A couple of days after Ira Trivedi, the author who called out Chetan Bhagat for sexual misconduct, Bhagat has responded to the allegation by digging up an old email and tweeting it out.
In an Outlook Magazine article on 12 October, Trivedi had said:
“A few weeks later, he invited me to tea at the India International Centre, in my mind a perfectly innocuous place for two authors to meet. He asked me to come to his room but I suggested we meet in the tea-room instead. After our tea, he asked me to come up to his room on the pretext of giving me a signed copy of his book. As soon as I entered his room, he made a pass at me: I ducked as he tried to plant a kiss on my lips and then I laughed, because I didn’t know what else to do, or how to respond. I asked him what in the world he was trying to do and he told me coyly, without hesitation and almost with an air of entitlement, that he had bought a hundred copies of my books and donated them to a library in Pune, so a kiss was his prerogative. I ignored his comment and pretended to be amused though in reality I was shaken. This was a married man with children, whose family I had hung out with at the literature festival. This was uncalled for and shocking behaviour.”Ira Trivedi in Outlook
Bhagat had earlier apologised to women who had accused him of sexual misconduct.
After the fresh allegations by Trivedi, Bhagat took to Twitter on Monday to call the allegations ‘fake’.
We are trying to reach Trivedi a response. We will update the story once we have that.
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