#MeToo: Phantom Ex-Employee Will Not Pursue Case Against Queen Director Vikas Bahl For Sexual Harassment

#MeToo: Survivor who accused Queen Director Vikas Bahl against sexual harassment, Will Not Pursue Case.

A former employee of Phantom Films who had accused Queen director Vikas Bahl has told the Mumbai high court that she doesn’t want to pursue the case. She didn’t appear in the court. When the application came up for hearing, the high court had asked for the woman to be made a respondent in the plea. Senior counsel Narvoz Serwai appeared for the woman and told the court that she was not desirous of being a part of the litigation. “She is not willing to pursue the case too. She does not wish to be embroiled in this,” Serwai said.

Justice SJ Kathawalla then said that if the woman is not willing to pursue the case, then no one should speak about it. “We do not want anybody to manipulate the woman to settle their own scores,” the court said.

Talking to ANI later, Bahl’s lawyer Hitesh Jain said, “The matter has been adjourned to October 23. The victim has made a statement that she is not going to file any complaint against Vikas. So you can deduce from that as to what the whole battle was about. It was about fighting for the pride and truth of Vikas.”

Recently, in the wake of #MeeToo movement, Vikas Bahl, has filed a Rs 10 crore defamation suit against Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane at the Mumbai High Court. He has also sought interim direction from the court to restrain his former partners, at the production house, from making any further statements against him. Bahl alleged that Kashyap and Motwane, among others, took advantage of the ongoing #MeToo movement in India and have published “false, malicious, unsubstantiated imputations, allegations and statements” against him through their social media platforms.

The allegation was made against Bahl by one of the Phantom Films crew members. The woman opened up about the incident to HuffPost and talked about how Bahl had masturbated on her back after a party in Goa, prior to the release of the film Bombay Velvet (2015).