knew about him, his ideas about feminism, patriarchy, social justice...,” the website quoted from the second intern’s post.
The first intern had alleged that the judge had misbehaved with other women interns as well.
The second intern said as much. “In this case, we spoke to other women... and found out that there was a history to such behaviour.”
“We also alerted some female senior faculty to the incident so that they would ensure that no female student was assigned work with him without being told to be on her guard.”
The website further quotes her as saying “he promised, incidentally, that he would never misbehave with another lady. Maybe it’s naiveté to believe him. Maybe it’s just youthful optimism. Being brave is tougher than it appears on the face of it, no?”
The post then goes on say that the judge “lost his RA’s [research assistants] and got a dressing down from a 23-year-old which should have come from his father.
“Why deprive girls from the chance to work with an illustrious mind because the mind is a little sick? A guy who gets the task would get a savvy CV and a better job opp (opportunity). We didn’t want girls to be left at a disadvantage,” the post, as uploaded on Legally India, read.
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