THANE: A real estate agent has been sentenced to three years’ rigorous imprisonment for filming his sex session with a married woman and selling the clip to her husband, resulting in divorce.
District judge SC Khalipe held Sunil Gupta, 38, guilty under section 67A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, for publishing or transmitting of material containing sexually explicit act etc. in electronic form.
Adv.Vandana Jadhav , who argued for the 28-year-old woman, said she had shifted to Pune after her marriage in 2007. In 2011, she came to stay with her parents in Thane after a dispute with her in-laws and husband.
“Here she got acquainted with Gupta and started working in his office. On October 31, 2011, after exchanging Diwali greetings, Gupta took her to show his new office. He later took her to a lodge near Thane station and the two got physically intimate. He kept his mobile phone above the bed to ensure that the entire act was filmed. When the women asked him why he was so particular about the mobile, he clarified that he was arranging it to get strong signal,” the prosecution told the court.
When she returned to Pune, Gupta followed and contacted her husband. He told him about his affair with his wife and sold him the video for ₹ 1 lakh. It fueled the bitterness between the woman and her husband, and concluded in divorce. Gupta’s aide reportedly transferred the video and received the cash from her husband.
She returned home to Thane and filed a complaint against Gupta with the Shreenagar police station on November 24, 2011. Then inspector Usha Suradkar sent the mobile phones of the concerned for forensic lab analysis. “The result was that there was one pornographic video file of 3GB in the memory card found in one mobile phone and it was transferred to other mobile phones as well,” the prosecution said.
Khalipe ruled that the reputation of the woman has lowered and her career and life ruined by the act and convicted Gupta under 67A of the IT Act and section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. Gupta’s aide was let off for lack of evidence. The court also ordered him to pay a fine of Rs 1 lakh. That amount and the seized cash of Rs 22,000 should be paid to the victim as compensation, the judge added.
In a twist to the case, while the investigation was on, the woman got married again. But the past would not fade away: the video shot by Gupta was uploaded on a popular social networking site. A fresh complaint was filed with the Bandra crime branch and investigations have indicated that her former husband’s brother had uploaded the clip. The case is pending final decision.
