With his thick framed black glasses perched on top of his bald pate, Tarun Tejpal, once a celebrated journalist who edited the even more celebrated magazine Tehelka, ran into a group of reporters shortly after the court convicted him of raping a junior colleague in 2013, and declared that he should have been acquitted 10 times over. “They are after me with sentiment of revenge for the last 13 years. I have full faith in the judiciary that there will be judges who will see the truth. We will present the evidence in public. There is so much evidence that I should have been acquitted 10 times over,” he told the reporters right after he was convicted. Around mid-afternoon, the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court sentenced him to 10 years in jail. Tejpal has asked for eight weeks to surrender. The court highlighted that Tejpal was the Editor-in-Chief of Tehelka while the complainant was a junior journalist, giving him significant professional authority over her. Tejpal, while speaking to reporters, cited the case of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who are in jail in the 2020 Delhi riots case, saying he is also “one of them”, appearing to suggest that he has been framed in a false case.
