Newsroom, Nov 2: In a shocking revelation, Pallavi Gogoi, the chief business editor of the US-based National Public Radio, has claimed that she was raped by journalist-turned-politician M J Akbar in 1994, when she was 23 years old and working for The Asian Age.
M J Akbar has dismissed the allegations as false, his lawyer told The Washington Post, which has published the first person account of Pallavi Gogoi, who is now a citizen of United States of America.
In an extensive piece on The Washington Post, Pallavi Gogoi said that she found out about the accusations against M J Akbar, prompting her to call her friends. She goes on to describe how, as a 22-year-old journalist in The Asian Age, where Akbar spared no opportunity to show just how superior he was to the new employees.
Gogoi says that she became the editor of the op-ed page a year after joining the Age, but "would soon pay a very big price for doing a job I loved". She said that when she went to show Akbar the page she had made that day, he applauded her and then lunged to kiss her.
Not stopping there, Akbar called her to the Taj hotel just months later and tried to repeat the kiss, but she fought him off at the cost of getting scratched.
Gogoi said that since then, she would come to work before others so she could finish her pages and leave to report by 11, but even that did not help her, for after an incident in Bombay, she found herself in Delhi, covering the murder of an inter-caste couple. Not long after, Akbar said to her to discuss her story with him in Jaipur, where he overpowered and raped her.
After the rape, Gogoi says Akbar became emboldened to defile her repeatedly and would shout at her if she spoke to her male colleagues in the company.
Gogoi said that she confided in Tushita Patel, one of Akbar's accusers, and left the Asian Age and went to New York, where she found work as a reporting assistant and eventually, a United States citizenship.
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